Refer App

Attribution that works on every visitor.
Not just the ones who accept your cookie banner.

Server-side attribution with no consent dependency. Every session measured, including the visitors cookie-based tools cannot see.

Free forever, no credit card. Pro from $199.99/year or $599.99 lifetime.

Refer App runs server-side, on your own server, with no third-party scripts. No consent banner required. No data leaving your server. No configuration beyond one script tag.

What consent banners do to your attribution data

Cookie consent banners exist for a reason. But they have a side effect most attribution guides don’t mention: they create a permanent blind spot in your data.

The visitors most likely to decline cookies are also more likely to be:

  • Using a desktop browser with an ad blocker
  • Technically informed and privacy-aware
  • Researching a considered purchase rather than impulse-buying
  • Converting at a higher rate than average

When these visitors decline your consent banner, or use a browser that blocks tracking cookies by default, every cookie-based analytics tool loses them. Not just from tracking, but from your attribution data entirely. Their session gets dropped, their conversion goes unattributed, and your channel performance numbers quietly degrade.

Google Analytics 4, Meta Pixel, most tag-manager-based attribution tools: all affected. All systematically undercounting the same segment.

Attribution built for the post-consent era

Refer App reads attribution signals the browser sends automatically with every request: the referrer header and UTM parameters in the URL. These are not tracking cookies. They do not require consent under UK PECR or EU GDPR in standard interpretations.

Server-side by design

Attribution runs on your server, not in the visitor’s browser. No JavaScript tracking library. No third-party request. No cookie consent dependency.

Your data, your server

Every session is stored in a SQLite database on your own hosting account. Nothing is sent to any third party unless you configure an integration to do so.

Accurate where others are blind

It accurately attributes sessions from ad-blocker users, privacy browser users, and consent-decliners: the visitors cookie-based tools are systematically undercounting.

The channel nobody else is measuring yet

A growing share of traffic arrives from AI tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. Most attribution tools classify this as Direct or Referral with no further detail.

Refer App has a built-in AI Referrer Taxonomy: a maintained list of AI tool domains that classifies this traffic as its own channel, with the specific tool as the source.

On a live production install, AI Referrer traffic accounts for 9.1% of all sessions: correctly identified and attributed, where every other tool would show them as Direct traffic with no source.

What it looks like on a live install

Refer App v0.23.4 Pro console dashboard showing three-panel traffic overview: channel donut, source donut, and sessions-per-day bar chart, with AI Referrer traffic from Claude visible in the recent activity log
100%
Sessions attributed to a named channel
Zero Direct, zero unclassified. Every visitor has a source.
9.1%
Sessions from AI Referrer
Correctly identified from AI tools, not lost into Direct.
100%
Data residency
Every session stays on the host server. Nothing sent to a third party.

See the full path, not just the first step

Click any multi-touch session in the Reports view and the full journey expands inline: every page the visitor passed through, in order, with time between each stop and a destination marker on the last touchpoint. If a conversion is recorded against the session, it appears at the end of the journey.

Session journey expanded in Refer App Reports view, showing a 4-page Paid Search visit through docs, features, and pricing, ending with a USD 199.99 annual license conversion

A Paid Search session expanded in the Reports view. Four pages visited over 12 minutes, ending with a confirmed annual license purchase. Every stop in the journey is attributed back to the original channel.

See it working before you commit to anything

The demo is a fully-loaded install of Refer App with every Pro feature enabled, pre-seeded with realistic attribution data across eight channels including AI Referrer traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Session journeys you can expand, conversion data by channel, trends over 90 days, content attribution, tags, and integrations.

Enter your email and you get instant access. No installation, no server, no configuration.

Try the live demo

Access expires after 48 hours. We don’t share your email.

Free to start. Pro when you need more.

Free is not a trial. Every feature listed under Free works fully, with no time limit and no locked functionality.

Free

$0

Always free, no time limit

Download Free
  • Full attribution and channel classification, unlimited sessions
  • Dashboard with channel-share chart, engagement rate, and device breakdown
  • Reports: filterable session log with CSV export
  • Session Journey: expand any multi-touch session
  • AI Referrer Taxonomy management
  • Settings, multi-user accounts, data retention controls

Up and running in under ten minutes

  1. Download the zip from referrerattribution.com/downloads/
  2. Upload the refer-app/ folder to your server via FTP or file manager
  3. Visit the console URL. Your database and login are created automatically on first visit
  4. Add one script tag to your site’s footer
  5. Sessions start appearing immediately

Works with any website. Your site does not need to be built in PHP. The only requirement is that your hosting account has PHP available, which is the default on virtually all shared hosting plans. No database server. No build tools. No ongoing maintenance.

Download refer-app-latest.zip

Privacy by design

Built to the standard privacy tools are built to avoid

Refer App processes no personal data in its standard deployment. No IP addresses stored, no device fingerprinting, no cross-site identifiers. Attribution runs entirely on your own server, under your own control, with one first-party session cookie that contains only a random token.

No personal data processed

IP addresses are not stored. Sessions are identified by a random daily-rotating token derived from no personal identifier. Device fingerprinting is not used. There is nothing to export, erase, or explain under GDPR.

Consent-aware architecture

The rac_session cookie contains no personal data. Under UK PECR, strictly necessary cookies do not require consent. In standard deployments, no consent banner is required for the attribution cookie alone.

Your data, your server

Attribution data is stored in your own database on your own server. No data leaves your infrastructure. No third-party scripts, no analytics platform with access to your visitor records, no vendor lock-in.

Frequently asked questions

Complete attribution, without the consent wall.

Free forever, no credit card. Pro from $199.99/year or $599.99 lifetime.