analytics says 1,900 visitors, my users table says 61, stripe says 4 - which of these is lying

None of them are lying, they are measuring three different things and one of them is being actively blocked.

Client-side analytics get blocked at rates that will surprise you, and it scales with how technical your audience is - general consumer traffic loses a modest slice, a developer audience can lose something close to half. Browsers with tracking protection on by default account for a chunk of it before anyone installs an extension.

The only number you can trust is the one your own server writes down. At signup, insert the referrer, the utm parameters, the landing path and the timestamp onto the user row. Then reconcile against payments by customer id. Three systems become one system with two decorations.

Take the numbers at face value for a second: 1,900 to 61 is 3.2% visitor-to-signup, and 61 to 4 is 6.5% signup-to-paid. Neither of those is broken for cold traffic. Depending on the source they are unremarkable.

The bigger question is how many of the 1,900 were bots. Crawlers, uptime checkers, link previewers and scrapers are a genuinely large fraction of raw traffic on small sites, and most edge dashboards count them by default. Strip known bots before you draw any conclusion about your conversion rate, or you will 'improve' a denominator that was never human.

At four customers, funnel analysis is astrology. You have four rows. Open them, find out who those people are, email all four, and ask what they were doing the day they signed up. You will learn more in one afternoon than a year of reconciling dashboards, and the sample size is the same either way.

The upsell criticism isn't baseless — claim rates on title policies are low relative to premium volume, and that's a fair thing to notice out loud. I bought mine anyway, but I shopped the rate rather than accepting the closing agent's default. Ask whether simultaneous-issue pricing applies when both policies are written together.

A 1940s house that has turned over twice recently is exactly the profile where I'd buy it. Older chains have more places to go wrong, and quick resales sometimes have paperwork done in a hurry by people who won't be around later. I've never claimed on mine and I'd buy it again on the next house.

Two practical fixes for the direct-traffic mystery. First, serving your analytics from your own domain rather than a third party host recovers some of the blocked portion - not all of it, list maintainers do notice, but some. Second, check your redirects: any hop that drops the query string silently destroys your utm parameters, and a bare domain to www redirect is the classic culprit. Traffic that arrives tagged and lands untagged shows up as 'direct' and you will never work out why.

Ask what amount the policy is written for. Some owner's policies are written at purchase price with no inflation provision and others have an escalation feature. Twenty years from now that difference is effectively the whole policy.

Found a fun one in mine while chasing exactly this: the signup conversion event fired on form submit rather than on successful account creation, so every failed signup - taken email, weak password, validation error - counted as a conversion. My analytics conversion count was about 20% higher than my users table for a completely mundane reason. Worth checking where your event actually fires before you go looking for anything clever.

Pricing and the rules around it vary a great deal by state and country. Check with a real estate attorney where you're actually buying rather than taking a forum's word for what's negotiable.