Rails counter_cache for Model.count without any association, in order to make SELECT COUNT (*) faster

I'm totaling the rows in one of my models using Model.count and am a bit concerned about performance, as eventually, this model will get very large, and, therefore, SELECT COUNT (*) very slow.

Is there a way to use counter_cache without the :belongs_to relationship? Or another performance-friendly way of counting the rows? I thought about making another model, just one where I store calculations like this but not sure that's the best way.