Google Analytics Pricing: What Free Really Costs

Google Analytics 4 costs nothing to license. There is no pageview meter, no seat fee and no trial that expires. The enterprise edition, Analytics 360, is sold through Google or resellers by quote, and public reports have put its starting point around $50,000 per year at time of writing. If you only read the price list, the question is settled.

The price list leaves out most of what people pay. This post walks through where the cost of Google Analytics actually lands, so you can compare it with a paid tool on honest terms. We make OnyxMetric, which appears near the end, so weigh our view accordingly.

What the free tier gives you

Standard GA4 covers the basics well: traffic sources, pages, audiences, conversions, and an exploration area for funnels and paths. It connects directly to Google Ads, Search Console and BigQuery. For a team that spends heavily on Google advertising, that integration is the real product, and nothing here replaces it.

The limits sit around the edges. Standard properties have caps on data retention for exploration reports, on custom dimensions, on API quotas and on how much data is processed before sampling or thresholding applies. Those caps are what push large organizations toward 360.

Cost one: consent and lost data

GA4 sets cookies and identifiers. In regions with consent requirements, you show a banner, and a share of visitors decline. Those visitors vanish from your reports, or get modeled estimates instead of counted sessions.

The size of that gap varies by audience and banner design, and it is worth measuring on your own site. Compare server logs or a cookieless tool against GA4 for a week. If the difference is 20 or 30 percent, your "free" numbers are missing a meaningful slice of traffic, and your conversion rates are skewed by who agrees to be tracked.

Cost two: setup and learning time

GA4's event model is flexible and unforgiving. Getting clean conversions means defining events, marking key events, configuring data streams, filtering internal traffic and checking that tags fire. Reports you expect to find in a click often live behind an exploration you build yourself.

Count hours, not dollars. If a marketer or developer spends a day a month wrestling with reports, multiply that by a loaded hourly rate and put the figure next to a subscription price. For many small teams the subscription is cheaper.

Cost three: the tools around it

GA4 does not include session replay, error tracking, Web Vitals reporting or feature flags. Teams fill those gaps with other products, each with its own bill, script and dashboard. A typical stack might be GA4 plus a replay tool plus an error tracker plus a flags service. The free line item sits next to three paid ones.

Adding scripts has a performance cost too. Every extra tag is more JavaScript the browser downloads before the page settles.

Cost four: BigQuery

Exporting raw events to BigQuery is a standout GA4 capability, and the export itself is free for standard properties up to a daily limit. Storage and queries are billed by Google Cloud. For small sites the bill is small. For high-traffic sites, or teams that query carelessly, it becomes a recurring line item that needs someone to watch it.

Cost five: Analytics 360

If you need higher limits, service-level commitments and enterprise features, you buy 360 through a contract. Pricing is negotiated, scales with usage and generally lands in the tens of thousands of dollars per year. It is a real option for large enterprises, and a poor fit for a ten-person team.

When Google Analytics is still the right call

Choose it when Google Ads attribution is central, when you have analysts who live in BigQuery, or when budget is the hard constraint and you can carry the setup and consent work. These are legitimate reasons. Plenty of well-run companies keep GA4 for exactly them.

How OnyxMetric prices things

OnyxMetric is paid and priced per site per month: Base is $99, Plus is $199 and Pro is $299. Paying yearly costs ten times the monthly price. There is no per-pageview meter, so a traffic spike does not change your bill.

What you get for that, based on what the product ships today:

• Cookieless tracking, so visitors are counted without a consent banner for analytics.
• Funnels, retention, goals and custom events.
• Web Vitals and error tracking next to your traffic data.
• Session replay on the Pro tier.
• Feature flags and experiments, plus Google Search Console data.
• An MCP server so an AI assistant can query your analytics.

What you do not get: native Google Ads audience sync, or a BigQuery export. If those matter, keep GA4 in the picture.

A quick way to decide

Write down four numbers for your own site:

1. Monthly hours spent on GA4 setup, reports and fixes, times an hourly rate.
2. The traffic gap between GA4 and a cookieless count.
3. What you pay today for replay, errors and other add-ons.
4. Your BigQuery bill, if any.

Add them up and compare with $99 to $299 per site per month. If the total is clearly larger, a flat-priced tool probably saves money. If it is smaller, GA4 is doing its job.

You can run both for a month. Install the OnyxMetric script next to GA4, compare the traffic numbers, and see which one your team actually opens. There is also a side-by-side summary on our Google Analytics comparison page.