Google Analytics pricing: what GA4 and Analytics 360 cost

Paul Jarvis · Mar 2, 2024

Standard Google Analytics (GA4) is free. The paid version, Google Analytics 360, has no public price list. Google sells it on contract, with a base fee plus a charge for the events you send, and most buyers report a starting point of around $50,000 a year.

So for most websites, the honest answer to “how much does Google Analytics cost?” is nothing, at least in money. The more useful questions are what you get for free, when the free limits start to bite, and what “free” costs you in other ways.

The two versions of Google Analytics

There are two versions today. Universal Analytics, the old version, stopped processing data in 2023 and can’t be bought or used any more.

Google Analytics 4 (standard) is free for anyone with a Google account. It covers what most sites need: traffic, sources, pages, conversions (Google calls them key events) and reports you can customise.

Google Analytics 360 is the enterprise version of the same product. It’s the same GA4 interface with higher limits, longer data retention, a service level agreement and support. You can’t buy it online. You buy it through Google’s sales team or a certified partner.

How Analytics 360 pricing works

Google’s billing documentation describes the model: a fixed base fee that includes your first 25 million events a month, then a fee for each event above that. The per-event fee gets cheaper as your volume grows.

Google doesn’t publish the base fee or the per-event rates. Partners and buyers commonly quote around $50,000 a year as the starting point, and high-traffic sites pay a lot more. Treat any number you see online, including this one, as a rough guide. The only real price is the quote you get.

A few things push the bill up:

• Event volume. Every pageview, scroll and click you send counts as an event, so a busy site with lots of custom events goes past 25 million a month quickly.
• Subproperties and roll-up properties. Their events are billed too, at a lower rate than the source property.
• BigQuery. The export itself is part of GA4, but storing and querying the data in Google Cloud is billed separately.
• People. Most 360 customers pay a partner or an in-house analyst to set it up and keep it running. That often costs more than the licence.

What you get for the money

The difference between the two versions is mostly about limits, not features. These are the ones people usually hit first:

	GA4 (standard)	Analytics 360
Price	Free	Contract, priced on events
Data retention for explorations	2 or 14 months	Up to 50 months
Sampling in explorations	Above 10 million events per query	Above 1 billion events per query
Daily BigQuery export	1 million events a day	Billions of events a day
Fresh data in reports	Usually within a few hours	Usually within about an hour
Service level agreement and support	No	Yes

Sources: Google’s help pages on data retention, Analytics 360, BigQuery Export and data freshness. Check them before you decide, because Google changes these limits from time to time.

One detail that trips people up: the 2 or 14 month retention setting applies to user-level and event-level data, which is what explorations and funnel reports use. Standard aggregated reports aren’t affected by it. So “GA4 deletes your data after 14 months” isn’t quite right, but if you want to dig into last year’s behaviour in an exploration, it can be.

Do you need Analytics 360?

Probably not. 360 makes sense when you send hundreds of millions of events, need raw data in BigQuery every day, need an SLA, or need a few years of event-level history inside GA itself. That describes large ecommerce sites, publishers and companies with a dedicated analytics team.

If you’re a SaaS company, a content site or an agency managing client sites, standard GA4 has more capacity than you’ll use. The limits you’re more likely to hit aren’t in the table above. They’re time and complexity.

What “free” costs you

Standard GA4 doesn’t charge you, but it isn’t free in every sense.

• Your time. GA4 is built around reports and explorations that you configure. Answering a simple question like “which blog post brought in sign-ups last month?” often means building something first, or paying someone who can.
• A cookie banner. GA4 uses cookies by default. Whether you need consent depends on your setup and where your visitors are, but many sites end up running a consent banner, often through a paid consent tool. Every visitor who declines is missing from your numbers.
• The business model. GA4 is free because it’s part of Google’s advertising business. Google gives you settings that control how your analytics data is shared, and it’s worth checking them, but you’re not the paying customer.

None of that makes GA4 a bad tool. It’s a powerful one, and for some teams it’s the right one. It’s just worth counting these costs when you compare it with tools that charge a subscription.

A cheaper (and better) Google Analytics 360 alternative

If you’re looking at 360 because standard GA4 feels limiting, or because you want support and a long history of your data, Fathom gives you that for a fraction of the price. It shows you where visitors come from, what they read and what converts, on one dashboard you can understand in minutes. We charge for the software, so your visitors’ data is never the product.

• Pricing: plans start at $15 a month for up to 100,000 monthly pageviews and 50 sites, with a free 7-day trial. Every plan includes the same features, and there are plans for high-traffic sites too.
• No analytics cookies: Fathom doesn’t use cookies, so no cookie banner is needed for your analytics. See our compliance documentation for the details for your situation.
• Your whole history: we keep your data for as long as you’re a customer, and you can export it any time.
• Support: excellent support whenever you need it.
• Switching: you can run Fathom next to GA4 while you decide, then import your GA4 history.

There’s a longer, side-by-side look at the two tools on our Fathom vs Google Analytics page.

FAQ

Is Google Analytics really free?

Yes. Standard GA4 has no fee and no paid tier below 360. You pay with setup time, and with the consent and data-sharing trade-offs above.

How much does Google Analytics 360 cost a month?

There’s no public monthly price. It’s an annual contract with a base fee that covers 25 million events a month, plus per-event fees above that. A starting figure of around $50,000 a year (about $4,000 a month) is commonly quoted, but only a quote from Google or a partner is reliable.

Can I still use Universal Analytics?

No. Google stopped processing Universal Analytics data in 2023 (2024 for 360 customers), and the old properties are no longer available.

Try Fathom alongside GA4

If you want to see what a simpler setup looks like, start a free 7-day trial and run it next to Google Analytics for a week. Or click around the live demo first.