TL;DR

• Google Analytics' free plan trades user privacy for data; GA360 starts at ~$50,000/year.
• Free GA4 limits data retention, uses data sampling, and lacks support or integrations.
• Privacy issues, GDPR risks, and cookie consent cause data loss and complexity.

Google Analytics is a useful tool for understanding website traffic and user behavior. However, Google Analytics’ pricing model present some challenges and limitations, especially for smaller organizations.

Here is all you need to know about Google Analytics’ pricing model and how it suits different types of customers.

1. Is Google Analytics free?
2. How much does Google 360 cost?
3. What about Universal Analytics?
4. What are the differences between the free and paid version of GA360?
   1. Data sampling
   2. Configuration limitations
   3. Retention limitation
   4. Integrations
   5. Advanced features
   6. SLAs
   7. Data freshness
   8. Customer support
5. Why you should check alternatives
   1. Privacy
   2. Cookie banners cause a loss of data
   3. A complex UI
   4. The price tag
   5. The perfect time to change
6. Why Simple Analytics

Is Google Analytics free?

Google Analytics comes with two plans: a free plan and a premium one called Google 360.

The free plan is free. Well, kind of. Google Analytics collects visitor data and analyzes it to provide insight into your website’s traffic and performance. Google then re-uses these data to power its extensive ad tech ecosystem. Like other Google services, it is a privacy-invasive tool that customers pay with their data- or rather, with their visitors'.

Google Analytics also features a premium plan that caters to large businesses. This plan offers extra features but comes with a big price tag (read: you pay with money and data).

How much does Google 360 cost?

Unlike Universal Analytics 360, GA4 360 follows a usage-based pricing model for Google 360.

Google does not publicize its pricing criteria, but anedoctally, the entry fee for GA360 is somewhere around $50.000 per year, with additional usage-based fees. Enterprise-level customers typically negotiate the agreement directly with Google’s sales team, leading to different prices on a case-by-case basis.

Overall, Google Analytics 4 is a powerful but pricey product aimed at enterprise-level customers.

What about Universal Analytics?

Google is phasing out Universal Analyics. UA is no longer supported, and UA360 will stop being supported in July 2024. If you still use UA360, you must transition to GA4 or move to a different service altogether.

Update: Universal Analytics 360 has been deprecated as of July 1 2024. Google Analytics 4 is now the only supported version of Google Analytics.

What are the differences between the free and paid version of GA360?

Data sampling

Universal Analytics recorded only 10 million monthly events per property on the free plan. A Google 360 subscription removed this limitation.

Google Analytics 4 is different. The free version can examine any number of events. However, it uses data sampling to examine the past 10 million events- which is to say, it uses statistics tricks to "make up" a portion of the data. This degrades the data quality.

So, the old event limit from UAbecame a data sampling threshold in GA4. What does this mean in practice?

Data sampling is a technique that makes data analysis easier at the cost of some accuracy. Imagine having to count all the trees in a forest: you could count them one by one or cut corners by counting the trees in an acre and multiplying it. This is what Google Analytics does when sampling data.

The quality of the sampled data depends on the sample size. If you exceed 10M events by a small margin, GA will use large sample sizes and give you fairly reliable data. Higher volumes of traffic lead to smaller sample sizes and less accurate data.

So, the free GA plan is probably fine if you don’t exceed the 10M events threshold by a large amount. However, data sampling can skew your results if you analyze large traffic volumes.

Also, note that some interactions that did not count as events in UA are recorded as events in GA4 due to the new attribution model. This change effectively inflates event count in GA4: organizations that were below UA's old event traffic threshold may find themselves above the data sampling threshold for GA4, especially if they analyze a lot of app traffic.

Configuration limitations

The free version of GA has other quantitative limitations, such as a limit on the number of audiences and conversions that can be configured per property.

Retention limitation

The free version of GA4 has a 14-month retention limitation for all data and metrics. GA360 still has the 14-month retention limit for properties, but it allows storing other events for up to 50 months.

Retention limitations are a major drawback of the free GA4 experience, as customers are severely limited in their ability to analyze long-term trends.

Integrations

Integrations are a big selling point for GA360.

The free version is compatible with a handful of Google Services (e.g., Google Ads, Adsense, Ad Exchange, Search Console), and that’s it. GA360 has many more integrations, including Big Query, Salesforce, Search Ads 360, Display Video 360, and more.

Big Query is an especially important integration, as Google’s serverless data warehouse can speed up queries on large data sets.

Advanced features

Google 360 includes features such as a data-driven attribution model and custom funnels. These advanced features cater to enterprise-level customers with a full marketing team on board.

SLAs

Only GA360 offers service-level agreements in its Terms of Service. Free customers are likely to experience more downtime. They should not count on the service being restored promptly after disruptions, as the company will likely focus on paying customers first to honor SLAs.

Data freshness

GA 360 refreshes data and reports more often than the free version. This is not likely to impact most customers but might be useful for those who want to get their real-time insights.

Customer support

Only Google 360 customers enjoy customer support. Free users can rely on Google’s technical documentation and ask the GA community for help. Still, it is ultimately up to them to solve any issues they may experience with the service.

Please note that much of the information on Google Analytics’ community forums refers to UA and might be outdated.

Why you should check alternatives

This is a comparison between the Google Analytics and Simple Analytics dashboard. Simple Analytics is A privacy-friendly and simple analytics tool - just the insights you need in a straightforward dashboard (And its also free yes).

Privacy

Like UA, GA4 is built around cookies. While first-party cookies are better than third-party cookies, they are still an intrinsically invasive technology.

Companies are moving towards privacy-friendly, cookie-free solutions as the general audience becomes increasingly concerned about online tracking.

In addition, data transfers to the US are problematic. The long-running Schrems drama is boiling down but not quite over yet. A Schrems III decision is widely expected and another crackdown on data transfer is a very real possibility. This would likely make GDPR-compliant implementations GA4 completely impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive in light of its performance as a self-hosted tool.

Under EU law, analytics cookies require user consent. This means that visitors must be presented with the option to refuse cookies.

Unfortunately for companies, people do not like being tracked and frequently decline cookies when presented with a transparent choice. This leads to data loss for GA customers: users who decline cookies are practically invisible in the data.

Cookie-free web analytics services such as Simple Analytics can solve this problem and make these visitors visible again. They can also be combined with GA or other cookie-based services to mitigate the data loss from cookie banners.

A complex UI

Universal Analytics was known for its unintuitive UI, and Google Analytics 4 is even worse. The interface is cluttered with advanced features that most users do not need, making navigation difficult even for users familiar with UA. Better options exist when it comes to UI: This is what the Simple Analytics dashboard looks like.

The price tag

Let’s be real:$50.000 is not pocket change for many businesses. Some small or medium-sized businesses find the restrictions of the free GA experience problematic but cannot afford GA360’s hefty entry-level price. These companies would do well to look for a cheaper alternative.

The perfect time to change

GA4 is even more complex to use than its predecessor. Right now, many businesses are still struggling to master it. It is a great time to rethink you data strategy and try a privacy-friendly service (and by the way, Simple Analytics allows you to carry over all your GA data).

Why Simple Analytics

The “free” version of Google Analytics is not exactly free: your visitors pay for it with their data. Simple Analytics has a free version and still keeps your data safe and secure.

We at Simple Analytics dislike the pay-with-your-data business model that is so prevalent today. Privacy is a right, and personal data are not a commodity. Hence why we decided to bulid a free plan.

If this resonates with you, feel free to give us a spin.