GA4 pricing: is GA4 free, and when is Analytics 360 worth it?

How much does GA4 cost?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) costs nothing in its standard version, and that is the version almost every small and mid-sized business uses. Google also sells Google Analytics 360, a paid upgrade with higher limits, service level agreements and features for larger organisations. GA4 pricing is therefore less about the licence and more about limits: as long as your property stays within the standard limits, there is no reason to pay for 360.

Analytics 360 has no public price list. Google sells it directly or through certified partners, and the price depends on data volume and the contract. If someone quotes you a fixed figure without knowing your traffic, treat it with caution.

What are the limits of the free version?

The free version is generous, but it does have hard limits. The figures below come from the Google Analytics Help page on Analytics 360 properties and are the ones that matter most in daily work.

Retention is the limit people notice first. Detailed data in explorations disappears after 14 months at most, while the standard aggregated reports remain. Key events come second: 30 is enough for most sites, but a shop that marks every micro step as a key event can reach it. Custom dimensions rarely run out when the tracking plan is tidy. If you are close to any of these limits, write down which reports depend on them before you think about an upgrade, because a tidy tracking plan often frees up more room than a new contract.

→ Cookie banner with Consent Mode v2: compliant, with no monthly licence

When is Analytics 360 worth paying for?

Analytics 360 makes sense when the standard limits block real work, not when the brand name sounds more professional. Typical reasons are:

• More than one million events per day that must go to BigQuery through the daily export
• Explorations on very large date ranges where sampling hides details
• A legal or contractual need for a service level agreement and support from Google
• Several brands or countries that need roll-up and sub-properties with separate access
• A need to keep detailed data in GA4 for longer than 14 months

For a typical UK or Irish business with a few thousand visitors a day, none of these apply. A shop with tens of thousands of orders a month might hit the BigQuery export limit, but even then the streaming export is an option, as it has no event limit in either version. The streaming export does create BigQuery costs, which are usually small compared with a 360 contract.

If you do talk to Google or a partner about 360, ask concrete questions before you sign. Which limit do we hit today, and how often? Which reports or exports fail because of it? What does the contract include in support and response times, and for how long does it run? A partner that cannot point to a specific limit in your property is selling the name, not a solution.

Where do the real costs of GA4 come from?

The real costs of GA4 come from setup and maintenance, not from the licence. Someone has to install Google Tag Manager, connect a consent banner with Google Consent Mode v2, define which events count as key events, send correct ecommerce data and test everything. After that, every theme update, plugin change or relaunch can break the setup without anyone noticing for weeks.

BigQuery is the second possible cost. Linking GA4 to BigQuery is free, but storing and querying the data is billed by Google Cloud once you go beyond the free tier. For small properties the monthly bill is often zero or close to it; for large ones, poorly written queries cost more than the storage. Dashboards in Looker Studio are free, although connectors from third parties are often paid.

A third cost is easy to overlook: missing or wrong data. If tags fire twice, ignore the cookie banner or lose the campaign source on the way to the checkout, the reports look complete but lead to wrong decisions. Neither the free version nor Analytics 360 fixes that, because both only report what the website sends. Visitors who reject analytics cookies are missing in both versions as well, so a paid licence does not close the gap between GA4 and your order system or CRM. Regular checks of the setup therefore save more money than any upgrade.

→ Setting up Google Consent Mode v2 correctly: no warning in Tag Assistant

How do you get more out of the free version?

Most problems blamed on the free version are configuration problems. Set the data retention to 14 months, because the default is 2 months. Keep the list of key events short and meaningful. Exclude internal traffic and unwanted referrals such as payment providers. Link GA4 to BigQuery early if you think you will need history, because the export only contains data from the day you link it.

Take a software firm in Dublin that was looking at Analytics 360 because its explorations showed sampling warnings. A review showed that the warnings appeared only on two-year comparisons, and the firm already had 13 key events, most of them page views. After cleaning up the key events and enabling the BigQuery export for long-term analysis, the free version covered every report the team actually used.

How Trackum helps with GA4 costs

Trackum sets up Google Tag Manager, GA4 and Consent Mode v2 with up to 15 events for a fixed €150 plus VAT, tested with and without consent and live within one working day. For €19 a month plus VAT, cancellable monthly, Trackum tests your site every week and repairs anything it set up that breaks, for example after a plugin update. The free check at trackum.app/check shows within two minutes which tags load on your site and whether the cookie banner controls them.