Is Google Analytics Free?
The short answer is yes - the standard version of Google Analytics is completely free. For the vast majority of businesses, entrepreneurs, and marketers, the free version of Google Analytics 4 provides more than enough power to track website performance and understand user behavior. This article will walk you through what's included in the free version, where its limitations are, and what the paid alternative, Google Analytics 360, offers.
The Free Version: What You Get with Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 is the latest version of Google's powerful web analytics platform, and it's the default for any new property you create. It was built from the ground up to focus on the entire user journey across both websites and apps, moving away from the session-based model of its predecessor, Universal Analytics.
Even better, all of its core features are available without paying a dime. If you're running a small business, a startup, a content site, or a small e-commerce store, the free version is an incredible resource.
Core Features Included at No Cost
With a free GA4 account, you can access a full suite of reports and tools designed to give you a deep understanding of your audience and their behavior. Here are just a few of the things you can do:
User and Event Tracking: Monitor how many people visit your site or app, where they come from, and what specific actions they take - from page views and button clicks to form submissions and video plays.
Real-time Reporting: See who is on your site and what they’re doing right now. This is perfect for tracking the immediate impact of a new blog post, social media campaign, or email newsletter.
Audience Demographics: Learn about your users' age, gender, location, interests, and the technology they use to access your site.
Traffic Acquisition Reports: Discover which channels are driving the most traffic and conversions, whether it's organic search, social media, paid ads, or direct visits.
Engagement and Retention Analysis: Understand how engaged your users are and how well you’re retaining them over time with metrics like engaged sessions, engagement rate, and user retention cohorts.
Conversion Tracking: Set up custom events as conversions - such as a purchase, a lead form submission, or an account sign-up - to measure the actions that matter most to your business.
Integration with an Ads Account: Seamlessly connect GA4 with your Google Ads account to import conversions, create remarketing audiences, and get a clearer picture of your paid campaign performance.
For most businesses, this feature set is robust enough to provide all the essential insights needed for growth. You can measure marketing ROI, A/B test landing pages, and optimize your conversion funnels without ever paying for analytics.
The "Catch": When Is Google Analytics No Longer Free?
Google offers GA4 for free because the data helps it understand web trends and improve its other products, particularly Google Ads. However, there are some generous but firm limitations to the free version. The platform ceases to be free when your data volume grows so large that you surpass these limits, compelling you to upgrade to the enterprise-level version, Google Analytics 360.
Let's break down those key limitations.
GA4's Free Tier Limits
For standard reports (the ones you find in the "Reports" snapshot), you get complete, unfiltered data. But when you create an Exploration, a funnel report, a path exploration, or request more granular data, Google Analytics 4 might use a portion of your data to estimate the results. This is called data sampling.
Data Sampling
In GA4, sampling can occur in advanced reports when your query accesses more than 10 million events. When this happens, GA4 takes a representative subset of your data and extrapolates its findings to estimate the behavior of the whole dataset. While sampling can provide quick directional insights, major business decisions should ideally be based on precise, unsampled data.
If you see a green checkmark icon in your report, it means your data is based on 100% of available events. If you see a yellow or red icon, it means a sample was used. For most small to medium businesses, hitting this 10 million event threshold for a single query is rare, but for very high-traffic sites, it can be a daily reality.
Data Retention
Another important limit is data retention. This refers to how long Google stores your user-level and event-level data. In the free version of GA4, you can choose to store this granular data for either 2 months or 14 months. After that period, the detailed data is automatically deleted.
While aggregated data (like the information in your standard reports of pageviews or users) remains, you won't be able to run deep custom analyses on user behavior from 15 months ago. For businesses that need to analyze long-term trends or customer lifetime value over several years, this can be a significant limitation.
API Quotas
If your team uses the Google Analytics Data API to pull data into other tools or custom dashboards, there are daily quotas on how many "tokens" you can use. High-volume, constant requests can cause you to hit this limit, temporarily blocking your access until the quota resets. Enterprises with dedicated data teams often need higher API limits to support their reporting infrastructure.
Introducing the Paid Tier: Google Analytics 360
When you outgrow the free version, the next step is Google Analytics 360 (GA360). This is not a small, incremental upgrade, it is an enterprise-class analytics platform designed for large corporations with massive amounts of website traffic and complex analysis needs.
Key Benefits of Upgrading to GA360
Upgrading to GA360 essentially removes or drastically increases the limits of the free tier and adds a few powerful, enterprise-focused features.
Unsampled Reports: This is arguably the biggest benefit. With GA360, you can request 100% unsampled data in your custom reports and explorations, even for queries up to 1 billion events. This ensures maximum accuracy when making critical, data-driven decisions.
Extended Data Retention: GA360 allows you to extend user-level data retention up to 50 months, giving you over four years of granular data for long-term cohort analysis and user journey mapping.
Higher Collection and Reporting Limits: You get significantly higher limits for everything - API quotas, custom dimension/metric configurations, and audience sizes. It’s built to handle data at an enterprise scale.
BigQuery Export: While the free version offers a daily BigQuery export, GA360 provides an even more frequent near real-time export, sending event data to Google's data warehouse within minutes. This is invaluable for companies that rely on real-time data for product recommendations, fraud detection, or personalization.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs): GA360 comes with official SLAs from Google that guarantee data freshness, reporting availability, and data collection uptime, providing peace of mind for mission-critical operations.
How Much Does Google Analytics 360 Cost?
Google doesn't publish a fixed price for GA360. The pricing is bespoke and typically starts around $50,000 per year, scaling up from there based on your monthly event volume. Your final cost will depend entirely on how much data you process. To get a quote, you need to contact a Google Marketing Platform sales representative or a licensed third-party reseller.
Clearly, the price jump is significant, which underlines that it's designed for a very different type of user than the free GA4 platform.
Should You Upgrade? A Practical Checklist
For 99% of businesses, the answer is no. The free version of GA4 is more than sufficient. You should only consider GA360 if you can answer "yes" to most of the following questions:
Are you a large enterprise? Do you generate several million dollars in annual revenue and have a dedicated data analysis team?
Is your site consistently getting billions of hits a month? Regular, high-volume traffic is the main driver of the need to upgrade.
Do you frequently encounter data sampling in your reports? If your most important analyses are consistently based on sampled data, the cost of an inaccurate decision might outweigh the cost of GA360.
Is the 14-month data retention limit hindering your business intelligence? Do you need to analyze user-level behavior over multiple years?
Are you maxing out your API quotas? If your reporting services constantly fail because of API limits, an upgrade is necessary.
If you're not in this camp, you can benefit from the incredible power that Google Analytics 4 offers for free while avoiding the massive enterprise price tag.
Final Thoughts
Google Analytics 4 is a powerful, comprehensive, and - best of all - free platform for the overwhelming majority of users. You can track users, measure marketing efforts, and gain deep business insights without cost. The limitations on data sampling and retention only become relevant at an enterprise scale, at which point the paid Google Analytics 360 becomes a necessity.
While GA4 is great at collecting complex data, turning raw numbers into clear, actionable reports can still be time-consuming. We built Graphed because we believe getting insights shouldn’t require a steep learning curve. After connecting your Google Analytics account in just a few clicks, you can ask questions in plain English - like "show me my top traffic sources this month in a bar chart" - and get a live, automated dashboard in seconds. It allows anyone on your team to move straight to the insights, skipping the manual reporting work entirely.