Google Analytics 4 pricing

How pricing works

Google Analytics comes in two editions, and only one has a published price.

The standard product costs nothing. Google’s product page says the tools are free of charge, and the usage report in Google Marketing Platform agrees: for a standard property the billable hit volume is zero. Nothing is invoiced, so there is no trial period and no renewal date.

Analytics 360 is the paid edition. It runs on an order agreed with Google or with a sales partner, and the rates are not published. The shape of the bill is documented, though. Google’s billing help describes a fixed base fee that covers the first 25 million monthly events, plus a per-event fee on everything above that, split into volume tiers in which the price per event falls as volume rises. Billable events are all events collected while a property is set to 360, apart from user engagement, spam and hidden system events. Organization and billing admins can switch on a usage preview that shows billable events and a sample amount for the month, and Google notes those preview rates are standard, not contractual, and may vary by market. The base fee, the tier rates and the commitment behind them are set in the contract.

What separates the editions is limits rather than a feature list. The 360 service level raises event parameters per event, custom dimensions and metrics, key events, audiences, calculated metrics, reporting API tokens per day and the daily BigQuery export cap. It lifts the sampling threshold for explorations and adds unsampled results, which standard properties cannot request. Retention moves from two or fourteen months to options up to fifty. Intraday data usually lands in about an hour instead of two to six, and service level agreements apply only under a 360 contract. What each edition measures is on the Google Analytics 4 card.

Questions and answers

Is there a monthly event cap on the free edition?

Google publishes no monthly allowance for standard properties. What it does document is a size classification by the events a property processed over the previous 31 days. When a standard property crosses into the Large class, event level retention drops to two months on its own and older event level data is deleted. Administrators get a warning email first and can either send fewer events or move the property to 360.

Do events sent before an upgrade count?

Only events collected while the property sits at the 360 service level are billable, and standard properties report zero billable volume. An upgrade in the middle of a month starts the meter at the moment the service level changes.