Yes. The standard version of Google Analytics 4 costs nothing, at any traffic volume, with no event limit and no bill. The paid version, GA4 360, is for large companies, and Google does not publish its price.
This post covers what each version includes, where the free one runs out, and the costs that do not appear on an invoice. Limits come from Google's own documentation and were checked on 1 October 2026.
The two versions
GA4 is the version almost everyone uses. You create a property, add the tag and start collecting.
GA4 360 is sold through Google's sales team and its resellers on an annual contract. It raises most of the limits below and adds service-level guarantees and support.
Google does not publish a price for 360. Its billing docs describe the shape: a fixed fee that covers the first 25 million events a month, then a fee per event above that, which falls as volume grows. To get a figure, you ask Google or one of its resellers.
Where the free version runs out
| Limit | GA4 | GA4 360 |
|---|---|---|
| Exploration sampling | Above 10M events per query | Above 1B events per query |
| Event-level data retention | Up to 14 months | Up to 50 months |
| Custom dimensions (event) | 50 | 125 |
| Custom metrics (event) | 50 | 125 |
| User properties | 25 | 100 |
| Key events | 30 | 50 |
| Audiences | 100 | 400 |
| BigQuery daily export | 1M events a day | Billions of events a day |
Two of these catch smaller sites too.
Sampling. Standard reports are complete. Explorations, where funnels, paths and cohorts live, switch to a sample once a query covers more than 10 million events. A busy site hits that with a date range of a few months. We wrote about why that tends to happen in your best week.
Retention. The 14-month limit applies to the event-level data that explorations read. Standard reports keep their totals, but you cannot build a new exploration over data older than your retention setting. The default is 2 months, so check it under Admin → Data collection and modification → Data retention.
What "free" costs in practice
Time. GA4's standard reports answer "how much traffic, from where". Anything deeper is an exploration you build yourself. Somebody on the team has to learn that, or you pay an agency.
BigQuery. The free export is the usual way around GA4's limits. The export costs nothing, but storing and querying the data in BigQuery is billed once you pass Google Cloud's free allowance.
Consent. GA4 sets cookies, so in many places it runs behind a consent banner. People who decline are not counted. Consent Mode can model their behaviour and add estimates to some reports, which are then partly modelled rather than counted.
Your data. GA4 is part of Google's advertising products. Its data-sharing settings, under Admin → Account settings, decide how much Google may use for its own products. Read them before you assume the answer.
When GA4 360 makes sense
It is built for companies whose questions run past the free limits every day: very high event volumes, long retention requirements, large BigQuery exports or many linked properties. If that is you, you likely already have a Google sales contact.
For most small and mid-sized sites, the choice is not between GA4 and GA4 360. It is between free GA4 and a paid tool that answers the deeper questions without building anything.
What a paid alternative costs
Paid analytics tools usually price by events or pageviews. For comparison, here is ours.
| Events a month | Spreelytics |
|---|---|
| 100,000 | Free |
| 250,000 | $29 a month |
| 1,000,000 | $89 a month |
| 10,000,000 | $339 a month |
| 50,000,000 | $879 a month |
Free has every feature except session replay and the in-app AI assistant, and every paid size has them all. Nothing is sampled, and revenue from Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy is credited to the channel that earned it. Yearly billing is ten months for twelve. The full ladder is on the pricing page.
Many teams keep GA4 for its Google Ads link and add a second tool for everything else. Both can run on the same site, and there is a side-by-side comparison if you are weighing the two.