Standard Google Analytics 4 is free to use. Analytics 360 is the paid enterprise version, with higher limits and contractual service commitments. The question is whether those differences solve a problem your team actually has.
Before requesting a quote, separate three costs: the Analytics license, the infrastructure around it, and the work needed to implement and maintain your measurement setup. Some teams need neither version: for straightforward traffic reports without cookies, Simple Analytics is a lighter option, and larger teams can run it alongside GA4 as an independent count.
Is Google Analytics free?
Yes. Standard GA4 has no license fee. Google presents the standard product as a free analytics service, with Analytics 360 available for enterprise requirements. Google Analytics product overview.
Free does not mean that operating the setup costs nothing. Your budget may include implementation, consent management, a server-side tagging environment, warehouse storage, queries and ongoing analyst or engineering time. These are costs of your chosen setup, not a hidden GA4 subscription.
Start with the free version unless you can identify a limit or service requirement that justifies upgrading.
How much does Analytics 360 cost?
Get a quote for your organization’s requirements. Google's public sales page directs Analytics 360 buyers to its sales team; it does not provide a universal checkout price. Contact Google Marketing Platform sales.
A third-party starting-price estimate is not a budget for your implementation. Ask the seller to specify:
- The usage included, how it is measured, and the cost of exceeding it.
- Which properties and environments the agreement covers.
- Support scope and applicable service commitments.
- Contract length and renewal terms.
- Implementation or partner services charged separately.
Use your current event volumes and expected growth in that discussion. A quote without a shared definition of usage is difficult to compare with another offer.
What does the paid version change?
These are selected differences from Google's current comparison, not a complete procurement checklist.
| Requirement | Standard GA4 | Analytics 360 |
|---|---|---|
| Audiences per property | 100 | 400 |
| Event-scoped custom dimensions per property | 50 | 125 |
| Exploration sampling limit | 10 million events per query | 100 million by default; up to 1 billion with More detailed results |
| Daily batch BigQuery export | Up to 1 million events per day | Up to 20 billion events per day |
| Service-level agreement | Not the Analytics 360 SLA | Covered under the applicable 360 contract |
Check the exact limits against your property and contract. Google's standard and 360 comparison.
These sampling limits concern events processed for a query, not a monthly collection allowance. Analytics 360 uses the lower, faster setting by default. Selecting More detailed results in Explore raises the limit; a change that reruns the query resets that choice. Check the data-quality indicator for the result you are using. How Google stores and displays data, adjusting sampling in 360.
The daily batch export limits are separate from exploration sampling limits. BigQuery export types and limits.
Does the free version include BigQuery export?
Yes. Standard GA4 supports BigQuery export. You do not need an Analytics 360 license just to use it.
The one-million-event limit applies to daily batch export from a standard property. Streaming export is available for standard and 360 properties without that volume limit, but it is a best-effort service: it can contain gaps and is not a completeness-guaranteed substitute for daily export. Google recommends daily export for user-attribution data. BigQuery storage and processing costs can apply, and streaming has an additional ingestion charge. Google's BigQuery export documentation.
Define whether you need daily reporting, near-real-time analysis, or both. Budget for the export type, storage and queries separately from the Analytics license. Exporting to BigQuery also does not reproduce every GA4 report: the export excludes behavioral modeling and other reporting-layer additions.
Does GA4 delete all reports after 14 months?
No. This setting does not affect standard aggregated reports. It affects the underlying user-level and event-level data available for explorations and funnel reports.
The rules depend on the data category:
- User-level and key-event data: two or fourteen months.
- Other event data: two or fourteen months in standard GA4; 360 also offers twenty-six, thirty-eight and fifty months.
- Age, gender and interest data: two months, regardless of the selected setting.
- Google-signals data: at most twenty-six months, or the shorter configured retention period.
There is also a volume exception: when a standard property becomes Large, or a 360 property becomes XL, event-level retention is reduced to two months. Google's data retention documentation.
Choose the setting for the analysis you need. An aggregate year-over-year report and a detailed historical exploration have different requirements. Increasing retention cannot restore data already deleted.
Does 360 solve consent-related gaps?
An upgrade changes product limits and service terms. It does not give visitors an analytics identifier when they have refused one.
With Basic Consent Mode, Google tags remain blocked when consent is denied. Advanced Consent Mode allows cookieless pings while analytics storage is denied. Google's Consent Mode documentation.
Behavioral modeling can estimate users and sessions for non-consenting traffic when the property is eligible. It is not a guarantee of complete measurement, and eligibility depends on the implementation and available data. Seeing modeled data also depends on the reporting identity and whether the report supports it. Behavioral modeling requirements.
If the question is “Are our traffic numbers falling because consent behavior changed?”, first investigate the implementation and reports. A bigger license does not establish the answer.
Choose the investment that answers your question
If you need higher exploration limits, more configuration capacity or contractual service commitments, evaluate Analytics 360 against those requirements.
If you need historical analysis outside GA4's interface, assess the BigQuery export and the cost of maintaining that dataset.
If you need to understand traffic that your consent-dependent setup may not report, test a second measurement method alongside GA4. That is a different evaluation from upgrading GA4, and you may have reasons to do both.
Simple Analytics records pageviews and events without persistent visitor identities. It can provide an independent comparison, but it does not replace GA4's user-level capabilities or reconstruct journeys across separate visits. Its calculated session starts also use a different definition. How Simple Analytics measures sessions.
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