Is Google Analytics free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —Data retention of 14 months maximum, and the options are only 2 or 14 months
• —Large and XL properties are capped at 2 months of retention
• —Explorations sample above 10 million events per query
• —BigQuery export capped at 1 million events a day
• —100 audiences, 25 event parameters per event, 50 event-scoped custom dimensions

Where the wall is

Year-over-year reporting. At 14 months you cannot compare this Christmas with the last one properly, and the data is gone rather than hidden — nothing restores it later. The other wall arrives quietly: past 10 million events a query, your explorations are sampled, so two people can run the same report and get different numbers.

After that: Analytics 360, sold through Google Marketing Platform sales rather than a published price. It raises retention to 50 months, sampling to 1 billion events a query, BigQuery export to billions of events a day and audiences to 400.

Can you self-host Google Analytics? No — cloud only

No, and that is the whole reason the alternatives exist. Matomo, Plausible, Umami and Fathom can all be self-hosted, keep unsampled data for as long as you keep the disk, and do not send your visitors' behaviour to an advertising company.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

What you are locked into

Data gravity in Google's ecosystem and a complex, sampling-prone model.

If you would rather not pay: Plausible