Web analytics pricing in 2026: 17 tools, from $0 to £193,680 a year

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 6 October 2026Prefer this source on Google

Web analytics pricing runs from nothing to six figures, and the line between them is drawn by one number: how much traffic and event data you send. Google Analytics 4 costs $0. The UK Department for Work and Pensions paid £193,680 for one year of Google Analytics 360 with BigQuery.

Between those poles sit pricing models for every size: privacy-first tools billed by pageviews, product analytics tools billed by events, and heatmap tools billed by sessions. Plausible starts at $9 a month. Amplitude's median contract on Vendr is $64,000 a year.

This report prices 17 web analytics tools from vendor pages, Vendr contract medians and UK public contract notices, checked on 6 October 2026. It's for marketers and analytics leads who need a budget line before a sales call sets one.

Four ways web analytics tools bill

Every web analytics platform on this page prices on volume, and the unit it counts decides who pays most. Each analytics tool picks one of four units. A blog with 100,000 page views and almost no clicks pays little under event billing. An ecommerce store firing ten events per visit pays ten times more.

• Pageviews. Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics and Crazy Egg sell flat-rate monthly pricing tiers by pageview count, a fixed recurring fee with every core feature on every tier.
• Hits or actions. Matomo counts page views, events, downloads, outlinks, site searches, content tracking and crashes as hits, so each outbound link click costs the same as a page load. Piwik PRO counts actions.
• Events. Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog, Kissmetrics and Vercel meter every tracked event, with a free tier of 50,000 to 2M events a month.
• Contracts. Google Analytics 360, Adobe Analytics and the enterprise tiers of the event vendors sell annual agreements. Google bills 360 as a fixed base fee covering the first 25M monthly events, plus a per-event fee that falls as volume rises.

Freemium sits on top of all four models. A free plan with no strings attached covers the core features, and the upgrade sells more features: more volume, longer history, more users and seats, or additional features such as A/B testing and advanced analytics.

Google Analytics 4: the free version and its quotas

Google Analytics 4 is free for every site. Google's own product page offers the tools "free of charge, to understand the customer journey and improve marketing ROI", and there's no traffic ceiling on a standard property. That price is why it holds the lion's share of the market: W3Techs counts Google Analytics on 47.3% of all websites, an 82.6% share of sites running any traffic analysis tool.

The Google Analytics free version links straight into Google Ads. Linking the two accounts lets advertisers share remarketing audiences and import key events as Google Ads conversions, which is how GA users improve ad targeting in Google Ads without paying for analytics.

Realtime reporting covers users active in the last 30 minutes of activity, and funnel exploration is included. Standard reporting on traffic sources, user behavior and conversion metrics ships with every property.

Configuration is where the devil's in the details, because the free property caps what you can configure. Google's 360 comparison page lists the standard limits:

• 50 event-scoped custom dimensions and 50 custom metrics (125 each on 360)
• 30 key events and 100 audiences (50 and 400 on 360)
• 1M events a day in the daily export to the BigQuery data warehouse (billions on 360), with streaming export unlimited
• Explorations sampled above 10M events per query (1B on 360)
• Event-level data retention of 2 or 14 months, cut to 2 months on Large and XL properties (up to 50 on 360)
• 10 GB of data import storage per property (1 TB on 360)

Retention bites hardest. Google's data retention page says the setting doesn't touch standard aggregated reports, only explorations and funnel reports. So most GA users keep their traffic sources and visitor numbers in standard reporting, and lose the event-level detail behind them after 14 months. The BigQuery export is the workaround: it gives direct access to raw website data that Google doesn't expire.

Universal Analytics is gone. Standard properties stopped processing hits on 1 July 2023, and historical data and API access ended in the week of 1 July 2024. Teams that never exported their UA history went back to square one with GA4's 14-month window.

Google Analytics 360 cost: a base fee and four public contracts

Google Analytics 360 is the premium version of GA4, sold through Google and its resellers as one of the Google Marketing Platform products. Google's billing page describes the structure and no price: a base fee that includes the first 25M monthly events, then volume tiers where the cost per event falls. The usage preview in the product says its prices "are not contractual rates and may vary by market".

UK public procurement notices fill the gap, and they show 360 costs an arm and a leg next to the free tier. All four contracts below went through Merkle:

• DVLA paid £98,566 for October 2021 to September 2022.
• The Government Digital Service and Cabinet Office paid £150,000 for October 2025 to October 2026, setup and support services included.
• The Houses of Parliament signed for £315,360 over two years from February 2025, or £157,680 a year.
• DWP paid £193,680 for March 2025 to February 2026, with BigQuery as its data infrastructure.

Forum figures for GA360 pricing run older. A Hacker News commenter wrote on 5 January 2021 that "Analytics 360 runs 12K+/month from memory, but someone probably has more recent info". A 2016 commenter put the floor of its predecessor higher:

"Unless you're a Google Analytics Premium customer (which starts at $150k per year, by the way), you're not affected."

Hacker News commenter, 15 March 2016

What the money buys is capacity: 50-month retention, exploration sampling pushed to 1B events per query, 125 custom dimensions and 1 TB of import storage. Larger enterprises with billions of events a month pay for those advanced features. A site under 25M events a month already fits inside the free daily BigQuery export of 1M events, roughly 30M a month. At that size a 360 contract buys headroom the property won't touch.

Adobe Analytics: server calls and three editions

Adobe Analytics is the other enterprise web analytics platform with no published price, so buyers have to read between the lines of a sales order. Its product description meters usage in server calls and sells three editions, Select, Prime and Ultimate, each capped at 500,000 report requests a month. A customer over that limit "may be obligated to license additional quantity of Total Monthly Report Requests".

The edition decides which advanced analytics features and analysis limits you get, and Ultimate carries the extensive features list:

• Contribution Analysis: 10 tokens a month on Prime, 20 on Ultimate
• Customer Attributes: 3 on Select, 15 on Prime, 200 per report suite on Ultimate
• eVars: 200 on Select and Prime, 250 on Ultimate
• Predictive Workbench: a separate add-on outside all three editions

The Foundation Pack for Experience Cloud, capped at 120M server calls a year, stopped taking purchases, upsells or renewals on 1 January 2024. Adobe Analytics runs on 0.1% of all websites, against 47.3% for Google Analytics, and W3Techs puts KISSmetrics in its below-0.1% group.

Privacy-first web analytics priced by pageviews

Five web analytics tools in this group sell privacy-focused analytics on a public rate card, and they're the affordable options for a site that wants to own all the data it collects. Plausible, Simple Analytics and both Matomo and Piwik PRO clouds host data in the EU.

Plausible

Plausible starts at $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews on the Starter plan, one site and 3 years of data retention. At 100,000 pageviews Starter costs $19, Growth $29 with 3 sites and 3 team members, and Business $39 with 10 sites, 5 years of history, funnels and a Stats API. A 30-day trial needs no card, and yearly billing gives 2 months free.

Fathom

Fathom sells one feature set at three volumes: $15 a month for 100,000 pageviews, $25 for 200,000 and $45 for 500,000. Every plan covers 50 sites, with extra 50-site packs at $10 a month, API access and unlimited email reports, and keeps full history while you're subscribed. Its 7-day trial requires a card.

Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics has a free plan for 5 websites with 1 month of history and a required badge. The self-serve plan costs €20 a month at 100,000 pageviews, plus €20 per extra user.

Matomo

Matomo's free route is self-hosting. The On-Premise Community edition has unlimited users and hits and no fee; the cost moves to hosting and upkeep. Paid plugin bundles start at €275 a month for 4 users and 5M hits, up to €3,400 a month for 50 users and 100M hits.

Matomo Cloud costs €22 a month at 50,000 hits and €38 at 100,000, with 30 websites, 100 segments, 100 custom reports, 24 months of raw data, 1,500 heatmap pageviews and 150 session recordings a month.

Piwik PRO

Piwik PRO, an analytics solution built for regulated industries, prices its Business plan from €36 a month for up to 2M monthly actions across 20 domains, with 25 months of retention, 50 custom reports per website and a 30-day trial. Enterprise starts at €366 a month billed annually and adds a HIPAA business associate agreement.

Piwik PRO's plan comparison lists customer journey analytics and sells real-time data by the tier: the realtime reporting lookback runs 30 minutes on Business, 2 hours on Data Fundamentals, 12 hours on Trusted Insights and 24 hours on Secure Intelligence.

Product analytics priced by events

Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog, Heap and Kissmetrics track user interactions and user behavior as events, then sell funnels, retention metrics and cohort analysis on top. Each analytics product counts users differently, but all five bill the event and report metrics per user. Their free tiers are generous, and their contracts are where the money is.

Mixpanel gives 1M events a month free with unlimited users. Growth keeps the first 1M free; 1.5M events a month costs $120 a month billed yearly or $140 monthly, up to 20M. Enterprise covers up to 1T events and a custom data retention policy. Vendr tracks a $38,717 median across 222 purchases, from $13,050 to $122,820, with buyers saving 19% on average.

Mixpanel's tiers have changed since May 2024, when a developer priced the step from free to paid on Hacker News:

"To match what they provide in their free tier (20M events), the cost is $2,289 USD / month (no thanks)."

Hacker News commenter, 22 May 2024

A commenter who had pitched Mixpanel to a client replied in the same thread about the billing unit itself:

"I could never explain (or honestly understand) events, and even though I had raw server data, g analytics data and cloudflare analytics data - I still don't understand what constitutes an event or number of events, or what it may cost."

Hacker News commenter, 22 May 2024

Amplitude gives 2M events a month free with 1 year of data access. Plus starts at $0, scales to 700,000 monthly tracked users or 70M events and keeps 2 years. Growth and Enterprise are custom-priced with unlimited reporting history, A/B/n testing starts at Growth, and Amplitude pitches Enterprise at larger enterprises with complex requirements. Vendr's median is $64,000 a year, from $24,750 to $382,219.

"They don't have public pricing, but their sales rep told me some time ago the best offer they can make is 30k/year, which is too expensive for me."

Hacker News commenter on Amplitude, 2 March 2023

That free tier is a long game. Another commenter's company sat on it "and then we didn't pay for years, until we eventually ended up paying $40K/year then more", writing in September 2021.

PostHog gives 1M events a month free, then charges $0.00005 per anonymous event and $0.000198 per identified event. Free accounts keep 1 year of data and paid accounts 7 years, with no minimum spend, so 1.5M anonymous events costs $25 a month, a drop in the bucket next to a Mixpanel contract.

Heap publishes no rate card and has a $41,220 Vendr median across 191 purchases, from $13,000 to $154,798. Kissmetrics, which tracks users by person and reports funnels, cohorts and activity, is free to 100,000 events, then $99 a month, falling to $0.10 per 1,000 events above 5M.

The paywall pattern is par for the course. A/B testing and machine learning features land on the upper tiers: Amplitude rates Predictions as limited on Growth and included on Enterprise, and Mixpanel lists root cause analysis and Metric Trees on Enterprise.

Heatmaps and session replay pricing

Behavior tools price by recorded sessions, and the cheapest one in this report is free. Microsoft Clarity is free with no traffic cap, keeps recordings for 30 days and heatmaps for 9 months, and runs on 4.1% of all websites.

Hotjar's pricing URL now redirects to Contentsquare. Contentsquare's Experience Analytics is free to 200,000 monthly sessions with 1 month of data, then $49 a month billed annually for Growth with 13 months of reporting. Its Vendr median is $20,000 a year.

Crazy Egg bills annually from $29 a month for 5,000 pageviews to $599 for 1M. Plus costs $99 a month for 150,000 pageviews, 1,000 recordings, unlimited A/B tests and detailed insights from 75 heatmap reports, with unlimited users on every plan. It charges no overages, so tracking pauses at the cap until the 1st of the next month.

All 17 web analytics tools side by side

Entry prices are list prices from each vendor's own pricing page or docs, except Google Analytics 360, priced from DVLA's 2021 notice on UK Contracts Finder. Adobe Analytics and Heap print no rate card. Checked 6 October 2026.

Vercel's Web Analytics docs set its reporting window at 1 month on Hobby and 12 on Pro, and Web Analytics Plus stretches it to 24 for $10 a month.

What a 100,000-pageview site pays each vendor

Take one website with 100,000 monthly pageviews and nothing else tracked, a site whose website traffic holds at that level. The bill ranges from $0 to $99 a month.

The free five hold only while the site stays small. Add ten tracked interactions per pageview and the same site sends 1.1M events, which takes it past the Mixpanel and PostHog free tiers. At 2M anonymous events a month, PostHog bills $50. Matomo's €38 also assumes pageviews alone; every download and outlink counts as a hit.

Annual billing trims the paid column for buyers who bite the bullet on a 12-month commitment. Plausible, Fathom and Matomo each give 2 months free, so Plausible Starter falls to $190 a year and Matomo Cloud to €380.

Data retention: the cost line free tiers cut

Retention is where the cheap plans save money. A free tier that deletes data after 30 days works for a quick overview of last week's traffic, and it's a red flag for any year-on-year report.

Long term retention costs little outside Google's tiers. PostHog keeps 7 years once a card is on file. Vercel charges $10 a month to double its reporting window to 24 months. Matomo Cloud deletes raw data after 24 months and keeps the aggregated report data forever, so historical data survives the cut.

Costs outside the subscription

Total cost of ownership adds implementation, maintenance, support and compliance to the licence, and a complex setup is where hidden costs pile up.

• Implementation. The GDS contract bundled GA360 with design, setup, configuration and implementation services. PostHog sells a 30-minute onboarding call for $80.
• Hosting. Matomo On-Premise is free, and the buyer pays for the server and upkeep.
• Support and SLAs. Amplitude's response SLA is 2 business days on Growth and 1 on Enterprise. Matomo's Team bundle answers email within 12 hours, and its Enterprise bundle adds dedicated support. Mixpanel lists 24/7 support only on Enterprise.
• Seats and sites. Most vendors price access by users or sites. Simple Analytics charges €20 per extra user, Plausible caps Growth at 3 sites, and Fathom sells extra 50-site packs at $10 a month.
• Compliance. GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA requirements push buyers up a tier. Piwik PRO's business associate agreement sits in Enterprise, Matomo Cloud stores data in Frankfurt, and Plausible processes visitor data on EU-owned servers.

ROI on any of these is the revenue you can trace to decisions made from its reporting, divided by subscription plus implementation. A $19 Plausible plan breaks even at $228 a year of attributable gains. A £150,000 GA360 contract needs custom reports and BigQuery analysis feeding marketing campaigns worth far more.

How to pick the right web analytics tool for your budget

The right tool matches the data you need to keep. Picking on price alone is how teams cut corners and rebuild tracking a year later, and running two free tools side by side avoids putting all your eggs in one basket.

• Under 100,000 pageviews: GA4 plus Clarity covers traffic sources, conversion rates and heatmaps for $0.
• EU hosting matters: Plausible, Fathom or Simple Analytics at $15 to $39 a month, all user friendly with a short learning curve.
• Self-hosting and full data ownership: Matomo On-Premise, free, plus your hosting bill.
• Product funnels and metrics on what users do: Amplitude, Mixpanel or PostHog, free to 1M or 2M events.
• Over 25M events a month: Google Analytics 360 or Adobe Analytics, with GA360 pricing at £98,566 to £193,680 a year on the public record.

For in depth reviews of other tools in each web analytics tool category, see the Google Analytics 4 review, the Hotjar review, Google Analytics vs Hotjar and the website traffic analysis tools ranking. Competitor traffic estimates are a separate product, priced in the Similarweb pricing report.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google web analytics free?

Yes. The Google Analytics 4 free version costs nothing at any traffic level, and users of a standard property get event-level data retention capped at 14 months.

How much does Google Analytics 4 cost?

GA4 costs $0. The paid upgrade, Google Analytics 360, ran £98,566 to £193,680 a year in UK public contracts.

How much does Google Analytics cost?

Google Analytics pricing has two tiers: the standard product is free, and Google Analytics 360 is sold by contract with no published rate card. For a standard property, the only Google Analytics cost is setup time.

What is replacing Google Analytics?

Google Analytics 4 replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped processing hits on 1 July 2023. Sites leaving Google move to Plausible, Fathom, Matomo or Piwik PRO for privacy, or to PostHog, Mixpanel and Amplitude.

Can I get Google Analytics for free?

Yes. The Google Analytics free version needs a Google account and a tracking tag, and GA users pay nothing on a standard property.

Is Google Analytics 4 free or paid?

Both exist. GA4 standard is free, and GA4 with Analytics 360 is paid, adding 50-month retention and 125 custom dimensions.

Bottom line

Web analytics cost tracks the data you send and the history you keep, and Google Analytics pricing sits at both ends of it. Under 100,000 pageviews of website traffic, GA4 and Clarity cost nothing, and $15 to $39 a month buys a privacy-first alternative with 3 to 5 years of history.

Event pricing for product analytics stays free to 1M or 2M events, then turns into a contract with a Vendr median of $38,717 to $64,000. Google Analytics 360 sits above all of it, at £98,566 to £193,680 a year on the UK public record, and it's only worth paying for once a property passes 25M events a month.