Why pay for an analytics tool when Google Analytics is free?
Google Analytics has been the staple of the digital marketing industry. It’s the most commonly adopted web analytics tool on the internet, that it’s a habit–a no-brainer–for site owners to install and use it for tracking site performance. And because it’s always been free to use, that is part of the habit as well.
This makes many people wonder why pay for an analytics tool when Google Analytics–the go-to tool–is available for free. 🤷 It’s a good question and we’re here to answer it with full transparency.
Who are we to answer this? In case you’re here for the first time, we’re Plausible: the non-complicated, privacy-friendly, more accurate, equally powerful, and yes – paid – alternative to Google Analytics. We’ve been in this industry for 6+ years at the time of writing this.
After been received with a lot of love by website owners and the privacy-conscious community, we believe we struck a chord already which made our subscribers rather pay for Plausible than deal with a free Google Analytics.
We’ve been profitable and sustainable from the starting, and so we believe we’re qualified to answer what is it that makes sense for people to pay for a web analytics tool that’s an alternative to the digital marketing industry’s staple and free tool.
Google Analytics’ hidden costs
The following are the reasons that actually make Google Analytics “invisibly” very expensive to use, even though it charges no subscription fee.
The time and energy cost
GA has a complicated UI with deep layers of menus, reports, settings, etc. Unlike a large chunk of typical B2B tools, the UI is basically, what can only be called “user-unfriendly.” Setting up and mastering GA4 takes time and expertise, which has its own cost.
There’s an endless sea of help articles, videos, and tutorials available online to help with all that. Usually, this only makes the process more overwhelming. It’s common for someone to feel they could easily miss out on something crucial or set up something wrong.
So yes, unless you have time and/or a genuine interest in learning the tool, you’re going to have a hard time doing just that.
I saw someone say once, something along the lines of: “Sure, GA is free, but if I spend weeks setting it up properly and still can’t get the reports I need, I’m paying in time, stress, and missed insight.”
Time = value = money.
The “let me just hire someone” cost
Because of the above reason, it’s common for business owners to just hire a marketing agency, a freelancer, or an internal GA expert to handle this part of marketing or website management. If not that, many end up subscribing to an expensive GA mastery course.
This ends up making the “free” tool more expensive than the perceived savings of the subscription fees. If it was just a simpler product with good UX and customer support for a little subscription fees, you would be saving more money at the end of the day.
For perspective, we at Plausible only charge $9 monthly for an easy to use and just as powerful web analytics tool. This is way lesser than hiring any marketing agency, freelancer, internal GA expert, or buying a course.
The privacy cost
The real reason Google provides its Analytics (and many other products) for free is so that it can collect as much information as possible from people, and feed it into its ad-tech machine for targeting consumers more precisely, leading to better revenue from the ad network.
This entire process has been called “surveillance capitalism.” Moreover, according to the book, “The age of surveillance capitalism,” surplus personal data is used for behavioural modelling, is sold to enterprises, etc., leaving those who give their data to Google as mere raw material for the ad-tech machine.
You end up paying with the privacy of yours and your users. And it has very real financial implications too. 👇
The compliance cost
Using Google Analytics means legal consultation, ensuring compliance with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and other similar laws all around the world. If you ignore that, you may save on legal fees but if you anytime come under legal scrutiny for not protecting your customers’ personal data correctly, the fines can be massive.
Even if your violation was unintentional, you’re liable to pay up to $2,500 per unintentional violation under CCPA, for example.
GDPR fines up to €10 million or 2% of global annual turnover, whichever is higher, for less severe violations. Google itself has been fined a whopping €50M under GDPR for “insufficient transparency, control, and consent over the processing of personal data for the purposes of behavioural advertising.”
Here are some more cases to help understand how much companies usually have to pay in fines and what the reasons for that usually are.
Secondly, since GA uses third-party cookies for tracking, you need to invest in a cookie consent banner on your website. If you do this through a CMP (consent management platform), it can cost anywhere from $6 to $100+ monthly subscription cost, depending upon your scale of business, features needed, etc.
A cookieless web analytics alternative on the other hand doesn’t require its users to put up annoying cookie consent banners on their website for the reasons of using that tool.
The accuracy cost
In a test we ran, we saw how 58% of Hacker News, Reddit and tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics. Many privacy-aware people use ad blockers or privacy-first browsers to block the GA script from tracking them altogether.
So website owners, who simply wanted some useful website usage data to improve their website, ends up missing more than half of useful data (proof) just because of an innocent decision to use GA. This may lead to missed insights, and worse: critical business decisions based on skewed analytics, the cost of which is immeasurable.
The other thing is that GA4 doesn’t do a great job at blocking bot and spam traffic, which further skews the analytics.
The reputation cost
Using Google products is now commonly perceived as creepy tracking of your customers, even if you’re not doing so intentionally or are unaware about it.
Worse, if you come under scrutiny for your privacy practices just because of using GA, you stand the risk of losing your brand’s long-earned reputation as well.
The tiny business cost
Smaller businesses, indie hackers, independent bloggers, etc., are the ones that usually don’t have the time or energy to sit and learn Google Analytics by going through multiple tutorials, ensuring correct setups, etc. They would rather be wanting to focus on core business problems.
This is one of the most common reasons we’ve seen that one uses a GA alternative.
As a side note, for large teams or businesses that interact a lot with the Google ecosystem, it actually might make sense to stick with Google Analytics. While to cover for all the lost accuracy, many Plausible subscribers for example, use Plausible and GA4 side-by-side.
The UA to GA4 cost
Many people were still happier with Universal Analytics, or GA3. However, we constantly (literally, everyday) read complaints about GA4 being a huge downgrade from UA. GA4 users struggle with setting it up, making sense of the UI, finding insights, blocking bots, etc.
The common sentiment on the internet is that GA abandoned its power users with this migration, with speculations on the fact that they wanted people to either upgrade to GA360 or just made the new UI keeping developers in mind.
The freemium tool’s cost
Google Analytics operates on a freemium model: the basic GA4 is free with data limits and sampling; the enterprise “360” tier costs ~$50 k–150 k/year.
Once you exceed GA4’s freemium threshold, paid analytics may be better.
What do you get with a paid-for analytics solution?
The reasons we charge small subscription fees for Plausible are simple.
We don’t make money by selling your data
We’re not involved with any form of surveillance capitalism, which means we don’t utilize (or even collect) your personal data for any purpose other than providing website usage statistics (which is anonymized and aggregated).
We’re basically what any regular SaaS tool is: a good-experience tool with a little subscription fee. We’re a small team that cares only about a usable analytics tool with no overheads for privacy, legal fees, etc.
We do this full-time and charge a small fee only from our subscribers (we’re not VC-funded either) to fund Plausible and its operations.
We take care of things that Google Analytics does not
The whole reason Uku created Plausible is so that nobody has to deal with GA’s issues – be it privacy, a complicated UI, hiring marketing agencies, dealing with skewed insights, struggling with setup, etc.
Every reason you saw above about the hidden cost of using GA is simply not present with Plausible Analytics – by design. Here’s what that means:
No steep learning curve
In Plausible, there are no layers of menus, reports, settings, or tagging systems to figure out. No need to study how the tool works before you can use it. You install it, and it starts giving insights. The basics are already covered.
It also means you don’t have to hire anyone just to figure out your analytics.
No cookie banners or compliance overhead
Because we don’t use cookies or track personal data, there’s no need for annoying cookie consent banners. This simplifies compliance, while improving your site’s user experience.
See how this works here.
We don’t collect personal data, don’t use third-party cookies, or transfer data across jurisdictions. You’re not taking on legal risk just by using the product. No need for separate DPA reviews or extra documentation.
No retargeting, no behavioural profiles, no leveraging your traffic data to improve an ad auction elsewhere. You’ll be able to sleep easy knowing that your data is private, your user’s data is private, and Google won’t be able to track you anymore.
P.S. We do encourage you to consult your legal advisor to ensure you don’t get legal surprises later considering your unique industry, countries of operation, nature of business, etc.
If you’re interested, you can also go through this guide by a data protection lawyer.
No sampling or delays
We do not use any data sampling by default. We collect and store 100% of the data regardless of how many pageviews you have. The stats in your dashboard reflect 100% accurate data of what happens on your site. This is opposed to sampled reports in GA4.
Traffic data is available in real time too. You don’t have to wait hours to see what’s happening on your site, as opposed to GA4.
No bot noise
We filter out maximum of the background noise that skews numbers in GA—referrer spam, bots, and irrelevant pings that aren’t actual visits. We literally proved it with a test too.
Included customer support
You can reach out and actually get a timely, useful response from a human being who understands websites, analytics, marketing, tech and the entire ecosystem. Support isn’t hidden behind an enterprise contract or a paywall.
Accuracy and reliability
No dark patterns, no “ghost” referrals, no inflated numbers. There are exactly 11 reasons we identified how we’re more accurate than GA. :)
…yet, better features than GA
We made sure to not leave out essential, useful features so you don’t feel like you’re missing out on anything when migrating from GA. It should feel like an upgrade, not a compromise. There are so many things that are present in Plausible and not in GA, such as automatic scroll depth tracking, easier AI-referral tracking, accurate VPN location detection, public stats, and much more.
You can play around with our live stats. There’s also a whole compilation of things that are much easier to do in Plausible than GA.
