GA4 is completely free for standard use. You get 10 million events per month at no charge, which covers the vast majority of small to medium businesses and even many enterprise sites. To put that in perspective, a site getting 500,000 pageviews monthly would typically log 2–3 million events once you count scrolls, clicks, video plays, and form interactions, so you have substantial headroom. The paid tier is Google Analytics 360, part of the Google Marketing Platform. Pricing starts around $50,000 USD per year (roughly $67,000 CAD) but often runs $150,000+ depending on data volume and contract terms. You get higher event limits (1 billion per month), unsampled reports, BigQuery export with no daily limits, service-level agreements, and dedicated support. Unless you're processing massive traffic or need raw data exports for advanced modeling, the free version handles everything. At Ottawa SEO, we've yet to encounter a client who actually needed 360. Even our largest portfolio sites with millions of annual visits stay well under the 10 million event threshold. The free GA4 gives you custom dimensions, conversion tracking, audience building, cross-domain tracking, and integration with Google Ads and Search Console. That's the full analytics stack most businesses require. One thing to watch: GA4 samples reports when you apply complex segments or filters over large date ranges, even on the free tier. If you see a yellow "This report is based on X% of sessions" notice, you're hitting sampling. The workaround is narrowing your date range or exporting to BigQuery (also free up to 10GB per day of streaming). For most decision-making, light sampling doesn't materially affect insights. If you genuinely need unsampled data at scale, that's when 360 becomes relevant, but again, that's a narrow use case tied to enterprise-level data science operations, not typical marketing reporting.