Google Analytics 4 costs nothing for the standard version. You get unlimited users, unlimited properties, and can track millions of events per month without paying Google a dollar. This applies whether you're a solo consultant in Ottawa or a mid-sized ecommerce company in Toronto processing substantial traffic. The paid tier is GA4 360, which runs roughly $50,000–$150,000 USD per year depending on your data volume and contract terms. It's designed for enterprises needing unsampled reports at high query volumes, BigQuery export without the standard daily limits, guaranteed SLAs, and dedicated Google support. Most businesses never hit the thresholds that justify this cost. What you actually pay for with GA4 isn't the tool itself but the implementation and maintenance. Proper GA4 setup requires configuring custom events, building conversion funnels, integrating with Google Tag Manager, and often connecting to BigQuery for advanced analysis. At Ottawa SEO, we've seen clients spend anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000 CAD on initial GA4 implementation depending on tracking complexity and ecommerce requirements. Ongoing costs come from analytics expertise, not licensing. You might pay a contractor $80–$150/hour to build custom reports, troubleshoot tracking gaps, or train your team. Agencies often bundle GA4 monitoring into monthly retainers at $500–$2,000/month depending on reporting depth. The hidden cost is time. GA4's interface has a learning curve steeper than Universal Analytics. Expect your team to invest 10–20 hours learning the new event-based model, Exploration reports, and the differences in how sessions and conversions are counted. If you're migrating from UA, budget time to rebuild your dashboard and reconcile why the numbers look different. For our portfolio properties, we run standard GA4 on everything. The free tier handles our needs completely, and we only layer in BigQuery when a client needs raw event data for custom attribution models or wants to keep historical data beyond GA4's default retention limits.