GA4 is free because Google gets the data, keeps standard properties to 2 or 14 months of retention, and is blocked by many browsers and extensions. Plausible and Umami can be self-hosted; a first-party collector on your own domain sees the visits blockers hide. The tradeoffs.
Google Analytics 4 costs nothing and does a lot. The costs are elsewhere: your visitors' data goes to Google, tracker blockers drop a share of your visits, and a standard property keeps event data for 2 or 14 months, no longer.
Book a free 30-minute call. You'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
Blockers mostly match known third-party hosts and script names. An SDK that posts to /v1/events on your own domain looks like the rest of your site, needs no cross-site cookies, and is not a tracker in the sense blockers target. That is not a way around consent: where the law requires consent for analytics, it still does.
Marketing team lives in Google Ads: keep GA4 for ads, and add your own collection for the record.
You want a simple dashboard and nothing at Google: Plausible or Umami, self-hosted.
You need to tie a visit to the signup, the lead and the deal: first-party collection, because the join needs one visitor id across everything you own.
Once a month: what changed in tech that month and what it means for you, from cloud and AI to security and the tools you build with. Every item links to its source. No sales pitch, unsubscribe in one click.
Book a free 30-minute call about it. Bring your setup and your bill; you'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
Or keep reading
Own Your Data in the Age of AI: When to Replace a SaaS Tool With Your Own
Building a CRM, an analytics pipeline or a help desk used to be a year of work. With AI coding tools and open-source cores it is weeks. That changes the math on per-seat pricing and on handing your customer data to someone else. When it pays to run your own, when it does not, and what you take on.
Read
Replacing Salesforce or HubSpot: A Self-Hosted CRM (Twenty) or One You Build
A CRM is contacts, companies, deals, activities and a pipeline view. At $90–$195 per seat per month, ten seats cost $11k–$23k a year. Twenty is an open-source CRM you can run yourself; building on Postgres is the other route. What each option costs, what you lose, and how to migrate without losing history.
Read
As of October 30, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.