Why Metrimato is not free

The obvious question when the best-known alternative costs nothing. The short answer is that Google Analytics is not free either, it is just paid for with your customers' privacy, and the invoice arrives in a form that never reaches your accounting.

Free is a price, not a feature

Google Analytics is part of an advertising business. What it measures on your site helps target advertising, and the value of that flows to Google. If you buy a lot of advertising, it is a fair trade. If you do not, it is a strange one.

This is not a claim that anything is hidden. Google says in its own terms what it does with the data.

The customer of a free tool is someone else: What gets built into Google Analytics is shaped by what advertisers need, because they are the ones paying. Metrimato is paid for by the people who use it, so what gets built is shaped by what a site owner needs.
Free does not mean without cost: Google Analytics does not invoice you, but it still costs: setting it up and keeping it working takes hours, the consent banner is a purchase of its own, and some of your visitors never reach the report at all. None of that appears on an invoice.
An ad-funded tool always collects more: When a product is funded by advertising, there is always a reason to collect a little more about the visitors. Metrimato does not sell advertising, so we have no reason to widen what we collect. That is why we can promise it stays as it is.

What free costs before anyone even opens a report

Every one of these is work someone in your company does, or buys. None of it appears on an invoice from Google.

Getting started is a project: A property, a data stream, tags, usually a tag manager, and a consent platform wired so that nothing fires before the banner is answered. Metrimato, meanwhile, is one script line.
Someone has to keep it working: A new page template, a campaign landing page or a change at the checkout can break the tagging, and nobody notices until a month of data is already wrong.
Reading the reports is a separate skill: The default reports answer questions most site owners do not have, and the ones they do have need an exploration built by hand. Companies routinely buy that as a service, billed by the hour.
The consent platform is its own purchase: It is licensed, it is configured, and it has to be kept up to date as the rules move.
And the paperwork: A transfer assessment, a cookie policy, a record of processing. All of it exists because the tool collects personal data. If no personal data is collected, none of it has to be worked through.

We deliberately put no euro figure on any of this. There is no independent survey of what a Google Analytics implementation costs.

The most expensive part is the data you never get

A free tool that records some of your visitors is not obviously cheaper than a paid one that records all of them. In the EU, the size of that gap is not a rounding error.

25 %: of everyone shown a cookie banner accepted all cookies. A third never touched it at all.; Advance Metrics, 2023, international business sites
40 %: consented when the banner had an equally visible reject button. With nudging the figure rose to 54 %.; etracker Consent Benchmark 2025, 500 German sites
20 %: of conversions were missing from Google Analytics on sites with a banner, against 11 % without one.; Orbit Media, 2024, 60 comparisons across 33 accounts

Across these studies, the share of visitors who never end up in Google Analytics ranges from roughly a third to about three quarters, and the spread is mostly explained by how the banner is built rather than by who the visitors were. Nobody has published a measurement for Finland, so we quote the European studies and leave it at that.

Metrimato needs no consent, so it records everyone who came. That difference alone tends to be worth more than the subscription, particularly on a site where a single decision about what to write next is worth more than a year of the plan.

See the full comparison and its sources

What the money buys

Where a subscription goes

A price is easier to justify the more precisely you can say what it pays for. Here is ours.

There is a person in support: Support from the people who wrote the code, in Finnish or English.
The service stays up and stays lawful: Updates, backups, the data processing agreement, the security description, the subprocessor list and the assessment template, all kept current.
Continuous development: The subscription funds development that keeps going. New features arrive regularly, and what customers ask for steers what gets built next.
Privacy that stays: We sell neither advertising nor data, so we have no reason to collect more about your visitors than we do now. That is a promise only a paid tool can make.

What it costs

The free plan covers one small site. Above that the price follows size, not features.

Free

Try it without a card

0 € / month

1 site
1 user
10,000 events / month
6 months of history
Realtime view

Request an invite

Starter

Business

For a growing team

29 € / month

10 sites
15 team members
1M events / month
24 months of history
Team roles
Public summaries

Request an invite

Enterprise

For a group of companies

99 € / month

50 sites
100 users
10M events / month
36 months of history
DPA and privacy assessment
Priority support

Request an invite

When Metrimato is not the right choice

We would rather be honest even when it does not sell. Metrimato does not suit everything, and it is better to say so up front than to let you find out for yourself.

You want to follow the person rather than the traffic: The visitor identifier changes every day by design. Cohorts, retention curves and lifetime value cannot be built here, now or later.
You need attribution across months: Metrimato does not remember a visitor for longer than a day, so it cannot tell you that the person who bought today first arrived through an ad a month ago.
You need heatmaps or session recordings: Deliberately not built. They record what a person did on a page.
You need advertising audiences: Nothing is sent to any advertising platform, so no audience can be built from your visitors.

If more than one of these describes you, keep Google Analytics or use Metrimato alongside it.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from a named study or from the supplier's own documentation. The links open in a new tab, so you can check them yourself.

Switch to a measure that respects the visitor

We onboard new companies by invitation so we have time to help everyone get started.

Request an invite See pricing