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. Depending on your data sharing and advertising settings, Analytics data can be used with Google's advertising features. 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.
Ad funding creates an incentive to collect more: Advertising-funded platforms can have incentives to collect and combine more information about users. 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. Analytics services that process visitor-level personal data can add privacy documentation and compliance work. Metrimato is designed to minimise this by not storing visitor identifiers such as IP addresses.

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 whose measurement does not depend on analytics consent. 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 %: was the average consent rate on sites with a compliant consent design. Sites using nudging averaged about 14 percentage points higher.; etracker Consent Benchmark 2025, 500 German sites
20 %: average GA4 underreporting on sites with a consent banner, compared with about 11 % on sites without one.; Orbit Media, 2024, 60 comparisons across 33 accounts

The three studies measure different things on different sets of sites, and their denominators are not the same, so the figures cannot be added up or combined into a single number. Nobody has published a measurement for Finland, so we quote the European studies and leave it at that.

Metrimato's own measurement does not depend on analytics consent, so visitors are not excluded because they declined or ignored an analytics consent banner. 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

There is no free plan. There is a 14-day trial with everything in it, and after that the price follows the traffic, not the features.

Events / month	Price
10,000	9 € / month
100,000	19 € / month
500,000	39 € / month
1,000,000	59 € / month
2,000,000	89 € / month
5,000,000	149 € / month
10,000,000	249 € / month
More than 10M	Contact us

Pro is an add-on of 29 € a month on top of any tier. It opens the read API, server-side events, scheduled reports, larger teams, the audit log and longer retention, and leaves the event quota untouched.

Start the 14-day trial See pricing

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

The research findings and third-party figures used on this page are linked to their original studies or supplier documentation whenever available. The links open in a new tab, so you can check them yourself.

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