Web analytics · cost comparison

Google Analytics 4 vs self-hosted Plausible Analytics: what each actually costs

Google Analytics 4 on the Free tier against Plausible Analytics running on the smallest server that fits it. Every figure below is computed from the sizing model and the dated prices at the foot of this page, and includes the part most comparisons leave out: your own time.

There is no bill to beat here. Google Analytics 4 costs nothing at 10 people, so running Plausible Analytics yourself costs you $121 a month more, not less. The reason to do it is who holds the data, not what it costs.

Google Analytics 4: $0.00per month, Free
Self-hosted: $121server, backups and your time
Server and backups: $8.04CX23 (cost-optimized), 4 GB RAM
36-month difference: $4,789 extra to self-host
Break-even: neverafter $450 of setup time

The same comparison at every team size

Self-hosting has a floor and almost no slope, while per-seat software has no floor and a steep slope. That is the whole story, and it is why the answer flips somewhere in this table rather than being the same for everyone.

Google Analytics 4 Free against Plausible Analytics self-hosted, per month, over 36 months. Self-hosted includes server, backups and maintenance time at $75 an hour.
Team size	Google Analytics 4	Self-hosted	Without valuing your time	Server needed	36-month difference
solo	$0.00	$121	$8.04	CX23 (cost-optimized) (4 GB)	-$4,789
5 people	$0.00	$121	$8.04	CX23 (cost-optimized) (4 GB)	-$4,789
10 people	$0.00	$121	$8.04	CX23 (cost-optimized) (4 GB)	-$4,789
25 people	$0.00	$121	$8.04	CX23 (cost-optimized) (4 GB)	-$4,789
50 people	$0.00	$121	$8.04	CX23 (cost-optimized) (4 GB)	-$4,789
100 people	$0.00	$121	$8.04	CX23 (cost-optimized) (4 GB)	-$4,789
250 people	$0.00	$125	$12.07	CX33 (cost-optimized) (8 GB)	-$4,935

Self-hosting never comes out ahead at any team size on this page, once your time is priced in.

Where the self-hosted money actually goes at 10 people

Line item	Per month	What it is
Server	$6.70	CX23 (cost-optimized) at Hetzner Cloud: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB disk
Backups	$1.34	Provider snapshots at 20% of the server price. Skipping this is not a saving, it is a bet.
Your time	$112	1.5 hours a month of updates, upgrades and the occasional broken thing, at $75 an hour
Total	$121	Plus $450 once, for roughly 6 hours of first-time setup

Google Analytics 4 at this size costs $0.00 a month. No licence cost at the standard tier.

What Plausible Analytics needs to run at 10 people

Ships as Elixir plus ClickHouse plus PostgreSQL. ClickHouse sets the memory floor, so this stack does not usefully shrink below 2 GB. Disk scales with pageviews rather than with seats.

Resource	Required	How it is derived
Memory	2.6 GB	2 GB for the stack at rest, plus 5 MB per active user, plus 25% headroom
Disk	21 GB	20 GB base, plus 0.1 GB per user
vCPU	2	The project's own baseline. For this workload memory runs out before the processor does.

What you give up, stated plainly

Uptime is now yours. Google Analytics 4 has an operations team on call. Self-hosted, a failed upgrade at 18:00 on a Friday is your evening.
Backups only exist if you test restoring them. The $1.34 line above buys snapshots, not a rehearsed recovery.
Plausible Analytics is a multi-container stack with a database you have to back up yourself. That is why the maintenance line is 1.5 hours a month rather than zero.
Feature parity is never exact. Plausible Analytics covers the core of what teams use Google Analytics 4 for; the long tail of integrations and enterprise controls is where the gap shows.

Where to put Plausible Analytics

2.6 GB of memory and 21 GB of disk is what this needs at 10 people. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the CX23 (cost-optimized) at Hetzner Cloud for $6.70 a month.

Go to Hetzner Cloud Compare hosts

We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and may well undercut it. Price them yourself before you commit.

Plausible Analytics at a glance

Licence	GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Written in	Elixir
GitHub stars	29,036, checked 2026-09-12
Latest release	v3.2.1
Last commit	2026-09-12
Ships Docker images	Yes
Project	plausible.io · plausible/analytics

Get the migration checklist for this tool

A one-page pre-flight list: data export path, sizing, backup plan, and the rollback step most people skip.

Questions people actually ask

How much does Google Analytics 4 cost?

Google Analytics 4 Free costs $0.00 a month at 10 people: free at the standard tier. That figure was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-12.

What does it cost to self-host Plausible Analytics?

$121 a month at 10 people: $6.70 for the CX23 (cost-optimized) at Hetzner Cloud, $1.34 of backups, and $112 for the 1.5 hours a month it takes to look after.

Is Plausible Analytics cheaper than Google Analytics 4?

No. At every team size on this page, Google Analytics 4 costs less than running Plausible Analytics yourself once your time is priced in; over 36 months self-hosting costs $4,789 more. Self-hosting it buys control over the data, not savings.

What server does Plausible Analytics need?

At 10 people, 2.6 GB of memory and 21 GB of disk. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read, is the CX23 (cost-optimized) at Hetzner Cloud for $6.70 a month.

How much work is Plausible Analytics to run?

It is rated medium: about 6 hours to set up and 1.5 hours a month afterwards, priced at $75.00 an hour in the figures above.

Every figure on this page, and where it came from

Input	Value used	Source	Read on
Google Analytics 4 Free	free at the standard tier	vendor pricing page	2026-09-12
Hetzner Cloud CX23 (cost-optimized)	$6.70 per month	provider pricing page	2026-10-25
Engineer time	$75 per hour	our published assumption	—
Plausible Analytics sizing	2 GB base, 5 MB per user	project documentation	—

Prices move. If the vendor has changed theirs since 2026-09-12, the figures above are stale and the source links are the authority, not us. How we handle that.