Free isn't cheap
Lieven emailed me in response to my email yesterday about Google Analytics. Quoted with permission:
I agree that GA is complicated and not ideal but it’s free. And for organisations with limited budgets this makes a huge difference. I’ve tried to sell some of these privacy-respecting services to my team but even €9/month is seen as too much for something that’s available from Google for nothing.
I understand the dilemma. Google got as powerful as they are by offering most of their services for free. Because, as the saying goes: if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. Over 75% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Advertising that feeds off the data they collect about you and your users.
And is Google Analytics really free?
It requires a cookie consent banner to be legal. That's either a paid service or a plugin someone still has to set up and maintain. Then there's GA4 itself: two-month default data retention, reports that require a data science degree to configure, and an estimated 90% of accounts improperly set up. You’re wasting time, what’s it worth?
Then there's the data you're losing because of that cookie banner or ad blockers. When banners are designed properly (no dark patterns, no sneakily pre-ticked boxes), 60% or more of visitors say no. In Germany and France it's over 75%. A Chilean government study of 70.000 users found that when given a completely clear choice, 95% rejected additional cookies! (which tells you a lot about all the dark patterns on cookie banners out there).
So, you’re seeing a minority of your visitors, skewed towards the ones least likely to care about privacy (older people mostly).
Privacy-respecting analytics don’t need that banner, which means data from more visitors (though a few hardcore ad blockers will still block some of them).
You're also on legal thin ice. Between 2022 and 2025, data protection authorities in 8 European countries ruled against Google Analytics for transferring personal data to the US in violation of GDPR. Sweden issued a €1 million fine. Norway's data protection authority recommended companies look into compliant alternatives. Germany even declared Google Tag Manager as illegal.
If your mission involves trust, transparency, and treating people with respect: running Google Analytics contradicts that in so many ways. Every visit gets reported back to one of the biggest advertising networks on the planet. Your visitors came to support your cause or your ideas, not to have their behaviour profiled and exfiltrated.
Switching to a tool like Plausible or Simple Analytics advertises your values: “we don’t track you”.
€9 a month isn't competing against free (and some are cheaper than that). It's competing against cookie banners, legal issues, developer time, and feeding your community's data into a surveillance network while telling them that you're on their side.
Sorry for the wall of data, I’ll try to keep the next ones shorter :)
Colin