Guide
When free is genuinely the right answer, what it actually costs you, and what changes once it stops being enough.
If that’s you, install whichever free tool has the easiest script tag and move on. This guide is not trying to talk you out of it, and neither should anyone selling you analytics.
Your visitors’ data can be the payment.
An ad-funded tool like Google Analytics is free because the visitor data collected feeds an advertising business, not because there is no cost to running it. That is a real trade, not a scam, and it is worth naming plainly rather than pretending “free” means “no cost to anyone”.
Sampling shows up as you grow.
Free tiers, including on tools with no ad business behind them, commonly cap or sample data past a volume threshold, and the cap is rarely on the pricing page. You find out when a report starts returning an estimate instead of a count.
Support is whatever the community forum offers.
Fine, until something breaks the week before a board meeting and the answer is a three-day-old forum thread with no reply.
Migrating later costs more than starting on the right tool.
Historical data rarely moves cleanly between vendors: session rules, bot filtering and consent handling differ enough that splicing one tool’s history onto another produces a chart that looks continuous and isn’t. The real cost of “free for now” is often keeping the free tool running indefinitely alongside whatever replaces it, just to keep the old numbers reachable.
10 000 events a month, 1 project, 3 months of history, 1 team member, no card and no expiry. It includes real funnels and retention, not just pageviews: one funnel and three segments, which is enough to answer a genuine drop-off question rather than only count visitors.
One honest limit: if you outgrow it, upgrading today means emailing us rather than filling in a card form. Stripe checkout isn’t wired yet, so a paid plan is a conversation for now, not a self-serve purchase. The plans and quotas themselves are real and enforced; see pricing for exactly what each tier includes and what doesn’t work yet.
And if none of the “when paid earns its price” list above applies to your site, a free competitor covers you just as well. There is no reason to install ours instead just because you found this page.
Trying to decide between vendors first? The seven questions that actually decide it, or check whether Metricward fits your situation.
Start free