GA4 is free, but the real cost is your visitors' privacy, your page speed, and the hours you'll spend configuring consent banners. Here's what we switched to and why.
Google Analytics has been the default analytics tool for over a decade. It's free, it integrates with Google Ads, and most developers know how to install it. But "free" has always had a catch — and with GA4, that catch has become harder to ignore.
Every time a visitor loads your site with GA4 installed, a ~45 KB JavaScript file is fetched from Google's servers. That script loads before most of your own code, adds latency, and contributes to your Largest Contentful Paint time. More importantly, the data that script collects — your visitors' behaviour, interests, and browsing patterns — flows directly into Google's advertising infrastructure.
If you're serving visitors in the EU, that's a GDPR problem. You need a valid legal basis to send personal data to a US-based advertising company. In practice, that means a cookie consent banner — the kind that interrupts your visitors, damages conversions, and still doesn't fully protect you legally in many EU jurisdictions.
For most of our projects, the breaking point wasn't privacy — it was GA4's redesign. Universal Analytics was complex but navigable. GA4 replaced familiar session-based reporting with an event-based model that made simple questions like "how many people visited my homepage last week?" surprisingly difficult to answer.
We found ourselves spending more time querying Looker Studio dashboards than actually reading our data. The tool had become an obstacle rather than a resource. We were paying in developer time, in page performance, and in visitor privacy — and getting diminishing returns.
We evaluated several privacy-first alternatives. Our requirements were simple:
We ended up building Web Analyzer App — initially for our own use, then as a product. The tracker is 2 KB and loads asynchronously. It doesn't set any cookies. Sessions are identified via an in-memory UUID that expires when the browser closes. No personal data is ever stored. No consent banner is required.
There are things GA4 does that a smaller privacy-first tool won't:
For the vast majority of our projects, none of those mattered. We needed page views, session paths, referrer sources, conversion goals, and uptime alerts. All of that works without Google — and without giving your visitors' data to an advertising company.
Switching from Google Analytics is not as scary as it sounds. The data you'll miss is mostly data you never used anyway. What you gain is a faster page load, an end to the cookie consent ritual, and the ability to honestly tell your visitors that their behaviour isn't being shared with Google's ad network.
If that trade sounds worth it — try Web Analyzer App free. No credit card, up and running in 2 minutes.
