This is the rare swap that costs you money rather than saving it. Google Analytics 4 is free and has no pageview cap; Plausible starts at $9 a month. People move anyway, for three reasons: GA4 keeps user-level data for 14 months and then deletes it, the script needs a consent banner in the EU because it sets cookies, and the reporting interface asks you to build what used to be a default report. Plausible sells the opposite trade — less data, kept longer, with nothing to click through.

What works the same

The numbers most people actually look at: visitors, pageviews, sessions, bounce rate, entry and exit pages, referrers, UTM campaigns, countries, devices, browsers. Goals and custom events are there, revenue attribution is there, and you can point it at multiple sites from one dashboard. Setup is one script tag, and the dashboard is a single page with no report builder to learn.

What you give up

A lot, if you use GA4 seriously. No BigQuery export, no cross-device identity stitching, no audience building for Google Ads, no attribution modelling, no funnel exploration. Anything that depends on GA4 talking to the rest of Google’s stack goes away, and that is the honest reason most ad-driven teams stay put. Plausible also has no permanent free plan, so a hobby project that costs nothing today starts costing $9 a month.

The math

GA4: $0, with user-level data retained 14 months at most on the free tier. Plausible: $9 a month for 10k pageviews, $14 Growth, $19 Business, two months free if you pay annually, 30-day trial with no card. So you are paying roughly $108 a year to stop deleting your own history, drop the cookie banner, and cut a heavy tag down to a small one. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on whether you run Google Ads: if you do, the integrations you lose are worth more than $108.

Migration — time & effort

Half an hour to be live: add the script, verify the first pageview, recreate your goals as events. The real work is what you keep. GA4 history does not import, so most people run both in parallel for a quarter and keep GA4 as the archive. If you are in the EU and remove GA4 entirely you can also remove the consent banner, which is usually the change users notice, since Plausible sets no cookies and stores no personal data. Self-hosting is possible under AGPL if you would rather run it yourself.