A common question among users of the GA4 BigQuery export is – how much will it cost? Whilst there are numerous factors that can influence costs, this BigQuery cost calculator offers an initial estimate to help you gauge prospective expenses.
About the calculator
This calculator is designed to give you an estimate of potential storage costs associated with the GA4 BigQuery export, based on the average number of events collected each day. We assume that 1 GB would be equal to approximately 1.2M events, a number drawn from an average across various datasets. For further information on the factors that might influence your expenses, please see the detailed section below.
The results generated by this calculator are for information purposes only. We strongly recommend confirming the actual costs through Google Cloud Platform (GCP) after you have activated the GA4 integration and begun collecting data.
Want to start exploring the GA4 BigQuery export yourself? Check out this tutorial for a step-by-step guide to enabling the BigQuery integration in your GA4 property.
What influences storage costs?
Understanding the costs associated with cloud services like BigQuery can be complex, but it’s important to have peace of mind that you are not racking up a huge bill.
When using BigQuery with GA4 there are three main types of costs that you could incur: storage, compute, and ingestion. This calculator focuses on providing you with an estimated cost of storage, which will be a key component of your overall BigQuery expenditure.
The cost you pay for storage will depend on the amount of data, the duration it is stored for, and the location where it is stored. The first 10 GB stored each month is free, so many smaller sites may never pay anything at all.
For the US (us) and Europe (eu) regions any data above 10 GB is billed at $0.02 per GB per month for active storage (any table modified in the past 90 days) or $0.01 per GB per month for long-term storage (any table not modified for over 90 days). Other regions may have slightly different pricing, e.g. for the London (europe-west2) region the price is $0.023 per GB per month for active and $0.016 per GB per month for long-term storage. You can refer to this page for the current pricing per region.
How much data you store in BigQuery will depend on the number of events being collected by your GA4 property and the amount of data collected with those events. If you are sending lots of event parameters with each event, or collecting e-commerce events with lots of items in each one, then your tables will be much bigger than a site with just the basics implemented.
Google estimates 1 GB equates to approximately 600K events but across different properties I have seen this ranges from 800K to 1.6M. This calculator utilises an average of 1.2M events per GB to estimate storage size.