What's the relationship between a project and an audit?

In short: you pay for projects, you audit without limits. This is the foundation of the GA4audit model and the most common source of pleasant surprise for new users - so let's unpack it properly.

Two concepts worth keeping apart

A project is the GA4 property you monitor - your "slot" within a plan (see: What is a project?). Projects are countable, and their count is what defines the plans.

An audit is a single examination of that property - a snapshot of its state at a specific moment. Every audit runs through the full set of checkpoints available on your plan (28 on Free, all 62 on paid plans), saves itself into the project's history and updates the Quality score.

An analogy: the project is the patient's medical record; an audit is a single examination. You open the record once; you run examinations as often as the patient's condition requires - and every result lands in the same record, so the treatment progress stays visible.

Why audits are unlimited

A GA4 configuration audit only makes sense if it leads to fixes - and fixes require verification. The typical, healthy workflow looks like this:

1.Audit - you get a list of errors and warnings ordered by impact on data quality.

2.Implement fixes - you work through the Action plan, checking off completed tasks.

3.Rescan - a repeat scan verifies whether the fixes actually work and updates the Quality score. You'll see the change versus the previous scan in the project history (the score delta), and new problems land at the top of the Action plan.

4.Repeat - back to step 2 until the score is where you want it.

5.Recurring check-ups - GA4 configurations decay over time (deployments, site changes, GTM updates), so it pays to come back regularly, e.g. after every major release.

If every scan carried a price tag, step 3 would become a barrier - and step 3 is where the real value is created. That's why in GA4audit, fix verification is included in the price of the project.

The fair use principle

"Unlimited" means normal usage: auditing and verifying fixes as often as your work requires - even several times a day during an intense implementation sprint. We only apply a soft rate limit that protects the infrastructure from automated abuse (e.g. scans triggered by a script every minute). In practice, no one working manually will ever come close to it. Details: Fair Usage Policy - what does "unlimited audits" mean?

What happens when I hit the project limit

This applies to paid plans, where the limit refers to the number of projects. Nothing bad - you simply can't add another GA4 property until you free up a slot or upgrade. Everything you already have keeps working:

•existing projects can still be audited without restriction - a rescan is never blocked by the project limit,

•when you try to add a new project, the wizard shows a limit notice and suggests a higher plan,

•alternatively, you can delete a project you no longer need - the freed slot is available right away.

The Free plan vs paid plans

The "pay for projects, audit without limits" model works in full on the paid plans. The Free plan is a single taste: it includes one audit (1 project) across 28 of the 62 checkpoints. On Free, both your first audit and any attempt to rescan count toward that one audit - rescans and further audits unlock from the Pro plan onward. On paid plans the limit refers to the number of projects, and re-auditing an existing project doesn't use up a slot.

Related articles:

•How do rescans and fix verification work?

•I fixed an error - why do I still see it in the report?

•How do the plans differ?