Rudger de Groot of Mintminds shared how The Social Hub slashed its experimentation costs with GrowthBook. By driving down the incremental cost per experiment as close as possible to zero, companies can run as many experiments on as much traffic as they want.
The best experimentation programs scale cost-efficiently, so they can run more experiments, learn faster, and ship smarter. But a hidden cost killer is BigQuery query inefficiency. The more you test, the more you pay. What if there were a way to test more and pay less?
In this case study, we’ll show you how Mintminds cut experimentation costs for The Social Hub using GrowthBook with BigQuery optimizations from GA4Dataform by Superform Labs. The setup slashed BigQuery costs by 81.8% while improving data refresh speeds and monitoring capabilities. Here's how they did it.
A Scaling Advantage Built into the Cost Structure
The mission at Mintminds is simple: build high-quality experiments with reliable data and analysis. GrowthBook’s pricing model allows for a setup where the more you test, the lower your per-experiment cost. But to optimize costs, you need to understand where money actually flows. Let’s break down the pricing:
Fixed Costs (pricing, as of Nov 2025)
- $40/month per seat for GrowthBook Pro license
- Typical team size: 5 seats = $200/month
Variable Costs (GrowthBook Cloud):
- 2 million CDN requests included (≈ pageviews)
- 20 GB CDN bandwidth included
- Overage: $10 per million requests, $1 per GB bandwidth
Self-Hosting Alternative: You can eliminate CDN costs by self-hosting GrowthBook for $11-50/month (depending on your infrastructure choice).
How Experimentation Costs Compare
To understand how GrowthBook experimentation costs compare, Mintminds shares a real-world example from a client with 2.6 million unique users/month and running 5-7 experiments a month. In this example, they are running the GrowthBook JS SDK on Cloudflare pages, which means no limitations on the number of tested visitors for free. Yes, you read it right…for free!
The variable GrowthBook costs are:
- 6.6 million CDN requests: 6.6 – 2 (first 2 million are free) = 4.6 * $10 = $46
- 6 GB CDN Bandwidth usage: $ 0 (first 20GB is free)
- BigQuery usage cost estimation with daily updates: $300
Fixed GrowthBook Pro costs for a team of 5 members: 5 * $40 = $200
| Platform | Monthly Cost | Annual Cost | vs. GrowthBook Optimized |
|---|---|---|---|
| Convert.com Pro | $3,488 | $41,856 | 1,050% more expensive |
| VWO Pro | $4,308 | $51,696 | 1,320% more expensive |
| GrowthBook (Unoptimized) | $546 | $6,552 | 80% more expensive |
| GrowthBook (Optimized) | $303 | $3,640 | Baseline |
With BigQuery costs included, GrowthBook remains dramatically cheaper than traditional alternatives like Convert ($3,500/month) or VWO ($4,300/month) at comparable traffic levels. GrowthBook is already the smart financial choice. With optimization, it becomes unbeatable. Using GrowthBook cuts experimentation costs by 82% versus Convert.com Pro and 93% compared to VWO Pro.
An 82% BigQuery reduction transforms GrowthBook from “very affordable” to an offer you simply can’t refuse.
GA4 Structure Wastes BigQuery Resources
Regardless of hosting choice, BigQuery becomes your primary variable cost when using GA4 as your data source. For companies running active experimentation programs with daily updates, Mintminds finds that unoptimized BigQuery costs can easily reach $200 to $400/month.
The default GrowthBook BigQuery integration queries GA4’s standard events_* and events_intraday_* tables. These tables store event parameters in nested structures, forcing BigQuery to process far more data than necessary.
For example when you’re running experiments with:
- 5 metrics (1 goal + 1 secondary + 3 guardrails)
- 3 dimensions for segmentation
- Daily (or more frequent) data refreshes
BigQuery has to scan through nested arrays and repeated fields to extract the specific event parameters you need. You’re paying to process gigabytes of data when you only need megabytes of relevant information.
GrowthBook allows custom fact tables and metrics to select only relevant events and parameters. This helps, but optimizations plateau quickly because you’re still querying nested GA4 tables.
Enterprise customers get access to:
- Advanced fact table query optimization
- Data pipelines (significantly improved in GrowthBook 4.2)
But Pro license users need a different approach.
How to Use GA4Dataform's Flattened Datasets to Reduce Query Costs
At #CH2024 (the conference formerly known as Conversion Hotel), Rudger connected with Jules Stuifbergen from Superform Labs about this exact challenge. Jules introduced him to GA4Dataform, which offered an elegant solution.
What GA4Dataform Does: The Core Version (free!) creates a customized, flattened dataset optimized for the type of queries that GrowthBook uses.
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Fully flattened structure | No nested fields = dramatically faster queries |
| Smart partitioning and clustering | Restricting queries by date and event names will decrease the number of rows scanned |
| Smaller data footprint | Less data processed = lower BigQuery costs |
| Daily automated updates | Fresh data from GA4 events table is appended to the table, using incremental logic |
Key insight: Even though you’re creating a new dataset in BigQuery (which feeds from the generic GA4 table), the flattened structure makes it cheaper to generate AND cheaper to query than repeatedly querying GA4’s nested tables.
Bonus benefit: This same optimized dataset can be used for all your other BigQuery reports and dashboards, compounding the savings.
A Rigorous A/A Experiment to Test the Setup
Mindminds partnered with Laura Semeraro and the team at The Social Hub—a hybrid hospitality brand offering hotel rooms, co-living spaces, coworking facilities, and creative playgrounds across Europe—to validate this approach with real data.
Using GA4Dataform's flattened datasets didn't just reduce GrowthBook costs—it optimized all our BigQuery reports and dashboards.
Laura Semeraro, Digital Analyst at The Social Hub
Implementation Steps
1. GA4Dataform Setup – Laura installed GA4Dataform Core (free version). The custom event parameters from GrowthBook were added to the configuration (experiment ID and variation ID). With the daily schedule enabled, GA4Dataform automatically updates the flat events table incrementally.
2. GrowthBook Configuration – Mintminds created a new assignment query (for counting experiment visitors). Built fact tables for key conversion events: Add-to-cart and purchase events.
3. A/A Test Design – They ran two identical experiments simultaneously:
Configuration:
- Same targeting rules
- Same 5 metrics (1 goal, 1 secondary, 3 guardrails)
- Same 3 dimensions
The Only Difference:
Experiment A: Default GrowthBook queries (nested GA4 tables)
Experiment B: Optimized queries (flattened GA4Dataform dataset)
4. Measurement – GrowthBook usage is automatically labelled in BigQuery, allowing us to track:
- BigQuery costs from Experiment A (old approach)
- BigQuery costs from Experiment B (new approach)
- BigQuery costs for daily dataset updates
Test duration: 1 week
This gave us an objective, apples-to-apples comparison.
The Social Hub Reduced BigQuery Costs by 82%
When the results came in, Rudger and his team had to verify the numbers multiple times to ensure accuracy: a whopping 81.8% cost reduction and a massive query speed improvement, too.
By using the GA4Dataform flattened dataset instead of the default GA4 nested tables, they had reduced BigQuery data processing by more than four-fifths.
| Benefit | Impact |
|---|---|
| Update experiment results more frequently | Better SRM and MDE monitoring without budget concerns |
| Run updates faster | Flattened queries execute in a fraction of the time |
| Scale experiment volume | The "more you test, less you pay" promise becomes reality |
| Optimize other analytics | Use the same flattened dataset for all BigQuery dashboards |
The compounding effect: Lower per-experiment costs + faster refresh rates = exponentially better experimentation program ROI.
Enterprise Experimentation at a Fraction of the Cost
This case study demonstrates how to achieve exceptional BigQuery efficiency with GrowthBook. By combining GrowthBook Pro, GA4Dataform Core and Strategic BigQuery optimization, you can build a cost-effective, high-performance experimentation stack that rivals Enterprise setups—at a fraction of the price. The cost reduction Mintminds achieved with The Social Hub isn’t an outlier. It’s the new baseline for GrowthBook implementations.
About Our Partners
Mintminds is a Certified GrowthBook partner based in the Netherlands. Founded by Rudger de Groot, the team assists companies worldwide with hyper-scaling experimentation using GrowthBook.
The Social Hub is a European hospitality brand that blends traditional hotel stays with a vibrant, community-focused experience. Its unique hybrid model combines premium design-led short and long-stay hotel rooms with student accommodation, coworking spaces, meeting and event facilities, restaurants and bars, 24-hour gyms, and open-to-the-public spaces like rooftops, parks, and cultural venues.
