Give Your Startup the Gift of Free Analytics
How not to be a software Scrooge this season.
Not everyone is in the giving spirit this holiday season: Recently, the analytics point solution Mixpanel quietly downgraded its free analytics plan. As of December, their free event limit has been reduced by 95% from a generous 20 million events to a much thriftier 1 million. While we empathize with the affected users, we understand why Mixpanel might have made this decision.
At Amplitude, we know that providing a generous free plan can be costly for most SaaS businesses. But we choose to offer a meaningful slice of our platform for free to show our commitment to long-term partnerships over short term revenue.
If Mixpanel’s reduction feels like a lump of coal in your stocking, Amplitude’s Starter plan might be the holiday miracle you’ve been looking for. We now provide the most generous analytics limit on the market—and we also give you four more free products: feature flags, web experiments, CDP, and session replay.
Why we give away 5 products for free
Before sharing how we stack up against the competition, let’s talk about the philosophy behind our free plan. While we’re a public company now, we began as a YC startup and strive to keep that entrepreneurial spirit. We want to grow alongside our startup customers as they use Amplitude to become leading enterprises, and we’ve seen our customers like Calm and BeReal do just that.
We also firmly believe that tools like analytics and experiment are better when used together. And when you’re going from 0 to 1, you want to be focused on building your own product, not cobbling together a data stack from different point solutions.
If you’re looking for an alternative to Mixpanel, or just want to get the best value in your analytics stack, Amplitude is a great place to start your journey. And don’t just take our word for it—we checked the numbers across our competitors’ free plans (Mixpanel, Heap, Statsig, Posthog) so you can see for yourself.
Free Analytics
| Amplitude | Mixpanel | Heap | Statsig | Posthog |
|
50,000 MTUs (~5M events/month) |
1M events/month |
10k sessions/month ~500 MTUs assuming 20 sessions/MTU |
2M events/month | 1M events/month |
🎄 Pro Tip: You might be wondering why we’re the only ones to cap our free plan using MTUs (monthly transacting users) rather than events. This lets us closely tie how much we charge to the value we actually generate for our customers.
Fast-growing teams don’t (and shouldn’t!) have an exact sense of how many events they need from month to month. Tying pricing to monthly user growth makes much more sense for most startups. To get an apples-to-apples equivalent of how many events 50K MTUs will cover, we use an estimate of 100 events/MTU, which is where most of our startup customers will max out.
Free Session Replay
| Amplitude | Mixpanel | Heap | Statsig | Posthog |
| 1K sessions/month |
10K sessions/month |
14-day trial only |
50K sessions/month | 5K sessions/month |
☃️ Pro Tip: Session replay powered by product analytics combines high level metrics with a user-level view of the product experience, helping startup teams find product market fit faster. For teams that want even more sessions, our Plus plan offers a limit of 10K sessions/month.
Free Feature Flags
| Amplitude | Mixpanel | Heap | Statsig | Posthog |
| Unlimited |
N/A |
N/A |
Unlimited |
First 1M requests |
🌟 Pro Tip: Amplitude’s feature flags let you roll out new capabilities in a controlled way while monitoring their impact with session replay and product analytics.
Free Web Experimentation
| Amplitude | Mixpanel | Heap | Statsig | Posthog |
|
50,000 impressions |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A (In beta) |
🎁 Pro Tip: Self-service A/B testing paired with analytics helps identify opportunities to optimize your web experience and boost conversions. With our WYSIWYG editor, marketers can start experimenting with no coding experience necessary.
Free Activation (CDP)
| Amplitude | Mixpanel | Heap | Statsig | Posthog |
|
Unlimited one-time syncs 500K real time events streamed/month |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
N/A |
🎅 Pro Tip: Amplitude is one of the most common destinations for CDPs, so we built our own CDP with 150+ connections to help teams avoid the tax of analyzing and storing your data in two different places.
All in One, and All for Free
If powering your product with a completely free analytics platform sounds good to you, we’ve made it easier than ever to begin getting value out of our starter plan.
The benefits for small teams don’t end there either. If your analytics needs increase as your product grows, then our Plus plan provides increased capabilities and usage limits starting at $49/month—no conversation with sales necessary. For very early teams or portfolio companies of our venture partners, we also offer an entire year of our Growth plan for free through our scholarship program.
Regardless of where you are in your startup journey, we want to work with you. So ditch the ghosts of analytics past this season, and come see the future we’re building at Amplitude!
Francis Wilson
Former Director, Competitive Strategy, Amplitude
Francis Wilson is a Former Director of Competitive Strategy at Amplitude. He is a true believer in the power of data to enable a better-informed world, having spent his career before Amplitude as both a practitioner and an investor in the data and analytics space. Before taking on his role in Competitive Strategy, Francis served as Chief of Staff to Amplitude’s CEO, Spenser Skates.
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