Amplitude Analytics Pricing — is it too expensive for Startups?
An an Amplitude expert, one question I often get asked about is whether the tool is viable or too expensive for startups.
My answer in 95% of cases is that Amplitude is free, at least for a year or two, and after that you’ll likely be making the revenue required to justify a paid plan.
If you’re a pre-seed, seed funded, or bootstrapped startup, take a read through the guide below to understand which Amplitude plan might be best for you.
How to get Amplitude Analytics for free!
Amplitude has three really generous free options:
- the Scholarship plan
- the Starter plan
- the Tech for Black Founders plan
Let’s talk about what’s included in each.
The Amplitude Scholarship Plan
Conditions:
- less than $5m funding
- fewer than 20 people
What you get:
- Amplitude Growth Plan for free for 1 year
- Up to 20 million monthly events
The Scholarship plan gives you the chance to try out the full power of Amplitude for free — with 1 year of access to the Growth plan.
The Amplitude Starter Plan
Conditions:
- Maximum 10 million monthly events
What you get:
- The core Amplitude features
If you’ve already used up your 1 year of scholarship, or don’t fit the criteria (unlikely), then you can use the Starter plan for free. The starter plan includes a limited set of features but it is still enough to answer the majority of analysis questions. See the FAQ below for the differences to the other plans.
The Tech for Black Founders Plan
This will probably only be relevant to 1% of readers, and that’s exactly why Amplitude are offering this plan.
Conditions:
- a black co-founder
- US based
- less than $30m funding
- fewer than 150 people
What you get:
- Amplitude Growth Plan for free
- Up to 50 million monthly events
FAQ about the Free Plans
Q: What are the main differences between the Scholarship, Growth, and Starter Plan?
The feature sets in Scholarship and Growth are the same, just the Scholarship is limited by event volume (generous) and time (1 year).
The Starter plan has limited chart types, doesn’t include cohorts and notebooks, and has the 10 million monthly event volume threshold.
Q: When will my product exceed the Starter event limit?
When you will exceed the 10M monthly event volume depends basically on 2 things: how many active users you have, and what tracking events you have.
What I typically see is that B2B products don’t hit the event volume before Series A, because they have relatively few active users for the equivalent revenue of a B2C product at that stage.
With B2C products, you might get close to the event volume after a couple of years of using Amplitude and very successfully growing your user base, especially if you track user actions with quite a lot of detail.
Q: Is it worth waiting before starting the Scholarship Plan?
Generally no. You might get some key insights now that help you make a step-change to your product (e.g. by using the Compass chart or the Cohorts feature). If after a year you have to downgrade to Starter, it’s not a disaster.
The Amplitude Growth Plan
The Growth Plan is like the Scholarship plan, but you pay based on your event volume and feature set.
Typically companies upgrade when they exceed the event volume of the Starter plan, or they really want access to some of the powerful features of the growth plan.
Key features that might make you want to upgrade:
- Cohorts: without cohorts, it can be difficult to build custom segments in Amplitude, and therefore hard to make deepdives into your user behaviour.
- Chart Types: often I see that companies could really benefit from the Compass chart, which allows you to examine correlation between user actions and conversion or retention.
- Advanced Govern: if you need to edit, clean, or otherwise manipulate your data, Amplitude has built features for that.
Comparing Amplitude Pricing vs Mixpanel, Heap, GA …
Mixpanel offers equivalent plans, with a Startup plan similar to scholarship. The threshold on the Mixpanel free plan is based on Monthly Tracked Users (100k) rather than event volume so it’s tricky to compare. The pricing on the Growth plan is progressive based on Monthly Tracked Users.
The Heap free plan includes up to 10k monthly sessions, which is again hard to compare and depends on your business model. Heap utilises auto-track technology, so that and other features are probably the bigger determining factor than price as to whether you prefer the tool over Amplitude.
Google Analytics (GA) is free but the data will be sampled above a certain event volume. If you want unsampled data the paid plan is GA360 and is approximately $100k a year. GA is becoming more similar to Amplitude, but is still quite different for now.
Conclusion
I believe the majority of my readers will enjoy using the Amplitude Scholarship or Starter plan for free! If you are thinking about that vs another tool or the Growth plan, let me know if you need help with the evaluation.
Want to get the most of our your Plan?
More than the cost of the tool, the most determining factor for how much value you get out of Amplitude is how you use it!
If you want to make the most of your Amplitude implementation I can help you. Feel free to get in touch.
