Amplitude is a good product analytics platform that provides powerful visualization and easy audience and event segmentation. But it’s expensive — particularly as you scale and the number of events you need to track grows.
In this guide, we provide a full breakdown of Amplitude analytics pricing, looking at insights from customers and the costs that aren’t immediately obvious. We also look at a more affordable alternative that allows you to collect data from across channels without losing money on event-based pricing or having to pay for reverse-ETL tools.
Why Do Teams Choose Amplitude?
Amplitude is a product analytics platform that is well known for its user journey visualization features. You can use it to understand the user journey, track event sequences, build reports, and drill down on specific data, thus providing your team the information to create actionable insights to improve metrics like customer engagement and retention.
Teams also use Amplitude because it offers granular segmentation features. You can split your audience into groups based on their behaviors and profiles or segment events to optimize user flows.
Amplitude Pricing Model Breakdown
Amplitude organizes its pricing based on two factors – Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs) and event volume. This means that the more you grow and the more insights you need to acquire, the more you pay.
Amplitude Free Plan
Amplitude’s free plan makes it possible for you to track basic analytics, but you only get 1,000 sessions to track events per month and 50K monthly tracked users. It includes:
- Segmentation, funnels, session analysis, and retention analysis
- User journey visualization
- Starter templates
- Qualitative insights
- Replay share, search, and data masking
- Integrations with tools such as Slack and Notion
- Dashboard updates
- Data tables and campaign reporting to one channel
- One month’s access to session replays
- User identity resolution
- Unlimited sources & destinations
- Developer SDKs and APIs
- Warehouse integrations
- One-time audience sync
- 500K real-time event streaming sessions per month
- User privacy APIs
- Built-in privacy and compliance
- Data tracking plans
- AI data assistant
- Retroactive data transformation
- One branch for tracking plans
- 10 saved charts
- One space for team collaboration
- Five analysis projects
- One year of data access
- Community support
Amplitude Plus Plan Pricing
The Plus plan includes all of the above plus:
- 10,000 monthly sessions and 300K monthly tracked users
- Five behavioral cohorts
- Custom events and formulas
- User lookup ability
- Limited access to contextual analysis
- One month’s access to session replays
- Five sessions of audience targeting
- Automated audience sync
- Five million real-time event streaming sessions per month
- Observability for data monitoring
- Unlimited saved charts
- Three spaces for team collaboration
- Two years of data access
- Online customer support
Price: $49/month
Amplitude Growth Plan Pricing
Amplitude Growth pricing provides everything from the Plus plan as well as:
-
A custom number of monthly sessions and monthly tracked users decided in a sales call
- Advanced behavioral analysis charts such as personas and engagement
- Saved metrics to track KPIs
- Analysis of behaviors that lead to conversion or drop-off
- Cart analysis
- Forecasting and anomaly detection
- Root-cause analysis
- Monitoring & alerts
- Three month’s access to session replays
- Full access to audience targeting
- Real-time audience sync
- Unlimited real-time event streaming sessions
- Computations
- Unlimited branches for tracking plans
- Unlimited spaces for team collaboration
- 50 analysis projects
- Unlimited data access
- SSO & project-level permissions
- Full customer support
Price: The Growth Plan comes with custom pricing after you have a discovery call with the team, but users report it can range from $22,400 to $254,100 annually.
Amplitude Enterprise Pricing
Amplitude’s Enterprise plan includes everything mentioned so far plus:
-
A custom number of monthly sessions and monthly tracked users decided in a sales call
- Cross-product analysis
- Group behavior analysis
- Organization of analysis content
- Cross product replays
- Three month’s access to session replays
- Custom predictive audiences
- Personalized recommendations
- Access to user profile API
- Extra data controls such as derived properties
- Access to taxonomy API
- 200 analysis projects
- Unlimited data access
- Advanced permissions & SCIM
- Assigned account manager
Price: Amplitude Enterprise Pricing comes with custom pricing after you have a discovery call with the team.
The Real Cost of Amplitude
If you want the benefits of the full suite of analytics that Amplitude offers, you will have to pay for an Enterprise-level plan. And that means you’ll immediately be paying higher than you would with some Amplitude alternatives. However, the issue with Amplitude’s pricing goes deeper than this.
Amplitude’s pricing model is based on 2 factors – the number of monthly tracked users or MTUs and the number of events tracked. Their pricing page has a calculator that displays how they calculate their pricing, showing that the cost per MTU actually decreases as you grow. But this is not the full picture. While MTU-based pricing may appear affordable on the surface, some overages get added based on event volume – events include everything, right from button clicks to scrolls to cart abandonments. Event-based pricing can result in very high overage charges.
For instance, 50k monthly tracked events might seem like a lot, but as you scale, you could hit this within just a month. Say you’re running an e-commerce platform, you could reach this number just by measuring onboarding steps and cart abandonment for under 2000 users. Besides, as you grow, a chunk of these events will become obsolete, where they will no longer be used in analytics but you’ll still pay for each one.
The second big challenge is that event-based pricing is unpredictable. If your platform experiences a sudden spike in user activity due to a special event or promotion, you might incur significantly higher costs for the entire month, even though the surge occurred in just one day. It’s hard to budget to ensure a good return on investment.
As a vertically integrated SaaS application, Amplitude is more expensive compared to a warehouse-native platform. This means:
- You miss out on the benefits of cheap storage in the cloud and the flexible, pay-as-you-go computing power of modern cloud data warehouses. You have to limit the amount of data you collect upfront, which means you can’t easily access more data later, if you need it for analysis.
- To get a complete view of user behavior by using data from outside your product, you need to pay for reverse ETL tools that move data back into your system and manage those processes. Plus, you’ll spend a lot of time fixing differences between the data in Amplitude and your BI/SQL tool that works with your data warehouse.
A more affordable alternative to Amplitude
If you’re looking for a solution that allows you to collect cross-channel insights at a rate that scales with your business, look to NetSpring.
NetSpring’s affordability rests on its warehouse-native nature, which provides a few advantages. In a data warehouse-native platform, you can store data at the lowest fidelity, because cloud-based object storage is relatively inexpensive. Secondly, in contrast to Amplitude, NetSpring can offer the true benefit of the elasticity of a data warehouse. This elasticity ensures that you do not have to pay for unused resources. For example, if your data analytics workload fluctuates, NetSpring can optimize costs accordingly. Amplitude, on the other hand, will cost you for the events you set up at their peak capacity, regardless of actual usage. Lastly, in traditional tools like Amplitude, there can be significant costs associated with building and managing ETL and reserve ETL pipelines to/from data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks.
Compared to Amplitude pricing, you also keep costs down because our plans are not event-based. Starting at just $49/month/seat with a 14-day free trial, they’re designed to be affordable as you scale.
You can still get all of the templated reports offered by Amplitude e.g. funnel, path, cohorts etc. But you can go much further with ad hoc exploratory analysis to answer any question, forking off from the templates analysis. So you get more advanced analytical capabilities at a lower cost.
For an even more detailed breakdown, check out our comparison with Amplitude. Alternatively, jump straight in and book a 14-day risk-free trial to see how NetSpring could support you as you grow your product.
