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Updates to our Free Starter Plan

  • 24 January 2023
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Update as of January 27: We appreciate all the feedback regarding our move to an MTU-based free plan. We recognize that for some of you, this change may not fit well with your business and has been frustrating to navigate. We are already working directly with many of you to find a solution and will provide an update soon. In the meantime, if you haven’t reached out to our account teams (https://amplitude.com/sales-contact) please do so we can explore options with you.

 

We're excited to share a few updates to our Free Starter plan. We've listened to our customers and learned that now, more than ever, it is crucial for teams to understand what levers they can pull for growth. We've updated our Starter Plan to make it easy for product, data, and marketing teams to understand what their customers are doing and use those insights to drive action and growth. Here's a summary of the updates:

 

Introducing Monthly Tracked Users

As part of today’s update, we’re moving to a monthly tracked user ( MTU ) model that allows you to track usage based on the number of users who perform a tracked event each month. Our MTU-based model means it’s now easier to estimate monthly user growth as your product grows, and you spend less time worrying about event volume overages!

 

Granting access to more advanced collaboration tools and behavioral charts We continue to believe that analytics is a team sport. Products today are built by empowered, cross-functional teams, and they should have access to the best possible collaboration tools to share their insights. 

 

New collaboration and storytelling tools added to our Starter Plan include: 

  • Share your insights with your team with public links

  • Stay on top of your insights with email reports (coming soon)

  • Collaborate with teammates and share the context behind your insights with Notebooks

  • Uncover the paths your users take on their way to conversion with Pathfinder 

  • Determine how power users navigate your product with Pathfinder Users

 

We're committed to making it easier than ever before for new users to get up and running in Amplitude. As part of this update, we will be transferring a handful of advanced features to our paid plans, allowing us to focus on providing a robust set of core features in our Starter plan. See our list of resources at the bottom of this post to learn how to use the new features. 

 

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of what is changing in our Starter Plan. To see the full list of features available in Starter, go here.

 

 

Feature

Old Starter

New Starter Plan 

Pricing

10MM events monthly

100K Monthly Tracked Users

Core Analytics

Event Segmentation

Funnel Analysis

Retention Analysis

User Timelines

User Sessions

Stickiness

Lifecycle

 

Data Tables

 

Revenue LTV

 

Advanced Behavioral Analysis

Pathfinder

 

Pathfinder Users

 

Collaboration & Storytelling

Dashboards

Team spaces

Collaboration integrations

Annotations

Starter Templates

Notebooks

 

Public Links

 

Email Reports

 

Limited

 

Starter customers will have access to the expanded Advanced Behavioral Analytics and Collaboration features starting today. The other changes discussed in this post, including Free Starter customers moving to 100K MTUs, will go into effect on May 1, 2023. 

 

Feel free to comment below with any questions and our Support team will chime in to help.

 

 

Related Academy Resources:

 

Related Help Articles:


47 replies

@Jeremie Gluckman We’re in the same boat as lots of other folks, where we have many users but few events. Totally get the need to move people off the free account and to paid in these situations (honestly the free account has been generous), but pricing is opaque and in the past, I haven’t received a response when asking for more information. You’ve linked to the pricing page several times but as you know there aren’t any prices there. As a small company, we’re willing to pay but the increase needs to be incremental, not thousands / month. Is there any information I can find about what it would cost to increase MTUs? Or are companies like ours best to start migrating elsewhere? (I have very little interest in doing so, I love Amplitude!). Thanks for the help.

It’s disappotinting a bit.

Lifecycle reports were very demonstrative for us. This is not a problem to implement our own self-hosted lifecycly reports (thanks for free data export!), but will take some work… this looks like to be easy (simple data extraction, simple rendering) and I do not understand why to remove it from free plan.

100K users is also too low ceiling, especially if this is about Device IDs and not just about User IDs.

Both these items above could be not a problem if Amplitude had a transparency pricing where our startup could buy more MTU or some report for affordable price. But as I see on Quora the pricing starts from $1000/mo.. This is not even close to the price we can afford.

If MTU includes Device IDs, looks like we need to fully migrate to some own self-hosted solution with losing some useful features for the first time.

I was happy to be with great Amplitude service, but every good things have an end.

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@Jeremie Gluckman We’re in the same boat as lots of other folks, where we have many users but few events. Totally get the need to move people off the free account and to paid in these situations (honestly the free account has been generous), but pricing is opaque and in the past, I haven’t received a response when asking for more information. You’ve linked to the pricing page several times but as you know there aren’t any prices there. As a small company, we’re willing to pay but the increase needs to be incremental, not thousands / month. Is there any information I can find about what it would cost to increase MTUs? Or are companies like ours best to start migrating elsewhere? (I have very little interest in doing so, I love Amplitude!). Thanks for the help.

Thank you for posting here @Matt H  Your comment is a helpful overview of the tough spot this change puts you in. Please keep me posted if you need help getting in touch with the team. We’re so glad you love Amplitude and are committed to your continued success! 🙏

I'm upset about the changes. Could you tell, will revenue events be available in the New Starter Plan?

For me, this means going from using 30-40% of the free tier into having to upgrade to the growth plan. Base price would be $30k/year, but I did get an offer for $15k/year which would include the same number of events that is currently included in the free tier. I would likely have stayed once I hit the event limits, but when a change is made like this, and I had to reach out to a sales rep to get the new price, it isn’t strange that I started looking into other options. 

Interestingly enough. MixPanel is moving in the opposite direction. Fully transparent pricing (no discounts) and event based pricing. I did get a quote from them and I would be looking at $3500 / years for my current usage. Amplitude would be around 5-10x more expensive depending on how well my sales call would go. 

The funny thing is that I originally chose Amplitude since I back then could not afford Mixpanels MTU based pricing (had 20k MTU at the time and this meant I had to “contact sales”). I don’t mind paying for software, but I am not sure I am able to motivate paying 5-10x more than Mixpanel.

You just lost a customer. 

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I'm upset about the changes. Could you tell, will revenue events be available in the New Starter Plan?

Thanks for this question @darya.ershova. It’s unfortunate to learn that you’re having a challenging time. All details about the changes are documented in our Help Center here, and I’m linking to our definition of events here. Let me know if this helps and I can connect with the team if needed. 

I'm upset about the changes. Could you tell, will revenue events be available in the New Starter Plan?

Thanks for this question @darya.ershova. It’s unfortunate to learn that you’re having a challenging time. All details about the changes are documented in our Help Center here, and I’m linking to our definition of events here. Let me know if this helps and I can connect with the team if needed. 

I mean Revenue Events as a type. I see that you’re going to limit the use of Revenue LTV feature, so I’m asking. 

Very very very sad news. Amplitude is a fantastic tool, but the direction it evolving is sad. New rules may force us to switch to other tools. 

When approaching MTU limits, will it be a LIFO or FIFO model? In other words, if the 100k limit is reached, will Amplitude stop reporting on existing users or new users? And what happens in the product if the limit is exceeded, will users still have access to historical data?

BTW, I do appreciate the upfront communication about the change.

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Very very very sad news. Amplitude is a fantastic tool, but the direction it evolving is sad. New rules may force us to switch to other tools. 

Thanks for the feedback. The team recognizes that for some of you, this change may not fit well with your business and has been frustrating to navigate. If you haven’t reached out to our account teams (sales@amplitude.com) please do so we can explore options with you.

 

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When approaching MTU limits, will it be a LIFO or FIFO model? In other words, if the 100k limit is reached, will Amplitude stop reporting on existing users or new users? And what happens in the product if the limit is exceeded, will users still have access to historical data?

BTW, I do appreciate the upfront communication about the change.

Great question @Phil I’ve also flagged your question to the team in case I’m missing something. We’ll alert you over email and in-product when you’re getting close to your MTU limit for the month so you can take steps to avoid exceeding it. And yes! The Amplitude SDK will still work – we'll continue to collect data.

Wow, the 100k MTU limit will totally destroy any reasonable use of Amplitude for us. We were getting some mileage out of it with 10 million events, but 100k MTUs is pretty bad. I don’t expect we will be able to continue using Amplitude going forward.

When approaching MTU limits, will it be a LIFO or FIFO model? In other words, if the 100k limit is reached, will Amplitude stop reporting on existing users or new users? And what happens in the product if the limit is exceeded, will users still have access to historical data?

BTW, I do appreciate the upfront communication about the change.

Great question @Phil I’ve also flagged your question to the team in case I’m missing something. We’ll alert you over email and in-product when you’re getting close to your MTU limit for the month so you can take steps to avoid exceeding it. And yes! The Amplitude SDK will still work – we'll continue to collect data.

Hey @Jeremie Gluckman, thanks for the quick reply. But I’m still not sure what happens in the product after you cross the MTU limit. I get that there will be an alert .. but assume I do nothing, then what happens?

@Jeremie Gluckman FIY: I did reach out to sales@amplitude.com as per your recommendation on Jan 28. No reply so far... not even an automated one 😕 Your competitors have been a lot more responsive when reaching out. 

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If we stay on the free starter plan, will our existing Data Tables and LTV charts stop working on May 1st or will we simply not be able to make additional charts?

This is a great question @tommy. You will no longer have access to Data Tables after May 1st. 

As part of this update, we have transferred a handful of advanced features to our paid plans. This can help your users focus on the core features of Amplitude and onboard more successfully.

You can find the latest details about the changes to Data Tables and our plans in the help center

 

When you say we will not have access to data tables after May 1st, I assume we won’t be able to click the button to create a new data table. My question is if we’ll be able to load a data table that already exists on a dashboard?

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@Jeremie Gluckman FIY: I did reach out to sales@amplitude.com as per your recommendation on Jan 28. No reply so far... not even an automated one 😕 Your competitors have been a lot more responsive when reaching out. 

Thanks for letting me know @Simon Persson. I’ll connect with the team to figure out what’s going on. We appreciate your flexibility!

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If we stay on the free starter plan, will our existing Data Tables and LTV charts stop working on May 1st or will we simply not be able to make additional charts?

This is a great question @tommy. You will no longer have access to Data Tables after May 1st. 

As part of this update, we have transferred a handful of advanced features to our paid plans. This can help your users focus on the core features of Amplitude and onboard more successfully.

You can find the latest details about the changes to Data Tables and our plans in the help center

 

When you say we will not have access to data tables after May 1st, I assume we won’t be able to click the button to create a new data table. My question is if we’ll be able to load a data table that already exists on a dashboard?

Thank you @tommy. Let me triple check and get back to you. 

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@Jeremie Gluckman FIY: I did reach out to sales@amplitude.com as per your recommendation on Jan 28. No reply so far... not even an automated one 😕 Your competitors have been a lot more responsive when reaching out. 

Thanks for letting me know @Simon Persson. I’ll connect with the team to figure out what’s going on. We appreciate your flexibility!

Update: You’ll head back today!

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If we stay on the free starter plan, will our existing Data Tables and LTV charts stop working on May 1st or will we simply not be able to make additional charts?

This is a great question @tommy. You will no longer have access to Data Tables after May 1st. 

As part of this update, we have transferred a handful of advanced features to our paid plans. This can help your users focus on the core features of Amplitude and onboard more successfully.

You can find the latest details about the changes to Data Tables and our plans in the help center

 

When you say we will not have access to data tables after May 1st, I assume we won’t be able to click the button to create a new data table. My question is if we’ll be able to load a data table that already exists on a dashboard?

Thank you @tommy. Let me triple check and get back to you. 

@tommy Here’s the definitive answer: After May 1st you will no longer be able to load a data table that already exists on a dashboard. 

Hi Jeremie - this is also not going to work for us either. I think that you might rather decrease the total number of events or increase the MTUs. But, to be honest, what’s worst of all is that you’re not giving enough time for us to migrate to another provider.

Hi Jeremie - this is also not going to work for us either. I think that you might rather decrease the total number of events or increase the MTUs. But, to be honest, what’s worst of all is that you’re not giving enough time for us to migrate to another provider.

I agree with you but there are other good free alternatives. I switched to Firebase and it took only 2-3 days.

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If we stay on the free starter plan, will our existing Data Tables and LTV charts stop working on May 1st or will we simply not be able to make additional charts?

This is a great question @tommy. You will no longer have access to Data Tables after May 1st. 

As part of this update, we have transferred a handful of advanced features to our paid plans. This can help your users focus on the core features of Amplitude and onboard more successfully.

You can find the latest details about the changes to Data Tables and our plans in the help center

 

Data Tables are the most “basic” reporting feature (in my onionin) in Analytics.
It’s an essential playground when setting up an Amplitude account to easy validate data and see if it’s collected as expected. 
Removing this from the free plan can only be seen as “nudging” or pushing users to a pay-plan.
Fair enough that paying customers are the end goal of a free plan, but not including a simple Data Table in Analytics is making it limited. 

And BTW; Your Data Table chart, is already limited. As example there are no visualization option.
I assume your UX-team have already taking a look at the way Adobe Analytics Workspace “Freeform Table” works. Every single data-cell can be illustrated by simply clicking it. I hope you will get inspired for future developement. 

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