Amplitude review

A product analytics tool that kept absorbing other products

Amplitude started in 2012 as behavioural analytics and now sells itself as a digital analytics platform, a description it has been using since at least its own October 2023 press release. The analytics core is the same family as Mixpanel: named events, funnels, retention, cohorts and user journeys. What has been bolted on around it is the difference. Session replay, feature flags, web experimentation and A/B testing, a CDP-style audience and activation layer, in-product guides and surveys, and a layer of AI agents with MCP support on top of all of it. The guides and surveys came in with the acquisition of Command AI, formerly CommandBar, on 15 October 2024.

It is a public company, listed on Nasdaq as AMPL since a direct listing on 28 September 2021, with over 700 employees by its own count. That matters here mostly as a durability signal, and it cuts both ways: you are not betting on a side project, and you are also dealing with a company whose free tier exists to feed a sales conversation. The free plan is described by Amplitude as being for individuals and explorers getting started, and it genuinely does give you access across the platform rather than analytics alone, which is the honest point in its favour against Mixpanel's free tier.

Who gets more out of Amplitude than its analytics

• Product teams who would otherwise buy analytics, a feature flag tool and an experimentation tool separately
• Growth teams sending real volume, since 2 million events a month is the largest free allowance in this category
• Teams who want in-product guides or surveys attached to the same event data rather than in a fourth tool
• Anyone evaluating an event taxonomy, where the free plan is large enough to model a real product before committing

Two million events free, and no price published above it

Free is genuinely free forever: 2 million events a month with no credit card, plus 10,000 session replays a month, 2,000 AI feedback records, 500 active AI Visibility prompts, one-time cohort syncs, and limited access to Experiments, Guides and Surveys (as of July 2026). That is twice Mixpanel's free allowance on the same meter, and it is worth knowing because the industry still quotes Amplitude's free plan in monthly tracked users. Amplitude's own FAQ now explains why that is out of date: one tracked user can generate many events, so the free plan measures event volume instead. Its billing documentation has not caught up and still describes a 50,000 MTU free plan, which contradicts the pricing page. We follow the pricing page, because it is the newer of the two, and we flag the conflict rather than pick quietly.

Above Free the page goes quiet. Plus is listed as starting at $0 with pay-as-you-go billing, a credit card required at signup, scale up to 70 million events and 2-year data retention. Growth and Enterprise both say "Custom" against "Event based pricing", with 20,000 and 50,000 monthly session replays respectively and unlimited projects plus role-based access control at the top. No tier above Free publishes a dollar figure anywhere, and the bill estimator runs in the browser, so we have no rate to quote you and neither does anyone else reading the page. That is a real difference from Mixpanel, which publishes $0.28 per 1,000 events and a 20 million event ceiling in plain text, and it is the single most annoying thing about planning a move to Amplitude.

Three overages, a block, then deletion: the limits with teeth

• The overage policy is the harshest in this category. Exceed the monthly limit three times as a non-paying customer and Amplitude blocks the account, which means no charts and no dashboards, and if the overages continue without an upgrade Amplitude deletes the account six months after that block
• Administrative functions like the User API keep working while blocked, so compliance requests can still be served. Your analysis cannot
• Requests are throttled above 30 events per second for any single user or device, which shows up first in load testing and bulk imports
• Every plan, free included, caps a project at 2,000 event types, 2,000 event properties and 1,000 user properties. Past those, new values simply stop being indexed, and nothing announces it
• Free withholds custom events and formulas, behavioral cohorts, alerts and heatmaps, and the 2-year retention window is a Plus feature. Free-plan retention is not something we could verify first-party, so we are not quoting a figure
• Hidden, backfilled and inactive events all count towards your 2 million, which is how a historical import spends a month's allowance in one afternoon
• We could not confirm what happens to historical data if you downgrade, or whether any plan caps seats, so treat both as open questions

Start free, yes. Leave it unattended, no.

Amplitude's free plan is the biggest one in this category by event volume and the widest by product surface, and for a team that would otherwise pay for three tools it is a serious offer. The condition attached is unusual and worth taking literally: this is the only free plan on our list whose published policy ends with the account being deleted, so an abandoned Amplitude project that keeps ingesting events is not harmless. Watch the meter, or turn the tracking off properly when you stop using it. If you want the same job done with prices you can read on the page, Mixpanel publishes its rate, and PostHog publishes a rate per unit with no card and no deletion policy at all. Free Amplitude alternatives ranks the options, and the best free analytics tools covers the wider category.