how analytics pricing works, and what each model costs you

The short version

• Per event pricing exists because events are what the vendor stores. The side effect is that you ration data before you know what you will need
• Per seat pricing taxes sharing the answer, so people stop asking for seats and share a login instead
• Per pageview prices your whole site when you only wanted to measure one path through it
• Google Analytics is free, permanently and genuinely. You pay in moves, in a consent-shaped hole in the sample, and in a tool built around a different question
• Tiny Funnel is $10 a month per active funnel today, because a funnel is one question. Ten dollars is small, but it is not nothing, and a reader paying zero deserves a reason

Analytics tools charge in four different shapes, and the one a vendor picks tells you what they think you are buying. It also predicts what you will end up doing about it, which is the part worth reading before you choose.

Take per event, which is how both Mixpanel and Amplitude meter today. An event is the thing the vendor stores, indexes and queries, so their cost curve and their billing unit are the same shape. That is a reasonable thing for a vendor to want.

The problem is what it does to you. When events cost money you start deciding which ones are worth recording, and you make that decision before you know which question you will want to ask. Three months later you go looking for something and it is not there, because past you was economising.

Every pricing model does something like this. Per seat produces a login that three people know the password to. Per pageview charges a content-heavy marketing site for traffic that never goes near the funnel. Free charges you in a currency that isn't money.

Here is what each model is really pricing, and where per funnel sits among them.

What each pricing model is actually charging you for

Every billing unit is a sentence about what the vendor thinks you are buying. Read the unit and you can predict the behaviour it will produce in you, usually within a quarter.

None of these is dishonest. Each one is a vendor charging for the thing that costs them money, or for the thing they think correlates with the value they deliver. The useful question isn't which model is fair. It is which one you can live with.

Free, with a platform attached

Google Analytics is free. Not a trial, not a starter tier, not free until you grow. It is free, it is already installed on most of the internet, and it has the only real integration with Google Ads and Search Console. Nothing in this article beats free, and any page that pretends otherwise is selling something.

What you pay instead is attention. The funnel you want lives inside a reporting tool, so you build the report, then find it again next month. That is why "we have Google Analytics and nobody opens it" is the most common sentence our reader says, and it is a criticism of the number of moves, never of the person making them. The longer version of that argument is why a tool that can answer anything is hard to use.

Two other costs are about measurement rather than convenience. It is cookie-based, so a visitor who declines the banner is either modelled or missing, and modelling is an estimate rather than a count. Its exploration reports also sample above volume limits, so the number you read may not be the number that happened.

That is a real trade and plenty of people make it happily. It is also why "free" belongs in the table rather than above it.

The volume models, and the data you did not record

Per event, per tracked user and per pageview are the same idea wearing three costumes: the bill follows how much of your reality the tool has to hold.

The shapes, checked on 2026-08-23 by opening each vendor's own pricing page:

• Mixpanel prices monthly events, with a free monthly allowance and named tiers above it
• Amplitude also prices monthly events, with a free allowance, and puts no charge on seats at all
• Plausible prices monthly pageviews, with team members included in the tier rather than charged separately, and a trial rather than a free plan

Prefer the shape to the figure when you compare these. Analytics pricing changes constantly, and a number you memorised last quarter is a bad guide to this one.

The pageview model deserves a fair hearing, because at low volume it is cheap and simple and the tools using it are good. The mismatch is only that it prices your whole site when the thing you wanted to measure is one path through it. A marketing blog that does well in search pays more to watch a signup flow that did not change.

The bill arrives attached to your best week

Volume pricing makes traffic expensive. A campaign lands, the site gets busy, and the invoice shows up wearing the same numbers as the best week you have had all quarter. That is uncomfortable, and it is the objection everybody raises first.

It is not the expensive part. The expensive part is quieter: you start rationing what you record. Somebody asks whether it is worth firing an event on the plan selector and the answer becomes a budget conversation, so the event does not get added. In April you want to know whether people who touched the plan selector converted better, and there is no data, and there is no way to get it retroactively.

The whole point of recording a funnel is that you do not have to predict what you will want to know. A model that makes you predict is charging you twice, once in money and once in the answers you will not have.

Per seat prices a tool nobody opens

Seat pricing assumes the value of an analytics tool scales with the number of people who log into it. In practice one or two people read the numbers, everybody else hears the summary in a meeting, and the seat count becomes a tax on sharing the answer.

You end up with one login and three people who know the password. Everybody has done it, everybody knows it is silly, and it happens because asking for another seat was made to feel like a purchase decision, so nobody asked.

The model also multiplies. Zoho Analytics prices users, data rows and read-only viewers as three separate levers (checked 2026-08-23), which is a coherent way to build a plan and also means "how much will this cost us" has three inputs and a spreadsheet.

Seats are not universal in analytics, to be fair to the category: Amplitude puts no seat charge on any plan. They turn up most where the tool is a dashboard-building product rather than a report, which tells you what those vendors think they are selling.

Where per funnel sits

A funnel is one question: where do these people come from, how far down do they get, and do they buy. You either have that question or you do not, which makes it a unit you can count without a calculator.

So Tiny Funnel is $10 a month per active funnel. One product with one path to purchase is one question and costs ten dollars. Add a course with a completely different flow and that is a second question, with its own steps and its own numbers, and it costs another ten. Stop caring about one of them and you pause it: it stops ingesting, stops billing, and keeps everything it already recorded.

The practical effect is that the bill never surprises you. It does not move when a campaign works, it does not move when somebody joins the team, and there is no threshold that turns ten dollars into a conversation with a salesperson. There is also nothing to upgrade to, because nothing is held back: every funnel gets the filters, the journeys, the step conditions and the change detection. A tool that answers one question does not need five ways of answering it, and what that costs is one number on the pricing card. The "tiny" in the name is that scope decision rather than a size boast, and this price is what the decision looks like on an invoice.

Now the straight part. Ten dollars is not nothing. Google Analytics is free and it is already on your site, so the honest reason to pay us is not price, it is the number of moves between a question and an answer. If reading a fall between two steps is not something you do often enough to care about, keep the free one. If it is, the method for reading that fall is the same work in either tool, and this is the one where the funnel is already drawn when you log in.

What today's price is, and what it is not

Everything above describes what Tiny Funnel charges today and why the unit fits the product. It is a description, not a prophecy.

Pricing follows the shape of what a product is, and products change. A much larger customer with governance requirements and a lot of people who need their own access is a different shape of thing from a founder with one signup flow, and it would be dishonest to promise now exactly how that will be priced later. What we can say is what is true today: one price, per active funnel, no seat count and no event budget, and pausing stops the billing without losing the history.

An analytics vendor promising something forever is usually promising it until the next funding round. What is worth judging is whether the unit matches the work, and whether the bill moves for reasons you would recognise.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google Analytics really free? Yes, genuinely and permanently for the standard product, with a contracted enterprise tier above it that most small companies never touch. The cost is not money. It is the number of moves to your answer, a consent-shaped gap in who gets counted, and sampling on large exploration reports.

Why do analytics tools charge per event? Because an event is the unit they store, index and query, so the billing unit matches the cost curve. It is defensible engineering economics. The side effect on you is that recording something new becomes a spending decision, which is how people end up without the data they need.

Does traffic ever change the price of a funnel here? No. An active funnel costs the same on the quietest week of the year as it does on the day a campaign lands. There is no event budget to estimate and no pageview tier to cross.

How many people can look at the numbers? As many as you need. There are no seats in today's pricing, so nobody has to share a login to read their own funnel.

What happens to my data if I stop paying? Pause the funnel rather than deleting it. It stops ingesting, stops billing, and keeps its history, so a seasonal launch flow can sit dormant for months and still be there when the next launch comes round.

Read the unit, not the number

When you are comparing analytics tools, the price is the least interesting thing on the pricing page. The billing unit tells you what the vendor thinks you are buying, and it predicts what you will end up doing: recording less, sharing a login, paying for a blog post that went well, or pausing the funnel you stopped caring about.

Pick the one whose pressure you can live with. Ours is per funnel because a funnel is one question, and charging for questions is the only unit that made sense for a product that deliberately answers exactly one: where visitors came from, where they went, and how many bought.

Installing it is one script tag, the steps are recorded by clicking through your own site rather than by writing event code, it is cookie-less, and a funnel you pause stops billing. You can track one free for seven days without a card.