Amplitude

Where Amplitude sits

Amplitude is the analyst's product analytics platform: the one that grew up on event data, behavioral cohorts and retention curves, and that in the last two years has bolted on session replay, feature flags, experimentation, guides and surveys, and most recently a sizeable set of AI features — an AI assistant, AI agents with MCP access, and "Agent Analytics" for teams shipping LLM-driven products. The company repriced in 2026, moving its public self-serve pricing from monthly tracked users to event volume, the same unit Mixpanel and PostHog use. That change matters for buyers, because most pricing guides on the web still describe the old model.

What I look for in this category is depth of analysis — can the tool answer "why did retention drop for users who came through campaign X" without exporting to a notebook — and Amplitude is still the strongest at that. The trade is price transparency and learning curve. Amplitude's free tier is the most generous in the category at time of writing (2 million events per month, forever, with 10,000 session replays, unlimited seats and unlimited feature flags, per amplitude.com/pricing), while its paid tiers are, with exceptions, quote-driven and lightly documented.

The paid picture at time of writing: Plus "starts at $0" with the first 2M events free and scales to 70M events per month; Growth and Enterprise are custom, event-based quotes. Third-party readings of Amplitude's own bill estimator put Plus at roughly $94/month for 3M events and about $5,865/month at the 70M ceiling on monthly billing, with annual billing 20% lower at every step (figures read from the vendor estimator by independent reviewers in September–October 2026; treat the estimator itself as the source of truth). Amplitude also publishes two concrete anchors on its comparison pages — about $2,600 per year at 5M events and roughly $534/month at 25M events. No static rate card exists.

What Amplitude actually does

The core is behavioral analysis over event streams: funnels with conversion drivers, retention and lifecycle charts, segmentation, cohorts, path analysis, and formulas that let you build custom metrics. Amplitude's differentiator has always been that these run fast enough for exploration — you can ask a follow-up question of a chart, cut a cohort by any property, and keep going, without a SQL round trip. The 2026 platform wraps that core in adjacent products: session replay (10K recordings per month on Free and Plus, 20K on Growth, 50K on Enterprise, each with one month of retention unless you buy more), feature flags (unlimited on every plan — unusual in this category), feature and web experimentation (1 active experiment on Free and Plus, 2 on Growth and Enterprise, more as an add-on), guides and surveys for in-product activation, zoning insights with heatmaps, and feedback analysis that clusters user comments.

The AI layer is the newest part and the part I tested most recently. AI-powered analysis is included on all plans; AI agents and MCP access ship on the free tier with 5,000 monthly agent sessions; and "Agent Analytics" is aimed squarely at teams whose product is itself an AI agent — trace analysis, semantic filtering, topic clustering, custom LLM evaluators, calibration runs, bring-your-own-key support. That is a category most analytics vendors have not built for at all, and it is the most defensible new ground Amplitude has staked.

On billing mechanics, the details that matter: overage on Plus is charged at 1.0x your per-event fee rather than a penalty rate, per the Plus Plan Addendum — genuinely buyer-friendly — but volume above 200% of your purchased amount lets Amplitude suspend the account. Experiment exposure and assignment events are free and do not count toward your limits. Backfills bill to the month you load them, not the month they occurred. Unused events do not roll over.

My testing notes

Three observations. First, the free tier is the reason to look at Amplitude at small scale, and it is not crippled: I ran a full analysis workflow — funnel, retention, two cohorts, a saved dashboard, replay of individual sessions — entirely inside the 2M-event free plan, with unlimited teammates. For a pre-launch or early-traction product that is a genuinely complete tool. The ceiling arrives through your instrumentation, not your headcount: 2M events is roughly 80,000 sessions at 25 events per session, and sloppy tagging pushes you over faster than traffic growth does.

Second, the depth is real when you know the tool. Chaining a funnel report into a cohort into a retention chart, then replaying the sessions of users who dropped at a specific step, is a workflow I ran end to end without touching a spreadsheet. Conversion drivers — the feature that surfaces which behaviors correlate with completing a funnel — pointed at an activation step I would not have guessed. That said, watching a non-analyst colleague try the same: they needed onboarding. This interface has many paths into the same question and it does not choose for you.

Third, pricing past the free tier is the hard part. I could not find a published per-event rate anywhere on the pricing page — only the estimator slider and the tier caps. Reading the estimator across two dates, a third-party reviewer found the same ladder both times ($94/month at 3M events up to $5,865 at 70M on monthly billing), which suggests it is stable but is still a widget rather than a rate card. My practical rule: get your per-event rate in writing before you instrument, because an instrumentation change or a traffic spike moves this bill without anyone deciding to upgrade.

What it does not do

Price transparency is the first limit: Growth and Enterprise publish no figures at all, and even Plus hides its numbers in an estimator. Two Amplitude pages also state the free ceiling differently — the pricing page says 2M events per month, a comparison page describes the same plan as 10K MTUs and 2M events — so verify your actual limits in the billing panel rather than trusting either.

Replay is capped hard: one month of retention on every plan, with longer retention sold as an add-on. If you want to compare this quarter's checkout friction to last quarter's, that recording is gone unless someone exported it. The MTU meter also runs alongside events on contracts, and MTU counts rise for reasons unrelated to growth — backfills, test users, one person on two unlinked devices.

Experimentation depth does not scale for free: one active experiment on Free and Plus is a trial allowance, not a program; serious A/B testing needs Growth plus add-ons priced as a percentage of your platform plan, which means the extras cost more as your event volume grows whether or not you use them more. And the data-quality burden is on you — teams that install quickly and never write down an event taxonomy end up in a schema migration that cascades through every saved chart. Amplitude does not fix that; it makes it hurt more because everything you saved depends on the names.

Verdict

Amplitude is still the deepest self-serve behavioral analysis platform I have worked with, the free tier is the best entry deal in the category, and the 2026 event-based repricing made comparisons with Mixpanel and PostHog saner. I rate it 4.2 — core functionality depth 4.6 for analysis, replay, flags and the new agent analytics, value 3.9 because paid pricing is opaque and add-ons scale with plan cost, usability 4.0 for exploration depth balanced against a real learning curve, support and ecosystem 4.2 with strong docs and a startup program that gives qualifying companies a free Growth year, and reliability 4.1 as a long-standing platform with clear contract terms. The buyer is a product and growth team that will live in the analysis tools daily and wants predictive, cohort-driven answers rather than dashboards.

Sources

• https://amplitude.com/pricing
• https://amplitude.com/
• https://amplitude.com/startups
• https://amplitude.com/plus-plan-terms
• https://humblytics.com/blog/amplitude-pricing
• https://aibuildermarketplace.com/b2b/amplitude-review
• https://arktis.so/learning-hub/amplitude-pricing
• https://startupyeti.com/startup/amplitude-pricing
• https://itechguides.com/best/web-analytics-tools/amplitude
• https://amplitude.com/compare/posthog