Independent guide · checked against amplitude.com itself
What Amplitude actually costs (license + implementation)
Written by implementers, not by the vendor and not by a competitor. Plan structure, the event-based billing math, the free-plan fine print, and the cost line every budget forgets.
What are Amplitude’s plans in 2026?
Four tiers, metered by events per month. Checked against amplitude.com/pricing at the time of writing - pricing pages change, so re-verify the week you negotiate:
| Plan | Price | Volume | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0, no card | 2M events/mo (permanent) | Product analytics, 10K session replays/mo, AI agents & MCP, limited experiments/guides/surveys |
| Plus | Starts at $0 (first 2M events free), card required | Scales to 70M events/mo | Custom events/formulas, 20 behavioral cohorts, alerts, heatmaps, 2-year retention |
| Growth | Custom (sales) | Event-based, negotiated | Advanced behavioral exploration, monitoring/alerts, 20K replays/mo, SSO & project permissions |
| Enterprise | Custom (sales) | Event-based, negotiated | Unlimited projects per portfolio, data access controls, 50K replays/mo, advanced RBAC |
Why won’t anyone tell you the Growth price?
Because there isn’t one - Growth and Enterprise are quoted per deal, sized on event volume, feature needs, and negotiation. That is not a criticism; it is how the whole enterprise analytics category prices. What it means practically: your event volume forecast is your negotiating position. A team that walks in knowing its real events-per-month (and how much of it is taxonomy junk it could delete) negotiates from evidence; a team that doesn’t is negotiating against the vendor’s estimate of its own usage. That forecast is a 15-minute exercise if your instance is clean - and one of the outputs of our free audit if it isn’t.
How do you estimate your event volume?
- Take monthly active users of the product surface you will instrument.
- Multiply by sessions per user per month.
- Multiply by meaningful actions per session - for a disciplined taxonomy this is typically in the tens, not hundreds.
- Add non-interactive and server-side events (subscription renewals, notifications, pipeline events).
- Add 20-30% headroom for growth and instrumentation you haven’t thought of yet.
If that lands under 2M, start free. If it lands in the tens of millions, you are in Plus territory heading toward a Growth conversation - and the taxonomy discipline that keeps events meaningful is now directly a money question.
Interactive - hover the blocks. The forecast method drawn; the tier caps are Amplitude's published numbers.
The cost line nobody budgets: implementation
The license is the visible cost. The determining cost is whether the data can be trusted - which is decided by the tracking plan, instrumentation quality, and governance, not the plan tier. Done in-house, budget real engineering weeks; done with us, it is a fixed-scope sprint. Done badly, it becomes a rescue, which costs more than either. Whatever you choose, put a number in the budget - the “free” setup that produces unusable data is the most expensive option on this page.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Amplitude cost per month?+
At the time of writing: the Free plan is $0 for up to 2M events/month permanently; Plus starts at $0 (first 2M events free, card required) and scales with event volume up to 70M events; Growth and Enterprise are custom-quoted through sales. Amplitude does not publish Growth or Enterprise prices - any specific figure you see for those tiers is someone's negotiated quote, not a list price.
Does Amplitude charge by MTUs or by events?+
Amplitude's current public pricing is event-based - plans are sized by events per month. Much online discussion references MTUs (monthly tracked users), which predate event-based plans - and MTU billing is not fully historical: Amplitude's billing docs still maintain an MTU guide for MTU-priced plans, and its startup program quotes MTU caps. Check which unit your own contract uses before comparing quotes.
Is the Amplitude free plan enough for a real product?+
For early-stage products, genuinely yes: 2M events/month covers a small product with a disciplined taxonomy, and the free tier includes product analytics, session replay (10K/month), and even MCP/AI features. The catch is discipline - a sloppy taxonomy burns event volume on junk and hits the cap far sooner than a clean one.
What is the Amplitude startup program?+
Amplitude offers a Startup Scholarship at the time of writing: one free year on the Growth plan for companies with under $10M in funding and fewer than 20 employees. If you qualify, it is the strongest deal on the page - but plan the year-two bill before you build dependence on Growth features.
What does Amplitude cost beyond the license?+
Budget for implementation (instrumentation, tracking plan, QA - either engineering weeks in-house or a fixed-scope engagement), and for ongoing governance time. A mid-size implementation is typically a low-five-figure one-time project; skipping it is how teams end up paying for a rescue later, which costs more.
Want a second opinion on an Amplitude quote?
Bring us your event-volume estimate and the proposal. We'll sanity-check the sizing, flag what's negotiable, and tell you if a cheaper tier - or a different tool - fits better. Independent means we don't care which way it goes.
Book a plan-fit review