Is Amplitude free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
Billed on monthly tracked users. The Starter tier is free up to 10,000 MTUs and 2 million events per month. Plus starts around $49/month billed annually — about $582 a year at 1,000 MTUs — and scales up to 300,000 MTUs, with each MTU carrying an allowance of roughly 1,000 events. Growth and Enterprise are quoted. The mechanic to understand is that a user counts once they fire any event, so instrumenting more of the product does not raise the MTU count, but growing the audience does. Figures checked 2026-07-31.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you are inside the free tier — 10,000 MTUs and 2 million events covers a great many real products, and nothing here beats free and already instrumented. Stay if the analysis is the point: Amplitude's cohort, retention and pathfinding tools are more refined than any open alternative, and a team that lives in them daily will feel the downgrade. Stay if non-technical colleagues rely on it, because self-hosted tools tend to be more capable and less inviting. And stay if you have no appetite to own a ClickHouse cluster, which is what self-hosting PostHog at volume really means.
What you are locked into
Moderate and mostly in the tracking plan rather than the data. Historical events export, though large exports are slow and awkward. What costs real time is that your event taxonomy — names, properties, the conventions everyone agreed on — is embedded in application code, and any migration means either replaying that taxonomy into a new tool or rewriting instrumentation. Teams that send events through a neutral layer such as a Segment-compatible pipeline or OpenTelemetry keep this cheap. Teams calling the Amplitude SDK directly from every component do not.
If you would rather not pay: PostHog
PostHog
Product analytics, session replay, flags and experiments in one self-hostable product.
Generous free tier on cloud; self-hostable at no licence cost for the MIT core.
See all 5 Amplitude alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Amplitude before you commit. More product analytics decisions on Macrostack.