[namityadav]

I have wanted to use Mixpanel for a while. But your product is very very expensive for a Startup. When we're trying to be frugal, there's no way we can justify spending $150 per month on collecting data on just 5,000 users (where 98% of them will be free-users). Your product becomes interesting to a Startup only if they won't have to worry about paying for analytics till they're really successful. That means many millions of data-points. Not 25,000 or even 500,000.

The only Startups that can afford your service at this point are the ones that have only paying users.

[gsharma]

We circumvent Mixpanel's limited events early on and stayed under their free tier for as long as we could. This is what our setup looks like:

We collect millions of data points a month and save them on our servers. We do not use Mixpanel's SDK to collect these data points, but have written our own code for that. We save the raw data on our server, aggregate a bunch of similar events to 1 event and then push it to Mixpanel using their API. We heavily use event properties to send as few events to Mixpanel as possible.

This way we get most of the data into Mixpanel and can build funnels, etc. without any issue. There are some edge cases where we aggregated data is a limitation. But for those cases, we end up using the raw data that we store.

Not sure about your use case, but hope this helps.

[mblevin]

That's precisely why we price on a per-user basis at Indicative (https://www.indicative.com) and not on a per event basis.

What you described is a lot of work to build and maintain and very brittle. We've had quite a few customers switch to our platform from Mixpanel that were doing the same thing - aggregating data or sampling.

The problem with either is that you basically blow up your user-level data (e.g. John Smith doesn't have the right activity history), you will miss potentially important trends that are statistically significant that only appear over time, and you limit the type of analysis you do by "property stuffing", particularly around cohorts and retention.

[suhail]

What pricing structure do you want for your startup?

[jlukanta]

Same problem here. I recommend having a far higher limit on free users. Maybe you can also charge less if the growth rate of active users is less than x% per month. They won't have money to pay anyway without traction.