Startup Analytics Without the Enterprise Price Tag

Enterprise analytics tools want $2,000-10,000/month. Most startups don’t need them.

Here’s how we built a complete analytics stack for under $500/month.

The Problem With Enterprise Analytics

Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap: Great products. But pricing scales with events. Grow your product, pay exponentially more.

We got a Mixpanel quote at 10M events/month: $3,500/month. That’s insane for a startup.

The dirty secret: Most startups track too much and analyze too little. You don’t need every click recorded.

The Stack We Built

Product Analytics: PostHog (Free - $450/month)

Self-hosted PostHog is free. Cloud version has generous free tier.

What it does:

  • Event tracking
  • Session recordings
  • Feature flags
  • Funnels and retention

Why we chose it:

  • Open source (can self-host)
  • Event-based pricing is reasonable
  • Feature flags included (replaced LaunchDarkly, saved $300/month)

At 5M events/month, we pay ~$200/month. Mixpanel wanted 10x that.

Web Analytics: Plausible ($9-$99/month)

Simple, privacy-focused web analytics. Replaced Google Analytics.

What it does:

  • Traffic sources
  • Top pages
  • Geographic data
  • Campaign tracking

Why we chose it:

  • No cookie banner needed (privacy-compliant by design)
  • Clean interface versus GA’s complexity
  • Affordable flat pricing

We don’t need Google Analytics’ complexity. Plausible tells us what matters.

Business Metrics: Metabase (Free self-hosted)

Connect directly to your database. Build dashboards.

What it does:

  • SQL queries turned into charts
  • Scheduled reports
  • Team dashboards

Why we chose it:

  • Free (self-hosted)
  • Connects to any database
  • Non-technical team members can explore data

Our finance team builds their own reports. No data team required.

Customer Data: Segment ($120/month starter)

Event pipeline that routes data to tools. Single source of truth for tracking.

What it does:

  • Unified tracking across web, mobile, server
  • Routes events to analytics, marketing, CRM tools
  • Identity resolution

Why we chose it:

  • Single tracking implementation
  • Easy to add/remove destination tools
  • Clean data architecture

Worth the cost for the architecture benefits. Even at startup scale.

What We Track

Most startups track too much. We track:

Acquisition

  • How users find us (source, campaign)
  • Conversion from visitor to signup

Activation

  • First value moment (what action indicates “got it”)
  • Time to activation
  • Activation rate by cohort

Retention

  • Weekly/monthly active users
  • Feature usage frequency
  • Churn prediction signals

Revenue

  • Conversion to paid
  • Expansion revenue
  • Churn by segment

That’s it. Maybe 30 events total. Not 300.

The Dashboard That Matters

We have one dashboard everyone checks:

  1. New signups (daily/weekly)
  2. Activation rate (did they reach value moment?)
  3. Weekly active users (are people coming back?)
  4. Revenue (MRR, new, churned)
  5. NPS or CSAT (qualitative health check)

Five metrics. Updated automatically. No analyst required.

If those metrics are healthy, dig deeper. If they’re healthy, keep building.

What We Don’t Track

  • Every click and scroll
  • Detailed pathing for all users
  • Attribution modeling (too complex for our stage)
  • Heat maps (rarely actionable)

Each of these is useful for someone. Not useful for us yet.

Add complexity when you have questions that require it. Not before.

The Total Cost

ToolMonthly Cost
PostHog$200
Plausible$19
Metabase$0 (self-hosted)
Segment$120
Total$339/month

Compare to enterprise stack:

  • Mixpanel: $3,500/month
  • Amplitude: $3,000/month
  • LaunchDarkly: $300/month
  • GA360: $12,500/month

We’re doing 90% of what enterprise tools do at 5% of the cost.

When to Upgrade

Signs you’ve outgrown the bootstrap stack:

  1. Analysis bottleneck: Data team is spending too much time writing queries.

  2. Scale limits: Hitting event volume limits frequently.

  3. Advanced needs: Predictive analytics, ML features, warehouse integration.

  4. Compliance requirements: Enterprise customers need specific certifications.

For most startups, that’s Series A or beyond. Until then, the bootstrap stack works.

Implementation Tips

Start Simple

Don’t implement tracking for features you haven’t built. Track what exists.

Use a Tracking Plan

Document every event before you implement. Prevents naming chaos.

Format: Event Name | When Triggered | Properties | Purpose

Validate Early

Check that events fire correctly on day one. Garbage data is worse than no data.

Review Quarterly

What are you tracking that nobody looks at? Remove it. What questions do you have that you can’t answer? Add tracking for it.

The Philosophy

Analytics tools are means to decisions, not ends themselves.

What decisions will you make differently with this data? If you don’t have an answer, you don’t need the tracking.

Start with decisions. Work backward to data. Ignore everything else.