Mixpanel vs Amplitude: where each one stops being free, and which Stripe events reach it

What the free tiers include

Both lists were read from the vendors' pricing pages on 7 October 2026. Neither free plan asks for a card.

Session replay is level at 10,000 a month, which is a useful clue: the two products target the same buyer, so the entire free-tier difference is the event ceiling and each side's extras. Amplitude doubles the event allowance; Mixpanel lists feature-flag and experiment quotas explicitly on its Free card.

Cost at set monthly event volumes

Only one paid price is printed in the text of either page: Mixpanel's Growth card at 1.5 million events. The rest of the table says so plainly, rather than guess.

At 1.5 million events, Mixpanel's yearly-billing price is $120 times twelve, or $1,440, and the monthly-billing price is $140 times twelve, or $1,680. Choosing the monthly plan therefore costs $240 more over the year, and Amplitude's cost for that volume is zero. Mixpanel's slider runs from 1 million to 20 million-plus in steps, so the $120 is a point on a curve, not a starting price, and the Growth card's own headline reads "Starts at $0", in line with the first million events being free.

Ceilings matter more as you grow. Mixpanel Growth tops out at 20 million events a month, 500,000 session replays, 50 active feature flags and five alerts, and beyond that you need Enterprise, which it lists up to a trillion events with custom replay volumes. On the Amplitude side the self-serve ceiling is far higher: Plus covers up to 70 million events, and it is only when you want SSO, project permissions or advanced behavioral exploration that you are pushed to a quoted Growth or Enterprise contract. Plus also lists a cap of 20 cohorts per organization, so a team with many saved audiences should read that row of Amplitude's feature table.

Getting Stripe billing data in

For a SaaS, revenue events are the reason to have Stripe data in a product-analytics tool, and the two docs differ in a way that decides which events you can chart without writing code.

• Mixpanel. Its Stripe guide streams events from Stripe webhooks, through a Google Cloud Function (it says an AWS Lambda works the same way), to the /import API. The sample maps Stripe's event type to the event name, its event id to $insert_id, and the customer to the user identifier, and it spreads the Stripe object into event properties. It suggests selecting all event types in Stripe. The sample does not verify Stripe's webhook signature, so that step is yours, and the guide points to Vendo as a managed alternative.
• Amplitude. It maintains a Stripe source: add a webhook endpoint in Stripe pointing at a URL Amplitude supplies, choose API version 2024-06-20 and pick events. The listed events cover charges and refunds, invoices (including invoice.paid and invoice.payment_failed), payment intents and checkout sessions, with payment_intent.succeeded treated as a revenue event. No customer.subscription.* event appears in the table, it only captures events after the webhook is set up, and it does no currency conversion.

Identity is where both fail quietly. Amplitude checks metadata fields in a set order (amplitude_id, then user_id, then email fields, then the Stripe customer) and warns that without a metadata id the same person can appear as separate users. Mixpanel's sample uses the Stripe customer as the identifier, so you will want to merge it with the logged-in user's id. In both cases, put your own user id in the Stripe metadata when you create the customer. For events Amplitude's source does not carry, such as a trial ending or a subscription cancelled, its HTTP V2 API takes a revenue field and deduplicates by insert_id for seven days, so reuse the Stripe event id there.

Startup offers

Mixpanel's page offers the first year free on its Startup Plan to companies founded less than five years ago with up to $8M of total funding that have not redeemed another offer. Amplitude's offer is twelve months of its Growth plan, open to teams below 20 people that hold less than $10M of funding. The two tests differ, with company age and funding on one side and headcount and funding on the other, so a ten-year-old bootstrapped team passes one and fails the other.

Moving between them

1. List the events and properties the team opens weekly and drop the rest before you re-instrument, since volume is what you pay for above the free tier.
2. Send both tools the same stream for a few weeks, and compare one funnel and one retention chart in each.
3. Rebuild saved cohorts and dashboards in the new tool; history will not follow, so keep the old project readable.
4. Replay the Stripe handler against the new destination and confirm that duplicate deliveries do not double-count revenue.

Which to pick

• Amplitude when you expect 1 to 2 million events a month or want the 70 million self-serve ceiling.
• Mixpanel when you want explicit flag and experiment quotas on the free card, or when forwarding every Stripe event type, subscription events included, through one relay appeals.
• Either under 1 million events, where both are free and you should pick on how each one's report builder feels to your team.

Related reading: PostHog vs Amplitude, Heap vs Mixpanel, Segment vs RudderStack, an analytics stack for SaaS, product analytics tools and the comparison index.