Right now the way we price is pro-rate it for people who are between tiers. For example, if you have 3000 uniques per month, then you'll pay $28.75 ($25 for the first 2500 users, and then $3.75 pro-rated for 500 additional users on the next tier). If you have below 2500 users, you just pay for the portion of that $25 that you use (a site with 1000 users would pay $10). We're updating our pricing page to clarify this.

Thank you for explaining this. That's a huge difference that the impression of tiered pricing that I got.

Any plans for either a free trial period or a very small (<50 users?) free plan?

Definitely - we offer a one month free trial of the lowest tier plan (2500 users/month).

I would highly advise you to rethink that. What if we're a larger site? To be honest, your pricing is way out of our ballpark anyway (We're a smallish daily newspaper, ~300k uniques/monthly), there's no way I'd ever get approval for $20k/yr for analytics, no matter how cool, and I'd never get approval to spend $1k+ just to try it.

For orgs like us, your pricing seems rather brutal, as we're probably much lower in pages/visit than an "app" type website. (We're at ~10 page views per visit, average)

Feel free to reach us at sales@heapanalytics.com. We'd love to talk about fair pricing, and we certainly need more data points to evaluate what that fair pricing is.

Do you feel there's scope for pricing coming down a lot? I'm in a similar boat to TylerE: around a million monthly uniques, but in publishing, so there's really no way to justify $4k/month for Analytics when stuff like Google's already exists. 10% of that might be justifiable, but even then it's not a no-brainer.

Yea, precisely. I'd say for us we could maybe to like, $100/month. Also - how does it work for multiple sites? We actually have 4 separate sites for separate towns.

Depending on how usage looks on your site we can find a way to accomodate. Shoot us an email at sales@heapanalytics.com and we can coordinate a time to chat.

Newspapers routinely find the money to pay $570/mo and up for ChartBeat, and then never use it, or I-don't-know-how-much for Adobe Omniture when they could have Google Analytics for free. So I don't think you're representative of the news industry as a whole.

Also, content-heavy sites have different analytics needs from applications. It'd be interesting to see where Heap fits in, but most of the analyses you can run in KISSMetrics, Mixpanel and other app-focused analytics tools aren't of much use for news organizations.

That's a misunderstanding of the industry, I think. While the website as a whole isn't very "appy", some smaller sections of it _are_, and it would be incredible to actually understand how our customers are interacting with it.

P.S. We used to have Omniture, and switched to Google to save $.

Can you put your email in your signature? I'd like to ask you more questions about your analytics needs and have you check out a project I'm working on.

It's my username @ gmail

In the same boat as this guy. High anonymous visitor count, but would like to graph it, but pricing is not gonna make it possible.

I know you're reworking the pricing page as you said but you may want to consider doing what a lot of email service providers do and list the per-user price in tiers.

Something like

* Users 1-2,500: $0.01/user

* Users 2,501-20,000: $0.0625/user

* Users 20,001-80,000: $0.0583/user

might be a tad more intuitive, especially if you listed the top-end price along with that.

I don't think per user is the way to go. Customers want more predictability. Plus, per user feels like it's penalizing growers. It seems a bit more appropriate to charge per/email since there's som atomicity there.

For analytics, simple tiers (without pro rating) should work fine.

This is interesting. Our naive thinking was "fewer numbers" implies "easier comprehensibility", but I don't think the pricing was quite as understandable as we would've hoped. I like your suggestion a lot.

Keep the pricing message simple. I'm not a fan of variable pricing - I like to know what the monthly cost is going to be beforehand. I appreciate tiers where I can see what I'm going to hit depending on growth over time.

Someone below said that you should base your pricing on cost - I completely disagree. You should absolutely NOT look at cost when you put pricing together - rather, you need to ask your customers about the value of what it is you're providing. For example, Heap will be saving the time and hassle of deploying a generic solution on a server and the time of customising it. Plus Heap will be improving their product every day whereas the self-hosted version would need a developer to add new features. These sort of things all add up - you'll be surprised what you find out when you ask your customers.

Pricing is hard. There are a lot of good articles and discussions on HN if you do a bit of searching.

Good luck. Heap looks good

Perhaps a slider or some other interactive tool would be better for estimating monthly cost.

Anyone who'd use your service can look up their existing active user counts and plan accordingly -- much easier than estimating data points. However, you're going to lose some people if you require mental gymnastics to get an estimate based on arbitrary tiers and pro-rated pricing.

I would love to see prepay/caps implemented in a similar way. I give you $50 for the equivalent number of users, you stop serving me after that is exhausted. I can then chose to replenish today, tomorrow, next week or never.

Thanks for the clarification. The pricing structure sounds fair.