vs Amplitude
TrailStack vs Amplitude cost comparison for event analytics.
Honest cost math for teams reconsidering Amplitude's per-MTU pricing.
TL;DR
Amplitude is a complete product analytics suite — dashboards, funnels, cohorts, and session replay are included in the price. TrailStack ingests events into ClickHouse and exposes SQL. At 25K monthly tracked users, that costs ~$22 vs ~$1,225 at Amplitude's published $0.049/MTU.
Check first
TrailStack won't replace Amplitude if you depend on any of these:
- Behavioral cohorts — ML-driven cohorts beyond hand-written SQL (capped at 20 per organization on Starter and Plus)
- Session Replay — Amplitude Plus includes 10,000 monthly session recordings. TrailStack stores event JSON only, no screen recordings. Replacing this means a separate replay product (OpenReplay, Highlight, or similar)
- Amplitude Experiment — feature flags and A/B testing tied to Amplitude analytics. Sold as a separate Amplitude product, not bundled with Plus; switching from Amplitude analytics to TrailStack also breaks the Experiment integration
The scenario
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Monthly tracked users | 25,000 |
| Average events per MTU / month | 200 |
| Events per month (derived) | 5,000,000 |
| Average event size | 1 KB |
| Data volume per month (derived) | 5 GB |
| Retention | 12 months |
A product team on Plus at 25K MTUs (beyond Starter's 10K-MTU cap), with ~200 tracked events per user. Typical of mobile or social apps where every screen and interaction fires. Applying Amplitude's published Plus rate, the bill is roughly $1,225 per month. 25K MTUs and 5M events both sit comfortably under Plus's published 25M events and 300K MTUs ceilings.
Amplitude bills per MTU, so the headline number is set by the user count; events-per-MTU only moves TrailStack's storage line.
What 25K MTUs costs
| Line item | Amplitude | TrailStack |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier (this scenario exceeds it) | 10K MTUs | 1 GB / 0.25 CU |
| 25K MTUs (Plus, $0.049/MTU) | $1,225 | — |
| Storage (5 GB/mo × 12 = 60 GB) | Included | $0.025/GB = $1.50 |
| Compute (1 CU @ $20) | Included | $20 |
| Total | $1,225 | ~$22 |
$1,225 = 25,000 × $0.049, derived directly from Amplitude's published rate. Headline gap: ~56x cheaper for ingestion, storage, and SQL query. Amplitude's price also covers dashboards, funnels, cohorts, and session replay (see below).
This applies Amplitude's published $0.049/MTU rate linearly across all 25K MTUs. Amplitude does not publish whether Plus retains any free-MTU allowance or whether the rate steps down at higher volumes (see Caveats). The published $49/mo starting price is reached at roughly the first 1K MTUs and does not affect the math at 25K. Add-on products (Experiment, Engage, etc.) are billed separately and are not in this figure.
The published $49/mo starting price and $0.049/MTU rate are quoted on annual billing; Amplitude does not publish a monthly-billing rate.
TrailStack's ~$22 assumes a single concurrent analytics workflow (1 CU). Multi-user dashboards or scheduled queries push concurrency, and add CU at $20 each.
How the gap moves with engagement
At fixed 25K MTUs / 12-month retention:
| Events per MTU | Total events | TrailStack | Amplitude | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 1.25M | ~$20.40 | $1,225 | ~60x |
| 200 (this scenario) | 5M | ~$22 | $1,225 | ~56x |
| 1,000 | 25M * | ~$27.50 | $1,225 | ~45x |
* Hits Plus's published 25M events cap. At higher engagement, Amplitude requires Growth (custom-priced).
Amplitude's bill is flat in events. TrailStack's storage line scales linearly. The gap shrinks at heavy per-user volume but stays large in absolute dollars.
What happens to old data
Amplitude Plus caps retention at 2 years. After that, your data is permanently deleted unless you upgrade to Growth or Enterprise (custom pricing, unlimited retention).
TrailStack keeps all data in ClickHouse, always queryable, at $0.025 per GB per month while the subscription is active. No time limit on retention; on cancellation, data is held for 90 days, then deleted.
| Retention | TrailStack (1 CU) | Amplitude |
|---|---|---|
| 1 month (5 GB) | ~$20.13 | $1,225 |
| 12 months (60 GB) | ~$22.00 | $1,225 |
| 24 months (120 GB) | ~$23.00 | $1,225 (Plus max retention) |
| 36 months (180 GB) | ~$24.50 | Custom (Growth/Enterprise only) |
At 12 months the gap is ~56x. At 24 months it's ~53x. Beyond 2 years on Plus, your data is deleted. Only Growth and Enterprise contracts (custom-priced) keep it.
What you get for the money
Amplitude at $1,225 per month gives you dashboards, funnels, retention curves, behavioral cohorts (capped at 20 per organization), session replay (10K monthly sessions on Plus), and predictive analytics (limited on Plus; full on Growth/Enterprise). Point-and-click, no SQL needed. Retention up to 2 years on Plus.
TrailStack at ~$22 per month gives you flat-JSON ingestion with automatic schema detection (nested objects must be flattened — see Ingestion), ClickHouse SQL (~1-minute ingestion lag), and ClickHouse HTTP API access. No dashboards or built-in alerting. Bring Grafana for both, DBeaver, or AI tools. Unlimited retention at $0.025 per GB.
The pricing model
Amplitude charges by user count, TrailStack charges by data volume. The crossover depends on events-per-user: high-engagement consumer apps (200+ events per MAU) widen the gap because Amplitude's per-MTU bill stays flat while TrailStack's storage cost grows only linearly with events. Low-engagement B2B tools (10-20 events per MAU) narrow it. If your team needs Amplitude's visual analytics, stay on Amplitude. If someone comfortable with SQL can do the job, you save roughly $1,200 per month at Amplitude's published rate. Possibly less if Amplitude's undisclosed allowances apply (see Caveats); the order of magnitude doesn't change.
Caveats & Sources
The 1 KB average covers product events with user properties, UTM params, and device info. Amplitude charges per tracked user regardless of event size or count. Event size only affects TrailStack's storage cost.
The $1,225 figure applies the published $0.049/MTU rate linearly. Amplitude does not document any free-MTU baseline within Plus or volume tiering inside the 10K–300K range; if either applies, the actual bill is lower than the figure here. Either way, it is not higher.
- amplitude.com/pricing — Plus tier from $49/mo, $0.049/MTU, 2-year retention; Growth/Enterprise custom-priced with unlimited retention
Verified against the published pricing page as of May 2026.