Resources // Data, Analytics & Search
Amplitude for startups
Offer Free access
Suits for Non-VC-backedVC-backed
Updated Jun 2026
The offer
- One year free on Amplitude's Growth plan (Analytics, Feature and Web Experimentation, Session Replay, and Activation/CDP), then "competitive discounts for life"
- Data allowance: up to 200,000 monthly tracked users (MTUs), or measure by event volume instead (~100M events/month)
- Soft overage: you won't be charged for going over; exceed it more than twice and you're moved to the free Starter plan
Who qualifies
- Fewer than 20 full-time employees AND raised less than $10M
- Exception: Y Combinator, Sequoia, and AWS ecosystem companies qualify regardless of funding/size
- Apply for a free year of Growth (~96% of scholarship applicants are approved; reviewed in ~2 business days)
Community Insights
Amplitude is widely regarded as the depth leader in product analytics, built for the product-data use case first (funnels, retention, cohorts, pathfinder) rather than as a Google Analytics replacement, and the year of free Growth (200k MTUs / ~100M events/mo) is a generous on-ramp. The trade-offs people raise: it’s the steepest learning curve of the major tools, and it gets expensive once you outgrow the free year (enterprise contracts routinely run $30k-$50k+). The free tier is deliberately a land-and-expand funnel, so plan for the cost cliff.
Best Practices (from community tips)
- Track only high-value events and keep a clean schema. Amplitude’s cost scales with volume, so don’t instrument every click.
- Use the free year to benchmark whether Amplitude’s depth (cohorts, retention, experimentation) actually drives decisions before you commit budget.
- Decide MTU vs event-based measurement up front based on whether you have many low-engagement/anonymous users.
- Plan the post-year cost (or a migration to Mixpanel/PostHog) before the scholarship ends. The jump to paid is steep.
Community Reviews
Positive
Negative
Neutral / Mixed
More in this category