Billing for Events

This guide will help you understand Mixpanel's events billing system.

What is an Event?

Events represent interactions between a user and your product. Think about events that you want to measure and understand. Is it a purchase? Video views? Friend requests? The first step is to send that data to Mixpanel. Our flexible data model lets you bring in events easily by connecting Mixpanel to your CDP, data warehouse, or in-house data pipelines. You can also install a Mixpanel SDK.

Events-based pricing calculates the amount you owe based on the number of events across all projects in each period. For eligible plans, you can choose to purchase monthly or annually.

There are three event-based billing plans to choose from: Free, Growth, and Enterprise. Refer to our pricing page for more information on the benefits and features of each plan.

Monthly Events Calculation

It depends on your number of active users and the number of events (interactions) a typical active user performs in your product every month (or year). These interactions include client-side engagement events (e.g., search, purchase, video view), server-side events (e.g., sign up, account upgrade), and messaging events (e.g., email sent, email opened, etc.). 

We encourage new customers to get started on the free plan and then upgrade once they have an estimate of their volume.

An organization is charged based on the total number of events across all projects. 

Excluded events

Certain events and API updates are non-qualifying and excluded from the calculation:

• $identify
• $create_alias
• $merge
• $web_event

In addition, some inbound events sent by partner products are excluded. Refer to a given partner's integration page to see if it has events excluded from calculations.

Estimate Events Usage

If you haven’t implemented tracking yet, you can estimate your current event usage by multiplying the number of MAUs (Monthly Active Users) you have to engage with your product by the estimated number of interactions (events you plan to track) each user performs every month. For reference, only a few companies track more than 200 events/user on our free plans. We typically see around 50 events/user.

View Events Usage

If you are currently tracking data, you can see your events consumption in your Organization Settings.

Click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of Mixpanel, and select your organization under ORGANIZATION SETTINGS.

From here, you can quickly view the usage this billing period as well as the current plan under Plan Details & Billing

To view detailed historical data usage or download a CSV of historical usage for each project, click on View Historical Usage in the top right of Plan Details & Billing. This will show you a graph of your usage over time, as well usage for each project in your organization for the last 12 months. This feature is accessible by all users and can be downloaded to a CSV file.

What are the top events contributing to my bill?

To view the top events contributing towards your event count, create a monthly Insights report using the following filters, or view this public example.

What if I go over my prepaid amount?

Once you’ve finished using your prepaid amount of events, you’ll be charged our regular monthly rate for each additional event tracked that month. Alerts are in place to notify Organization Owners and Billing Admins of potential additional data charges.

We don’t charge punitive overages but we do provide volume discounts – if your volume exceeds your projections you can save money by committing to a larger volume and locking in a lower average cost per event.

What are the benefits of events over an MTU plan?

Mixpanel provides both events and MTU-based pricing, but we recommend starting with events and believe that events are the better fit for most companies. 

Events plans allow you to start small

Starting small with just a few events saves money and can lead to greater data trust over time – We’ve found that most healthy implementations start with a couple of key events and add more events and use cases as teams find value. 

You don’t need unlimited events to gain key insights, KPIs, and business metrics. In fact, you can get a tremendous amount of value with just a couple of events — Our KPI Template requires just two events to get started!

Events plans avoid some pitfalls 

Event plans can be simpler to understand and avoid several “gotchas” that can lead to sudden spikes in MTU usage

1. Anonymous/Logged out users. Tracking users who visit marketing landing pages and help docs can blow up your MTU count. These users typically have much lower activity than logged-in users and constitute a trivial increase in event volume.
2. Messaging events. Tracking email/push delivery events would also increase your MTU since these messages are often targeting dormant/inactive users. While some would convert, you’d get charged for a large portion of inactive users as additional MTUs (despite getting one event).
3. Backfills. Often, customers backfill additional events that they begin tracking later in their implementation. For example, you may choose to backfill sign-ups from server-side logs instead of relying on SDKs. These additional events would create MTUs in previous months that would increase the number of billed MTUs.