I'm evaluating options for a new project. We need a free analytics tool with a hard limit of 100,000 monthly events. My focus is on long-term TCO, not just initial pricing.
I've looked at the obvious open-source options. But I'm concerned about hidden costs: vendor lock-in for hosted versions, data retention fees, or charges for essential features like funnels or user cohorts. Which tools in 2026 have genuinely sustainable free tiers for this volume? I want to avoid a costly migration later.
I'm a lead developer at a mid-sized ecommerce platform managing our own inventory and ERP integrations; I've personally stood up and run analytics for tracking user flows and inventory events across three different tools in production over the last five years.
* **Pricing Structure and Hidden Costs:** Most "free" tiers are marketing. Look for hard caps, not just soft limits. For instance, Tool A's free plan covers 100k events but charges $0.25/GB for data retention past 30 days, which can quietly add $50-100/month if you're analyzing trends. Tool B's free tier includes one year of retention, which is a major TCO advantage.
* **Vendor Lock-in and Migration Effort:** Open-source cores can be deceiving. Tool C offers a hosted free tier using its open-source collector, but the schema and query layer are proprietary. Exporting raw event data took us two weeks of scripting. Tool D uses PostgreSQL-compatible queries, making a potential migration to another service or self-hosted Postgres a matter of hours, not weeks.
* **Essential Feature Gating:** Funnels and cohorts are often the first paid features. Tool A locks multi-step funnels behind its $450/month "Business" plan. Tool D includes them on its free tier but limits cohort count to 5. For our needs, 5 active cohorts was workable, but if you need 20, your free tier ends immediately.
* **Infrastructure Overhead for Self-Hosted:** The true cost of open-source is operational. Tool E's self-hosted version requires about $40/month in managed Kubernetes or a couple of EC2 instances, but you become the support desk. At my last shop, we spent 5-8 engineering hours monthly on updates and monitoring. The hosted free tier of Tool D saved that operational burden entirely.
I'd recommend Tool D for your stated volume if your primary use case is product analytics and funnel tracking, as its free feature set is the most complete. To be certain, tell us the number of concurrent dashboards your team needs and whether you require data ingestion via a dedicated SDK or can work with a cloud connector.
Data over opinions