How we came to price Beam Analytics

My co-founder @TheBuilderJR and I only started thinking about building a GA alternative last year. In 2022, we saw a bunch of countries like Austria, France, and Italy confirm that EU companies using GA risked big fines. There was a market for GDPR compliant GA alternatives!

Soon, this joy of finding a viable idea to work on was met with the cold reality that a lot of people had already built this product. But @TheBuilderJR looked at all the alternatives and discovered something. Channeling his inner Jeff Bezos, he messaged me “Dude, their margin is our opportunity”. And he was right. Looking at the monthly USD prices of all the competitors, they were super high.

Why was the pricing so high?

Looking at this table, it looks like a classic case of price segmentation - charging a different price for different types of users. Here, the different users are based on how many pageviews their site gets each month. As you know, price segmentation is the idea of charging different types of customers different prices. Rich people want more space on a plane, so they are willing to pay more. They end up in first class and continue living their perfect lives. And more thrifty folks want to pay the lowest price possible so they fly coach. Airlines follow this economic theory of trying to charge each person their maximum willingness to pay.

But here, the pricing decision doesn’t seem to be driven by demand side willingness to pay. Instead, it seems more likely that higher prices for some users are driven by supply side cost factors. The core cost for a web analytics company are server costs. So the cost to provide web analytics to a company with 2m pageviews is way higher than it is to a company with 10 pageviews.

Could this be done more affordably?

But this led us to ask - does it really cost $70 to provide a web analytics service for companies with 1m+ users? Or $50 for those with 200-500k users? It just seemed too high. So we did some math and it showed that it would be possible to charge a much lower price and still make a profit. We don’t have access to a different set of servers. We’re just choosing to have really low margins, charge a low price, and try to reach as many customers as possible. And since this isn’t a network effects business, there’s no path of winning over all customers and then massively raising prices.

There didn't seem a good reason for the pricing to be based on tiers:

• Users are often paying for stuff they’re not using. People with 1.1m users pay as if they have 2m users. Not great.
• Users have to upgrade to tiers and that’s a hassle they don’t need

How Beam prices

We didn’t love the discontinuities in the pricing. We prefer linear pricing where users just pay for what they use. So we came up with a very simple formula.

• Fewer than 10k pageviews in a month, Beam is free
• Between 10k and 100k pageviews in a month, it’s $11
• And then you pay $2/month for each extra 100k pageviews

Adding Beam to the comparison table for various levels of monthly pageviews, we’re really confident that we have the most affordable product. And there’s never ever any guesswork about how the pricing will change as your pageview scales. Every extra 100k pageviews just costs $2.

We basically want to be the supermarket house brand. It’s effectively the same product. We don’t have the same frills (ie. integrations, email reports etc), but way more affordable. If you want a privacy, GDPR compliant GA alternative, and you’re budget conscious, we’re for you. And you’ll get conversion funnels thrown in! Sign up at beamanalytics.io. Any questions or thoughts, email me at hi@beamanalytics.io.