Heap Analytics Pricing: Plans and Real Costs

Heap publishes exactly one number and quotes the rest. There are four tiers: a free plan covering up to 10,000 monthly sessions with 6 months of data history, then Growth, Pro and Premier, all of which require a sales conversation. Reported Growth deals start around $3,600 a year. The detail almost every write-up gets wrong is the billing unit. Heap does not meter events and it does not meter monthly tracked users. It meters sessions, and a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity on web or 5 minutes on mobile. That single fact changes which products Heap is cheap for and which it is expensive for. The plan details below were read directly off heap.io/pricing in August 2026.

How much does Heap cost?

Four tiers, one published starting price, three quotes. Here is the structure as the pricing page presents it:

Two things stand out immediately. Growth and Pro both land on roughly a year of history, so moving up a tier does not buy you more retention by default. And the free plan includes SSO, which is genuinely unusual: most tools in this category treat single sign-on as an enterprise upsell. Userpilot, for one, gates SAML 2.0 to its custom-quoted Enterprise plan, and Amplitude gates SSO to Growth.

Is Heap analytics free?

Yes, there is a real free plan and it is not a trial. You get up to 10,000 monthly sessions, core analytics charts, unlimited enrichment and SSO, with 6 months of data history and no credit card.

What ends the free plan for most teams is not the session cap. It is the two things missing from it. There is no technical support at all on the free tier, so when your instrumentation behaves unexpectedly you are on your own. And Sense, the Contentsquare AI layer that does a lot of the work in Heap's current marketing, starts on Growth. The free plan gives you the charts, not the analysis assistance.

Ten thousand sessions is a meaningful allowance for a small site, but read the next section before you assume it maps to your traffic, because sessions are not users and they are not events.

How does Heap's session-based pricing work?

This is the part worth slowing down for, because a large share of the pages that rank for Heap pricing state the billing unit incorrectly. Several say Heap charges by monthly tracked users. Heap's own pricing page and help documentation say sessions.

A session in Heap is a period of activity from one user, and it can contain any number of pageviews and events. On web, a session ends after 30 minutes of pageview inactivity. On mobile, it ends after 5 minutes of inactivity, regardless of whether the app is in the foreground or the background. So one person who visits your site three times in a day, with a lunch break between visits, generates three sessions, not one user and not the forty events they fired.

The practical consequences are worth spelling out, because they run in the opposite direction to most people's intuition:

Heap's autocapture is the reason this matters more than it first appears. Because Heap records every interaction automatically rather than asking you to instrument events in advance, an event-metered tool would punish you for that density. Session metering does not. A single session with 400 captured interactions costs the same as one with 12. If your product is analytics-hungry and your users visit occasionally, that is a real structural advantage over an event-based competitor.

The inverse is the warning. A workflow tool that people open eight times a working day generates roughly 160 sessions per user per month before anyone does anything interesting. On an event-based tool that same usage might be cheap if your tracking is lean. Work out your sessions-per-user ratio from your existing analytics before you take any Heap quote at face value, and keep an eye on it afterward, because an unnoticed change in session volume is the sort of quiet shift in data volume that turns into a surprise renewal number a year later.

What is Heap analytics used for?

Heap is a digital insights platform built around autocapture. It records user interactions automatically, so you can define events retroactively instead of deciding in advance what to track. Teams use it for funnel analysis, user journeys, retention and conversion work, and its distinguishing pitch is that you can analyze a flow you never tagged.

Since the Contentsquare acquisition, Heap sits inside a wider experience analytics portfolio, which is where Sense, the AI layer, and the heatmaps and session replay tooling come from. That is also why some Heap capabilities are packaged as add-ons rather than plan features: they originate on the Contentsquare side of the house.

Which Heap features cost extra?

More than the tier list suggests. The ones to budget for separately:

• Session replay and heatmaps. These are add-ons on Pro, included on Premier. A great many comparison pages list session replay as a standard Heap feature. On Pro it is a line item.
• Error analysis. Same arrangement as replay: add-on on Pro, standard on Premier.
• Heap Connect, the data warehouse sync. An add-on on Pro, included on Premier. If getting Heap data into Snowflake or BigQuery is part of your plan, this is not free at the Pro tier.
• Additional years of data history. Pro and Premier both start at one year, with extra retention sold as an add-on.
• Training sessions. Offered as an add-on on Free and Growth. Professional services are available from Growth upward.

The pattern is consistent: Pro is where you get the analytics depth, and Premier is where the things Pro sells you separately become included. When you compare a Pro quote against a competitor, add the replay, warehouse and retention add-ons first, or you will be comparing an incomplete number.

Heap vs Google Analytics: which do you need?

They answer different questions and the choice is usually not either-or. Google Analytics 4 is free, session-aware, and built for understanding acquisition: where traffic came from, which campaigns converted, how your channels perform. Heap is built for understanding what happens after someone is inside your product, with autocapture so you can reconstruct a flow retroactively.

If your question is "which ad spend produced signups", GA4 answers it and costs nothing. If your question is "where in our five step setup wizard do accounts stall, and what did they click just before they gave up", GA4 will frustrate you and Heap will not. Most teams running a real SaaS product end up with GA4 on the marketing site and a product analytics tool inside the application. We go through that split properly in product analytics vs Google Analytics.

How does Heap's pricing compare to the alternatives?

The comparison is harder than it should be, because Heap publishes almost nothing and several of its competitors publish almost everything. Reported Growth contracts start around $3,600 a year, and reported deal sizes climb into five and six figures at Premier scale, but those are third-party transaction figures rather than a list price, so treat them as a range and not a quote.

For context on what the transparent end of the category looks like: PostHog publishes its entire rate card down to the sixth decimal, Mixpanel publishes a flat $0.28 per 1,000 events, and Amplitude gives away 2 million events a month forever. Userpilot and Pendo both meter monthly active users, with Userpilot publishing $299 and $849 entry prices and Pendo quoting everything above a free 500 MAU tier. The full landscape, including where each one is genuinely strongest, is in our product analytics tools roundup, and the closest published-rate matchups are covered in PostHog vs Amplitude and Mixpanel vs PostHog.

Three questions to put to a Heap salesperson before you commit:

What is my actual session count? Not users, not events. Pull it from your current analytics and ask for the quote against that number, plus realistic headroom for growth.

What is included versus added on at my tier? Specifically session replay, heatmaps, error analysis, Heap Connect and retention beyond one year. Get the all-in figure.

What happens at renewal? Ask in writing. Entry pricing tells you nothing about the year two uplift, and that is the most common complaint buyers raise across this entire category.

What no pricing page can tell you

Every tool on this page bills you for behavior, and behavior answers half the question. Heap's autocapture will show you, in exhaustive detail, that 38 percent of new accounts never reach a second session. It cannot show you that they left because an import step silently fails on files over 10MB, because nobody writes that in an event. They write it in a support ticket, a cancellation survey and a review the following week.

That is the gap AI customer feedback analysis closes: the same drop-off, with the reasons customers actually gave attached, clustered and ranked by how many accounts and how much revenue each theme touches. It runs alongside whichever analytics platform you buy rather than replacing it. If Heap's quote-only model has you weighing other options, the honest breakdown is in our Heap alternative comparison.

All Heap plan and feature details on this page were read directly off heap.io/pricing and Heap's help documentation in August 2026. Dollar figures for Growth and above are reported third-party transaction data, not list prices. Vendors change packaging often, so we recheck these roughly every four to six weeks.