The short answer
Heap doesn’t publish its paid pricing. Only the free tier is self-serve and shown openly: up to 10,000 monthly sessions with six months of data history, autocapture included. Everything above it — the Growth, Pro, and Premier plans — is “contact sales,” quoted on your session volume and committed annually. There is no public per-session rate, and third-party estimates for the paid plans vary so widely that none of them is worth quoting. The honest summary: a usable free tier, then a number only a sales conversation can give you.
How Heap’s pricing model works
Heap bills on sessions, not seats or events. A session is one user’s period of activity on your site or app — on web it ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, on mobile after 5. That has two consequences. First, your bill tracks traffic: the more visitors and the more often they return, the more sessions you accumulate, so cost grows with success rather than with the value you get from the tool. Second, because the rate is negotiated, two companies with identical traffic can pay very different amounts.
Autocapture is part of why the session model matters. Heap records interactions automatically once installed, so every active user generates sessions whether or not you’ve defined a single event — there’s no “track less to pay less” lever short of reducing what you collect. (For what autocapture is and how it differs from manual tracking, see the autocapture glossary entry.)
Heap’s four plans
Heap’s public plan grid lists four tiers. Exact inclusions move over time, so treat this as the shape of the ladder and confirm specifics on Heap’s own pricing page:
- Free — self-serve; up to 10,000 monthly sessions, six months of history, autocapture, and the core charts. The only tier with a number you can see.
- Growth — the entry paid tier; lifts the session cap and history limits and adds more of the analytics surface. Quoted by sales.
- Pro — adds deeper analysis (account-level analytics, alerting) and offers session replay as an add-on. Quoted by sales.
- Premier — the enterprise tier; the broadest limits, governance, and support. Quoted by sales.
Autocapture, notably, is included on every tier — so a search for “Heap autocapture pricing” really means “what does a Heap plan cost,” and the answer routes straight back to your session volume and a quote.
Why Heap’s pricing is hard to pin down
Heap has long kept paid pricing behind a sales conversation, and since the September 2023 Contentsquare acquisition it sits inside a larger enterprise-software motion. For a buyer that means three frictions: you can’t self-serve a paid plan, you commit annually, and the price scales on a metric (sessions) that’s hard to forecast a year out. It’s a reasonable model for Heap; it’s simply the opposite of what someone typing “heap pricing” into a search box is hoping to find — a clear, comparable number.
If you want to sanity-check what usage-based analytics costs at your scale, the analytics cost calculator models the event-priced vendors (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment) against $0 self-hosting. Heap isn’t in it — a session-based, quote-only vendor can’t be modelled honestly — but it frames the order of magnitude that paid product analytics reaches.
A free, open-source alternative
If the part you don’t like is the meter and the sales call, the structural fix is to own the tool. Pug is open-source product analytics under AGPL-3.0: it autocaptures the same kinds of interactions Heap popularised — page views, clicks, scrolls, form submits, plus rage and dead clicks — and gives you trends, funnels, retention, user-flow analysis, and unified profiles. Self-host it on a single Go binary and there’s no session cap and no licence fee at any volume; the managed cloud is free during open beta. Either way, your raw events stay yours and are exportable.
It’s not a feature-for-feature swap, and we won’t pretend otherwise: Heap adds retroactive event definition over everything it recorded, session replay, and the wider Contentsquare experience suite, which Pug doesn’t. The Pug vs Heap comparison lays out where each one wins, and the migrate-from-Heap guide walks the practical cutover. For the broader “what’s free and how do I run it” picture, see free analytics for startups and self-hosted analytics.