We’re a 4 person team trying to get better insights beyond basic app store metrics.
Most analytics solutions seem built for companies with data teams and big budgets. What’s actually working for you without breaking the bank?
Amplitude’s free tier gives you 10 million events per month - more than enough for smaller apps. I’d set up three main funnels: onboarding, purchase, and retention. Track one key action per screen, that’s it. Export your data weekly to a spreadsheet for deeper dives. Don’t bother with fancy dashboards or complex segments yet. Most teams get caught up tracking stuff that doesn’t actually matter.
Mixpanel’s free tier plus simple SQL queries gets you far.
Been there with a small team running mobile campaigns. We started with Mixpanel’s free tier but hit limits fast during campaign spikes.
What worked was mixing two tools - Mixpanel for user tracking and Hotjar for session recordings. Watching actual user behavior helped us catch conversion drops that raw numbers missed.
We also set up basic Zapier automations to dump key events into Google Sheets. Sounds simple, but having daily cohort data auto-populate helped us catch retention problems quick.
Biggest lesson - pick 3 metrics that directly impact revenue and ignore the rest until you scale. We wasted months on vanity metrics that looked good but didn’t help with real growth decisions.
This covers some solid free options if you want to see them in action.
Google Analytics and Firebase work well for mobile tracking. They are free and effective. Focus on a few key metrics that matter to your business. Setting up custom events for payment tracking is easy. Many teams overcomplicate things. Basic cohort tracking and conversion funnels provide enough data for smart decisions.