Leaving Mixpanel?
Mixpanel is a great product-analytics tool, and a hosted one you never own. Pricing is by event volume, so the bill climbs steeply as you grow, and the generous startup year ends in a cliff. smolanalytics is one binary you own, tells you what to fix, and lets your own AI answer questions for free.
is smolanalytics a good Mixpanel alternative?
Yes, if what pushed you off Mixpanel is the bill or not owning your data. Mixpanel is a hosted product-analytics tool: your events live on their servers, pricing is by event volume so the cost climbs steeply as you grow, and the generous startup year ends in a cliff where you either pay a large bill or downgrade. Add-ons like session replay and group analytics are priced separately. smolanalytics is a single MIT-licensed Go binary you self-host free forever, or run as an isolated cloud instance from $9/month with $5-per-million overage and a dashboard that never locks. It still does funnels, retention, and paths, adds a daily verdict on what to fix, and lets your own Claude or Cursor answer questions over MCP on your own model, so there is no AI bill. Answers come from the same deterministic reports the dashboard renders, and a CI test fails the build if the two ever differ. It does not do session replay, flags, or experiments; if you need those, keep Mixpanel for them.
why people leave Mixpanel
“We were DOWNGRADED from 20M events a month to 10K… I’ve been on the search for an alternative ever since.”
Hacker News
“At one point our mixpanel bill was more than our AWS one.”
Hacker News
“MixPanel is write-once, read-forever. aka if you misspell something or change definitions you end up in a bad place.”
Hacker News
Mixpanel vs smolanalytics
| Mixpanel | smolanalytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Own your data | hosted only, on their servers | self-host the binary, or an isolated cloud instance |
| Cost as you grow | by event volume, climbs steeply | $5 per million overage, dashboard never locks |
| The free-tier cliff | startup year ends, big bill or downgrade | self-host is the free tier: unlimited, forever |
| Add-ons | replay, group analytics, flags priced separately | one price, no per-feature upsell |
| Tells you what to fix | dashboards you interrogate | a verdict, every morning |
| Ask in plain English | their own AI feature | your own AI over MCP, free, computed not guessed |
| AI vs dashboard drift | a second path that can disagree | a CI test fails our build if they ever differ |
when to keep Mixpanel
- You need session replay, feature flags, or its deep report builder and cohorts. Mixpanel does these well and smolanalytics does none of them, on purpose.
- You are still inside the free tier or the startup year and not owning the data does not bother you. Mixpanel's free tier is genuinely generous, and if the bill never bites, there is no reason to move.
Own it in 30 seconds
# no account, no sales call, your box docker run -p 8080:8080 -v $PWD/data:/data \ -e SMOLANALYTICS_DB=/data/smolanalytics.data \ ghcr.io/arjun0606/smolanalytics # dashboard + MCP at http://localhost:8080
Your events, your box, your bill under control. Point Claude or Cursor at it and ask anything: no model to pay for, no number it can make up.
questions
Is smolanalytics a good Mixpanel alternative?
Yes, if the bill or not owning your data is what pushed you off Mixpanel. Mixpanel is hosted and priced by event volume, so cost climbs steeply as you grow and the startup year ends in a cliff. smolanalytics is a single MIT-licensed Go binary you self-host free, or an isolated cloud instance from $9/month with $5-per-million overage and a dashboard that never locks. It does funnels, retention, and paths, leads with a verdict on what to fix, and your own Claude or Cursor answers questions over MCP for free. It does not do session replay, flags, or experiments.
Can I bring my Mixpanel data over?
Yes. Export your Mixpanel events to CSV or JSONL and import them with `smolanalytics import`, so your history comes with you and your graphs don't start at zero.
How is the pricing different from Mixpanel?
It is flat and cheap, and it never meters your sites or your teammates. Overage is $5 per million events (a tenth of the ~$50 the big tools charge), every charge gets an emailed receipt, and the dashboard never locks. Self-hosting the binary is unlimited and free forever.
What does smolanalytics not do that Mixpanel does?
No session replay, feature flags, or experiments, on purpose. If you need those, keep Mixpanel for them. smolanalytics is for the teams who mostly want funnels, retention, paths, and a straight answer on what to fix, that they own and can ask in plain English.
Get the verdict, not another dashboard.
Drop one snippet, ask in your editor, own your data. 14-day full trial, no credit card.