Picking a price for a brand-new product feels like it should take ten minutes and a gut feeling. We tried the gut-feeling method first. It lasted about ten minutes before we talked ourselves out of it.
So we did the less exciting thing instead: before we wrote down our own number, we actually went and looked at what real competitors charge, one pricing page at a time, rather than trusting a secondhand roundup or a “competitors typically charge” line from a pricing consultant’s blog post.
Why not just pick a round number?
Because a round number picked from a gut feeling tends to mean one of two things later: you’re leaving money on the table, or you’re asking merchants to pay more than the market will bear for what you’re actually offering. Both are avoidable if you just go look. So we went and looked — at ten tools in our own category that a Shopify store owner would realistically be comparing us against.
What we actually did
We opened each tool’s live pricing page ourselves, not a comparison chart someone else put together, and wrote down what each one actually offered at each price point: what counted as the “free” tier (if there was one), what features were gated behind which plan, and where the real jump in price happened. It’s slower than reading a roundup. It’s also the only way to know you’re comparing what’s true today, not what was true when someone else last checked.
What surprised us
Going in, we expected most of these tools to offer some kind of real free tier, since that’s the industry’s default move. Only a minority actually did once we looked closely — several “free” options turned out to be time-limited trials dressed up as a free plan, or a free tier so limited it couldn’t realistically run a real store’s reporting.
One honest caveat here: pricing pages change, sometimes without much notice. Anything specific we noticed during our own research is a snapshot of that day, not a permanent fact about any competitor. If you’re using this as a reason to check a specific tool’s current pricing before you rely on it for your own decision, that’s exactly the right instinct — go look at their live page the same way we did, not an older summary of it, ours included.
Why this matters to you
When you’re comparing analytics tools for your own store, don’t stop at the sticker price. Pull up each tool’s actual current pricing page yourself and check three things: whether the “free” tier is genuinely free and genuinely usable (not a disguised trial), which features are locked behind the plan above the one you’re looking at, and whether the price jump between tiers lines up with a real jump in what you get. That ten-minute check, done directly on the source instead of a comparison article, is the same homework we did before we set our own price — and it’s the fastest way to catch a tool that looks cheap until you actually need the feature that was never included.
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