A pricing and measurement metric used by product-analytics platforms, Monthly Tracked Users (MTU) quantifies the number of distinct users a product tracks in a calendar month, regardless of how many events each of them generates. Amplitude popularized the model, and it remains the basis of many analytics, feature-flag, and experimentation platform price lists.
How It’s Counted
One user, once per month: Any user, identified or anonymous, who triggers at least one tracked event in the month counts once, whether they generated one event or ten thousand.
- Anonymous inflation: A visitor who appears on multiple devices, or before and after logging in, can count multiple times unless the platform merges those identities, a common source of surprise bills.
- Vendor variation: Each platform defines the details differently (bots, API-only events, imported data), so quoted MTU allowances are not directly comparable across tools.
MTU vs. Event-Based Pricing
MTU pricing favors products whose users are few but highly engaged: unlimited events per user at a fixed per-user cost. Event-based pricing favors the opposite: large audiences that each do a little. This is why high-traffic, low-engagement properties (content sites, marketing sites) often find MTU plans expensive relative to event plans, while SaaS products with daily-active users get better value from them.
Additional Acronyms for MTU
- MTU - Maximum Transmission Unit
