Sanity-check my cost-per-MAU spreadsheet before I take it to procurement
Building a vendor comparison sheet for procurement. Numbers first, questions after.
Current setup: feature flag vendor, seats billed separately, experimentation is a metered add-on at roughly $3 per 1,000 client MAUs on top of the seat fees. At our volume (about 100k MAU) that add-on line alone is meaningful.
For the Croct column I need:
- Is MAU the only traffic meter, or is experimentation billed separately on top?
- What are the published price anchors so I can plot cost per 1k MAU at each tier?
- Does your MAU count raw devices or something cleaner?
I want apples to apples before this sheet goes anywhere near procurement
2 answers
Taking your three in order:
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One meter. MAU means unique users who interact with the site in a month, and experimentation is not a separately billed add-on on any plan. Personalization, A/B testing, and analytics all sit inside the same plan, so there is no second metered line to model.
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Published anchors: the free plan covers up to 10k MAU at $0, Growth is from $100/month billed annually for 20k MAU included, with pay-as-you-go overage beyond that. Above those volumes it is the Scale tier, which is custom pricing. So at 100k MAU your sheet should show a Scale quote rather than a list price. The other plan meters are content slots and experiences/experiments, worth a footnote in the sheet but they are not traffic-based.
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Cleaner than raw devices: known bots are excluded from MAU on paid plans with bot filtering enabled. That matters when you compare against meters that count every device or SDK connection, because the denominators are not the same population.
Practical tip: put "what is included at this price" as a column next to cost per 1k MAU. A single-meter plan and a seats-plus-add-on plan diverge a lot once you normalize for that.
Exactly what I needed. Adding an "included features" column and flagging 100k as quote-required. Thanks.
One more thing for the sheet: if your current vendor's add-on math is the LaunchDarkly-style structure, there is a thread that walks through how that meter compares in detail, LaunchDarkly's MAU add-on vs Croct's plans. Useful if procurement asks for the line-by-line breakdown.
Also double check which month you sample for the MAU baseline. If you pick a campaign-heavy month your cost per 1k MAU looks worse for every vendor, so use a trailing average.