How to control your data usage

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Your data usage is likely to fluctuate as your product changes, you add new features and your business expands. All Mixpanel plans work with a cap on how many events or MTUs can be monitored. Once that limit is hit, you’ll pay the additional usage as overages with an “à la carte” price, that is slightly more expensive than the data points included in your license.

We don’t want you to pay overages! If you detect you are hitting the limit of your plan during the course of your billing cycle, you can always upgrade via our Pricing Page or reach out to your Account Manager.

Billing surprises are never nice, so here are a few ideas on how to control better your data usage:

1. First, get familiar with what your plan includes

If you have “owner” or “billing admin” permissions over your Mixpanel organization you’ll be able to access the section "Plan Details & Billing" at your Organization Settings:

Under “Plan Details” you’ll see if your plan is based on events or on Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs). It will also show if the license runs on monthly or yearly billing cycles. The example above is an event-based plan that includes 1,5M events monthly.

You can also check in real-time the data usage of the current billing cycle in the section “Data Usage” (on the right side of the screenshot). Click on “View Historical Usage” to see past billing cycles and the volumes per project.

2. Keep an eye on your email!

Our Finance team has automated email notifications so the users with “owner” or “billing admin” permissions get notified when they are about to hit the limit of their current plan. Remember to upgrade before the end of the current billing cycle so you don’t pay overages.

Forewarned is forearmed! You’ll receive notifications like this:

3. Create custom alerts

If you want to go the extra mile, an additional step to detect (even sooner!) that your data usage has increased unexpectedly is to create custom alerts based on daily usage.

For example, if your project usually tracks 100k daily events, you’ll probably want to be notified if yesterday 500k events were ingested in your project, as this would be considered as an unusually large data usage.

To make these notifications possible we’ll use the feature “Alerts” over an Insights report that checks your daily number of events, or daily number of unique users:

1. Create and save an Insights report querying “All events” with daily linear segments. You can take as an example this one in our E-Commerce demo data set.

💬 Notice that if your plan is based on events you’ll need to create a report with the calculation “Total Events”. If your plan is based on MTUs, you’ll need to create a report with the “Uniques” calculation.

1. Once the report is saved, you’ll be able to create an alert by clicking on the dot-dot-dot icon, then “Alerts” and then “Create Alert”.

2. You’ll see now a popup to customize your alert. You can rely on our automatic feature “Anomaly detection”, or set a custom threshold that needs to be met for the alert to trigger.

   Set the rest of the parameters (frequency, email, Slack…) and click on “Create Alert”.

Bonus ideas:

• If you are on an Enterprise plan, you can use the feature “Event Approval” to control when new unexpected event types are ingested. This can also point you new features being tracked, that could affect your data usage needed.
• Check from the Lexicon section of your project if there’s any event that hasn’t been queried in the last 30 days. Events with a high volume of ingestion but no queries are consuming your data usage without generating any analytics or value. Perhaps it’s the moment to stop tracking them.