How conversion tools are priced, and what you actually pay

The five models

Free with no cap. Microsoft Clarity is the significant example: recordings and heatmaps at any volume, at no cost. The trade is that you are the analysis layer.

Session or traffic bands. Most recording and analytics tools price this way: a monthly allowance of sessions with steps up. Simple to reason about, and it has the property that a good quarter raises your bill.

Monthly tracked users, or tested visitors. Common in experimentation platforms, and the one that surprises people, because a test running site-wide can count your entire audience against the allowance whether or not they saw the variant.

Quote-only enterprise. Usually software plus people: onboarding, a strategist, a customer-success manager. Sometimes that is exactly what you are buying and the software is incidental.

Retainers, for agencies. A fixed monthly fee for a certain amount of attention, generally with a slow start while discovery happens.

What scales the bill, and when it bites

Every model except the flat and free ones grows with something you are trying to increase. That is not unfair, because the cost of service does scale with volume, but it does mean you should price the store you expect to have rather than the one you have.

Run the arithmetic at double your current traffic and again at five times. Banded pricing is rarely linear, and the band you land in at five times is the one that decides whether the tool stays in the stack.

Watch what counts as a billable unit. A session, a visitor, a tracked user and a tested visitor are four different denominators, and a tool that counts bot sessions against your allowance is charging you for traffic that will never buy anything.

The line item nobody quotes

Every tool in this category has a second price in hours, and for the cheap ones it is the larger of the two. Session recording is the clearest case: the software may cost nothing and the watching costs an afternoon a week, indefinitely, from someone senior enough to interpret what they see.

Put a rate on it: the hours each week, times a fully loaded hourly cost, times the weeks in a month. For most teams that reorders the comparison at once, and it is why so many free recording installs are quietly abandoned.

The same applies to experimentation platforms, in a different place. The software runs the test; someone still has to have the idea, build the variant, check it across devices and interpret the result. If that person does not exist, the platform’s real cost is its licence plus an agency.

What is usually excluded

Testing. Plenty of recording and heatmap tools include no testing at all, so the real stack is two products, and the comparison should be made against both.

Seats. Some platforms price per user, which turns “let the developer look at this” into a purchasing decision and reliably reduces how much the tool gets used.

Data retention. Cheaper plans often keep data for a short window. If your investigation cycle is longer than the retention window, you are paying to collect evidence that expires before you look at it.

Support and onboarding. On enterprise quotes this is often most of the value and is rarely itemised.

Why a share of revenue is a bad model here

Performance pricing sounds aligned and mostly is not, for a specific reason: charging a share of revenue requires the tool to measure its own contribution, and that same measurement sets the price. The incentive to measure generously is structural rather than moral.

It also charges you for revenue you would have earned anyway. Without a holdback there is no counterfactual, and with one, the honest figure is usually far smaller than the one a performance model invoices against.

Liftable is priced on sessions and never as a share of revenue. The receipt it is built to produce measures revenue on Shopify orders against a 10% holdback, and it is there to tell you what worked, not to size an invoice. No store has a verified line on it yet.

Building a comparison that survives contact

Write down your sessions per month, your expected sessions in a year, how many people will need access, how long you need data kept, and whether you need testing included. Five lines, and they eliminate most of the category before you speak to anyone.

Then add the hours line. Estimate honestly how much time your team will spend inside each tool each week and price it at a real internal rate. Do this before the demos, because a demo is designed to make the hours feel like fun.

Finally, ask each vendor the same two questions: what does this cost at five times my current traffic, and what is included at that level that is not included today. The answers vary far more than the headline prices do.

Sources

1. Why this guide compares models rather than prices. List prices in this category change several times a year and vary by region, contract length and negotiation. Quoting them would produce a table that is wrong within a quarter and cited for years. Check current pricing with each vendor directly; the pricing shapes described here are stable.
2. Liftable’s own pricing. The Founding Brand Programme: 14 days free, then $750–$1,500 a month depending on sessions, including implementation support. Self-serve plans at $125, $400 and $999 a month are coming later. The store scan is free for anyone. Priced on sessions, never as a share of revenue.
3. Liftable: what is built today. Liftable’s own account of what the product does, checked against the code on 2 October 2026 and shown on /how-it-works and /compare. Every figure this page gives about Liftable comes from it. No test has run on a merchant’s store and there are no published merchant results yet.

Questions