Tool Comparisons

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  What Bitly's Link Tracking Shows You, and What It Doesn't

  Bitly is a link shortener, a redirect, and one of the biggest, creating hundreds of millions of links a month. Its tracking shows per-link clicks over time, rough location, referrers and device, with more on paid plans. But it stops at the click: once a visitor lands on your site they leave Bitly's view, so it cannot tell you what they did, whether they converted, or who they were. Use Bitly for clean short links and click counts, and add on-site tracking for what happens after.

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  What Mixpanel Actually Costs

  Mixpanel does not charge a flat fee; it charges by event volume. The Free plan covers up to 1 million events a month at no cost, which is plenty for an early-stage startup. The Growth plan starts at $0 and charges $0.28 per 1,000 events beyond the first million; Enterprise is custom. So the bill scales with how much you track, and since you decide what counts as an event, a heavily instrumented or fast-growing product can climb into the thousands of dollars.