Retention & cohorts
Retention curves are why teams buy Mixpanel — and behavioural cohorts only show up once you're paying Growth or Enterprise.
What people actually say
✕Behavioural cohorts, campaign reporting and custom events are Growth-tier features — the Free plan caps you at 5 saved reports and no advanced cohort building.
Source: Mixpanel pricing page ↗✕Growth includes 12 months of data retention; getting the full 5-year history that informs long-term retention analysis requires an Enterprise negotiation.
Source: SaaSPricePulse, Mixpanel Pricing 2026 ↗✕Costs of add-ons stacking up is a recurring complaint — base plan plus Group Analytics, Data Pipelines and extra Session Replays can easily 2-3x the expected bill.
Source: Userpilot, Honest Mixpanel Reviews 2026 ↗
Retention is a window function in Postgres run nightly into a materialised view; cohorts are a saved SQL filter your PMs edit in Metabase. Five years of history isn't a sales call — it's a TimescaleDB hypertable and an S3 cold tier.