Crazyegg == crazy expensive
Update: The nice folks at Crazyegg contacted me a few hours after I posted this, and though many different things were discussed and an informative dialogue was begun, I’m writing this update only to point out that they offer a free 5000-clicks/month plan, something I should have noted in the original piece.
Unless I’m missing something, the Crazyegg stats-tracking service seems to be way overpriced, especially in light of the free (or pay-once) offerings out there.
I mention this only because the blogosphere can’t seem to contain its enthusiam about it (indeed, I borrowed this title from 37signals’ recent post, Crazyegg = crazy good), but no one ever mentions the price, and, well, the prices are ridiculous.
As far as I can tell, the service offers three basic things, which are all just different presentations of the same click data: Overlay, List, and Heatmap. The heatmap feature is what has really set the blogosphere on fire, but is this one simple view worth $20-$100 a month? Does it really add anything to the overlay view, which is already available for free through Google Analytics? Does it look cool? Of course, and I’d love to use it myself, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay $50/mo (more than twice my actual webhosting costs) to get a pretty picture, whose ultimate significance can be derived for free from other services. Let me reiterate: save the pretty picture, this service offers nothing new. Moreover, with a little work, you can actually create a very similar picture for free, and I don’t think it’s going to be too long before someone creates a Pepper for Mint to accomplish the same.
If I’m wrong about this and/or have missed something, please correct me. I understand they are offering something somewhat innovative and their no-setup, everything-is-done-on-our-end approach will appeal to some people, but a high monthly cost for something that does so very little just doesn’t sit too well with me and I’m curious to know why no one else has taken issue with this aspect of the service.