The new "Business Bundle" at €1,450/month: pricing SMEs out of privacy

General questions
1

Hi everyone,

I’m writing this because I’ve been a huge advocate for Matomo over the years. As an agency that works closely with Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), I have always championed this platform as the gold standard for GDPR-compliant, data-owned analytics. However, I need to express some serious concerns about the new “Business Bundle” priced at €1,450 per month.

This pricing structure doesn’t just make Matomo a hard sell for SMEs—it makes it completely impossible to even bring to the table. I want to break down exactly why this pricing model is fundamentally disconnected from SME reality.

For a small or mid-sized business, €1,450 a month translates to €17,400 a year. In the SME world, that is not an “analytics software” budget; that is a part-time employee’s salary. Most of my clients run on lean margins and operate with software budgets that max out at maybe €2,000–€4,000 annually for their entire marketing tech stack.

When an SME sees a price tag of nearly €20k a year just to get a fully-featured setup, the conversation ends instantly.

The current pricing creates a massive, unbridgeable chasm. Essential premium features like Multi-channel Attribution and Cohorts are now locked away in an enterprise-level bracket. But what about the SME that desperately needs multi-channel attribution and cohorts to justify their modest ad spend?

By locking these essential marketing features behind a €1,450/month paywall, you aren’t forcing SMEs to upgrade. You are forcing them to leave.

Also - it is a misconception that SMEs only need a handful of user seats. Providing just 4 users (since the "anonymous user can not be disabled) on lower tiers is vastly insufficient for any serious setup. Even a small organization needs to follow basic security best practices, which dictate separated accounts with strict role-based access control. A standard, secure setup requires at minimum:

  • Admin user account for core configuration.

  • Marketing/Analyst read only user account for daily reporting.

  • API read-only account for external dashboards (e.g., Looker Studio, Grafana).

It work with a theoretical mini org, but not for any real company. When you restrict user accounts, you force SMEs to share logins and compromise their internal security. Pushing companies into an astronomical €1,450/month price bracket just so they can practice basic IT security without sharing credentials is a fundamentally flawed approach.

We all want to support an ethical, open-source web. But businesses are pragmatic. When faced with this pricing, SMEs will look at the market and take one of two paths:

  • Reverting to the GA4 trap: They will simply accept the privacy risks and go back to Google Analytics because it’s free.

  • Pivoting to lightweight alternatives: They will move to tools like Plausible, Fathom, or PostHog, which offer predictable pricing that actually scales sensibly with a growing business.

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2

Hi @cbolstad ,
Welcome in this comunity forum.

I completely understand your concern. €1,450/month is a very difficult number to justify for many SMEs, especially when their entire marketing technology budget may be only a few thousand euros per year.

However, before an agency moves away from Matomo, I think there is another option worth seriously considering: Matomo On-Premise (self-hosted).

For anyone who hasn’t considered it before, Matomo On-Premise is the self-hosted version of Matomo. The Matomo Core software is free and open source. Instead of paying Matomo a large monthly Cloud subscription, you host your own Matomo instance on a VPS/server and therefore retain control over the infrastructure and data. Of course, you still have the cost of hosting, backups, security, maintenance, and any premium plugins you choose to use.

For an agency, I would actually consider going one step further and running two Matomo instances:

1. Free/Core instance
For SMEs that don’t need premium functionality. This instance would use Matomo’s free/core functionality only, keeping the cost essentially limited to infrastructure and maintenance.

2. Premium instance
For clients who need features such as Multi-Channel Attribution, Cohorts, etc. Those clients could share an instance where the required premium plugins are licensed.

This separation can also make commercial sense because premium plugins are not simply something you can enable for one specific website/client while hiding them from every other website on the same instance. Once a premium plugin is installed/licensed on an instance, its functionality is generally available at the instance level. Separate instances therefore give an agency much better control over which client group gets premium functionality.

And the infrastructure cost may be surprisingly reasonable.

For example, depending on the traffic volume, a properly configured VPS with 4–8 CPU cores, 8–16 GB RAM, SSD storage, automated backups and appropriate security can potentially host a substantial number of SME websites. The exact cost really depends on the total monthly traffic and data retention requirements.

So, rather than assuming that Matomo necessarily means €17,400/year, I’d be happy to help estimate the actual On-Premise cost.

If you’re interested, could you share approximately:

  • Total number of websites you manage

  • Combined monthly pageviews/hits across those websites

  • Approximate number of monthly visits

  • How long you need to retain historical data

  • Whether you need premium plugins such as Heatmap session recording, Funnels, Forms, Custom Reports ect. for all clients or only some of them
    Here you can see all plugins: https://plugins.matomo.org/

With those numbers, I can give you a rough infrastructure estimate for running Matomo On-Premise, including server resources, backups and maintenance.

It may turn out that a self-hosted setup costs a fraction of the €1,450/month Cloud Business Bundle, while still giving SMEs the privacy, ownership and analytics capabilities that originally made Matomo attractive to them.

3

Hi @Naser_Aslam, thanks for the warm welcome and for taking the time to write such a detailed reply.

I think there’s a small misunderstanding I should clear up, and it’s my fault for not being explicit enough: I’m not talking about Matomo Cloud. My customers already self-host. The link in my post goes to https://plugins.matomo.org/special-offers - the new bundle pricing for the premium plugin licences for On-Premise. That’s where the €1,450/month figure comes from, on top of our own infrastructure.

So unfortunately self-hosting isn’t the escape hatch here. The Core software is of course still at no cost, and the server infrastructure already exist. The problem is that the moment an SME needs a reasonable number of users or Multi-Channel Attribution/Cohorts, they hit an insane bundle pricing. And: monthly hits is now also a factor for pricing!

  • Team Bundle: from €275/month — up to 4 users, 5M hits/month
  • Business Bundle: from €1,450/month — up to 20 users, 30M hits/month
  • Enterprise Bundle: from €3,400/month — up to 50 users, 100M hits/month

Compare that to the legacy entry bundles the same page lists as no longer available for new purchases: Content Optimization from €549/year, Growth from €1,099/year, Premium from €1,649/year.

4

Hi Christian,

Thanks for taking the time to share this feedback. Pricing has indeed increased for our bundles for 5+ users, but there is some nuance to how these prices work and there are certainly options for setting up new customers with Matomo in a way that works for them. For example, plugins can still be purchased individually, and grandfathered pricing is available for existing customers. Please get in touch with support - we’ll set up a time to learn about what you typically recommend to your clients and see what options are available for them.

5

Hi @cbolstad

Thanks for the clarification. And @Jason_1282 thanks for jumping in and clearing up the distinction between the premium plugin licences and the bundle/support plans. That distinction is important, and I think your offer to have a call is probably the best next step for anyone trying to understand the new model.

Cristian, I would definitely take Jason up on that call. Since this is a relatively new pricing/licensing structure, I think getting the answer directly from the Matomo team is much better than making assumptions from the pricing page.

There is, however, one question I would be particularly interested in hearing the answer to from an agency perspective:

How does Matomo intend agencies to handle premium plugins when multiple independent clients are hosted on the same On-Premise instance?

For example, suppose an agency has 20 SME clients on one Matomo instance. Client A has paid for Multi-Channel Attribution, while Client B only uses the free/core functionality.

If premium plugin licensing/functionality is applied at the Matomo instance level rather than being assignable to individual websites/clients, how is an agency expected to handle that scenario?

Ideally, there would be some mechanism to assign a premium plugin licence to specific websites/clients, so an agency doesn’t have to effectively purchase premium functionality for every customer simply because one customer needs it.

I think this is an especially important question for agencies because our economics are quite different from those of a single company running its own Matomo instance.

So I’d be very interested to hear Jason/Matomo’s answer on this. That clarification alone could make a significant difference to how agencies evaluate the new pricing model.

6

I think the concern about SME affordability is very understandable. €1,450 per month is a significant jump for a company that may only need a few advanced analytics capabilities, and the user-account limitation is an especially important point from a security perspective.

I also agree that pricing isn’t just about the absolute cost. Predictability and being able to scale gradually are important when you’re dealing with smaller clients with limited marketing budgets.

At the same time, I think Matomo’s privacy and data-ownership advantages remain valuable, so it would be great to see a middle tier that gives SMEs access to features such as cohorts, attribution, and sufficient user roles without requiring an enterprise-level commitment.

For agencies, having a clear privacy-focused analytics solution that can scale from a small client to a larger organization would make the platform much easier to recommend.