Alternatives / Fullstory
Fullstory session replay: free tier and sales-gated pricing
Fullstory's free plan includes 30,000 monthly sessions. Paid tiers require a sales conversation, which tells you who it is built for.
At a glance · Fullstory vs UserTapes
| Fullstory | UserTapes | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier volume | 30,000 sessions/mo | 100 sessions total |
| Paid pricing | Not published — sales call required | $29/mo, published, no call |
| Agent access | Official MCP — aggregate behavioural answers | Native MCP — full session transcripts |
| Built for | A team with an analyst and a procurement process | One developer debugging alone |
| Analytics retention | 12 months on the free tier | 30 days (90 on Broadcast) |
Fullstory pricing
| Plan | Price | Volume | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 30,000 sessions/mo | 12 months analytics retention |
| Business / Advanced / Enterprise | Not published | Not published | Request a demo for pricing |
Verified against www.fullstory.com. Pricing in this category changes often — check before you decide.
Fullstory’s free tier deserves more attention than it gets: 30,000 sessions a month with 12 months of analytics retention, at no cost. That is far more generous than UserTapes’ free tier, which is 100 sessions total. If free volume is your deciding factor, Fullstory beats us outright and it is not close.
The moment you outgrow free, though, you enter a sales process. No paid pricing is published for Business, Advanced or Enterprise — every path leads to “request a demo”. That is a deliberate choice and it tells you exactly who the product is for: teams with a procurement process and an analyst to drive it.
For a solo developer who wants to know why checkout broke for eleven people on Tuesday, that is a mismatch of scale rather than quality. Fullstory is a very good product aimed at a very different buyer.
If you do outgrow the free tier, know what you are walking into. The official MCP server and API answer aggregate behavioural questions — how many sessions hit a page, how a cohort trended — not “what happened in this specific session,” which is the question a native session-transcript MCP is built to answer instead.
What customers say about the sales process
The free tier’s reputation is good. The buying experience past it has a consistent, unflattering shape in public reviews:
“We’ve been using FullStory for 9 months. Their sales team ignores questions and uses predatory tactics… We’d either pay £300 or £3,000 per month. 10x upgrade for 10% more sessions. Get real!” — Paul_London, Trustpilot review of Fullstory, 20 August 2020
“Very unpleasant company to deal with. In particular their sales team use horrible tactics including undermining you, sending you nagging emails when you have made it clear you aren’t interested. They are not transparent in the slightest bit.” — sonatablue, Trustpilot review of Fullstory, 8 April 2022
Two reviews two years apart, both about the sales process rather than the product, is the kind of pattern worth weighing before you outgrow the free tier and have no published number to negotiate against.
UserTapes’ free tier is far smaller — 100 sessions total, no card, no expiry — but every price above it is a number on a page, not a phone call. See the full round-up of session replay tools for how Fullstory’s free tier stacks up against the rest of the category.
Switch to UserTapes if
- Sales-gated paid pricing means you can't budget without a call, and that alone is a dealbreaker
- You want your agent reading a full transcript, not an aggregate behavioural answer
- You're one developer, not a team with a dedicated analyst
- You'd rather skip the sales process former customers describe below
Stay on Fullstory if
- 30,000 free sessions a month covers your volume outright — nothing paid here beats that
- You have an analyst on staff and want best-in-class search across sessions
- You're already inside an enterprise procurement process regardless
- 12 months of analytics retention on a free plan matters more to you than a transcript