How much does Northbeam cost in 2026?

Northbeam's pricing page lists Starter from $1,500 per month for brands spending under $1.5 million a year on ads, Professional from $3,500 per month for up to $500,000 a month in ad spend, and custom quotes for Growth (agency-bundled, under $200,000 a month) and Enterprise (over $500,000 a month). These are starting prices; the actual quote depends on spend and data volume.

Is Northbeam only for Shopify?

The Starter plan effectively is. Integration with any e-commerce platform other than Shopify is listed as a Professional feature, and direct integration with custom builds is Enterprise. Non-Shopify brands should budget for Professional at $3,500 a month and up.

What is Northbeam MMM Plus?

MMM Plus is Northbeam's media mix model. It is trained and optimized daily, not quarterly, according to Northbeam, and uses Northbeam's own attribution data as an input. It is an optional add-on on the Enterprise tier and needs roughly 90 days of clean data to stabilize.

Is Northbeam worth it for a brand spending $30,000 a month on ads?

Usually not yet. At that spend the $1,500 minimum is a large share of the budget, the models have limited signal, and the onboarding ramp is the same as for a much larger brand. A self-serve attribution tool such as Arktis covers multi-touch attribution, conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform and session recordings from $49 a month, and Northbeam becomes worth revisiting above roughly $250,000 a month across several channels.

What is the cheapest Northbeam alternative?

Arktis is priced on traffic rather than ad spend, from $49 a month, with a 7-day free trial on the Growth plan. Triple Whale has a free plan with first and last-click attribution, and its Shopify App Store listing showed paid plans from $219 a month on 1 October 2026. Lifetimely is the cheapest option if profit and LTV reporting is what you actually need.

Northbeam Pricing 2026: Plans, True Cost, Alternatives

Q: Does Northbeam have a free trial?

No. Northbeam sells through a demo and a contract. Its pricing FAQ describes Starter as month-to-month, usage-based pricing for early-stage Shopify brands, while Professional and Enterprise are annual terms with annual or semi-annual billing. You get access to your data after signing, not before.

Northbeam's 2026 plans explained from its own pricing page, what 'starting at' really means, the hidden onboarding cost, and an honest Arktis vs Northbeam comparison.

Northbeam is the attribution platform serious DTC brands graduate to, and its pricing says so. On Northbeam's own pricing page in September 2026, Starter is listed from $1,500 per month, Professional from $3,500 per month, and Growth and Enterprise are quote-only. Those are starting points: plans are matched to your ad spend, the quote is sized by your pageview volume, Starter is month-to-month and Professional and Enterprise are annual terms. This guide walks through each tier, what the "starting at" language actually means for your invoice, the onboarding cost nobody puts on the pricing page, and where Arktis, the tool we build, is the better fit for brands that are not yet spending six figures a month on ads.

Northbeam pricing plans in 2026

Northbeam organizes its plans by how much you spend on advertising, not by features alone. All four tiers were read directly from the pricing page on 3 September 2026 and rechecked on 1 October 2026. Every tier includes ad credits from Northbeam's ad platform partners, which is a promotional perk rather than a discount on Northbeam itself.

Growth: custom pricing through an agency partner

Growth is aimed at seven-figure brands spending under $200,000 a month on ads that want Northbeam attribution bundled with hands-on agency support. Pricing is custom and built into an engagement with a preferred Northbeam agency partner, so you are buying media buying and strategy services with Northbeam included rather than the software on its own. The page lists up to $50,000 in partner ad credits. This is the tier to ask about if you already work with an agency, and the one to skip if you want to run your own attribution.

Starter: from $1,500 per month

Starter is for brands spending less than $1.5 million a year on ads, roughly $125,000 a month, and is listed at $1,500 per month "for maximum value," which is Northbeam's phrasing for a starting price. It includes independent first-party multi-touch attribution across all your ad channels, customizable omnichannel dashboards, custom attribution via Northbeam Apex to feed enriched conversion data back into ad platforms, view-through attribution through the Clicks plus Deterministic Views model, and access to the Northbeam MCP. It also carries up to $100,000 in partner ad credits. The important limit is platform coverage: integration with any e-commerce platform beyond Shopify is listed as a Professional feature, so a Starter customer is effectively a Shopify customer.

Professional: from $3,500 per month

Professional is for growth marketers spending up to $500,000 a month on ads. It adds everything in Starter plus unlimited users, data exports and integrations, integration with any e-commerce platform rather than only Shopify, a dedicated Media Strategist, more options for data refresh frequency for real-time optimization, and incrementality testing as an optional add-on. Partner ad credits rise to $150,000. Third-party pricing guides in 2026 quoted Professional anywhere between $2,500 and $5,000 a month, which brackets the $3,500 that Northbeam lists and suggests the quote moves with data volume in both directions.

Enterprise: custom, for more than $500,000 a month in ad spend

Enterprise is for teams spending more than half a million dollars a month. It layers on media buying guidance from Northbeam's Media Strategy team, a dedicated Customer Success Manager and Slack channel, optional hourly conversion data for high-frequency buying, export of granular touchpoint data, global or regional dashboards, direct integration with custom e-commerce builds, and the two headline measurement products as optional add-ons: Media Mix Modeling Plus and Incrementality. Up to $200,000 in partner ad credits. Northbeam's own guidance in its pricing FAQ is to choose Enterprise once you spend more than $250,000 a month on performance marketing. Northbeam reports that Enterprise customers saw a 37 percent increase in ROAS, a 14 percent increase in conversion rate and a 20 percent decrease in CAC over a year, which is the vendor's own figure and should be read as such.

What "starting at" means for your invoice

Northbeam's pricing page includes a FAQ titled "Why do plans start at the rates mentioned, what will be my actual price," and the honest summary is that the list price is a floor. Northbeam's own answer is that your monthly price is informed by the volume of data in your business, measured in pageviews, so a high-traffic store pays more than a low-traffic store on the same tier, and the list price is an initial estimate until they have seen your data. Contract terms follow the tier: Starter is month-to-month, usage-based pricing for early-stage Shopify brands, while Professional and Enterprise are annual terms with annual or semi-annual billing, which at Professional's list price means committing around $42,000 a year rather than running a monthly experiment. There is no free trial. You book a demo, negotiate a contract, and get access after signing. If you want to see your own data in the product before committing, that is not how Northbeam sells.

The true cost is the subscription plus a quarter of your team's time

The subscription is the visible part. Reviews and implementation guides agree on the rest: two to four weeks of installation with an onboarding specialist, then a 14 to 30 day model warm-up before reports are decision-grade, and around 90 days of clean data before MMM Plus stabilizes. Northbeam is built for operators who already understand the difference between multi-touch attribution and media mix modeling and know what they want to measure. Brands without a dedicated growth marketer or media buyer report feeling lost in the first month or two. On G2 the platform holds a 4.5 out of 5 rating from a small base of 16 reviews, with accurate data and clear reporting praised and complexity for new users the recurring caveat. Budget one to two months of internal labor before Northbeam pays for itself, and be honest about whether someone on your team will own it.

What you get for the money

The reason brands pay this much is measurement depth. Northbeam's first-party pixel plus server-side data holds up better than pixel-only tools after iOS 14, and its multi-touch attribution lets you compare models side by side rather than trusting one blended number. Clicks plus Deterministic Views attributes revenue to ads people saw but did not click. Apex pushes enriched first-party conversion data back into Meta, Google and TikTok to improve their delivery algorithms. Creative Analytics breaks performance down to the individual ad. And MMM Plus is a media mix model that is trained and optimized daily, not quarterly, according to Northbeam. Integrations cover Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, Shopify and Google Analytics, with Amazon, retail media networks and offline campaigns needing custom connectors or CSV uploads. If you spend across five or more channels and need to justify budget moves to a finance team, this is the most complete measurement stack available to a DTC brand, and our attribution models guide explains the multi-touch models that sit underneath it.

Where Northbeam is the wrong fit

Northbeam is honest about being an enterprise-grade product priced for meaningful ad spend, so most of the mismatches are about scale. If you spend under about $50,000 a month on ads, the models will not have enough signal to be useful and the subscription will be a large share of your marketing budget. If you sell on WooCommerce, BigCommerce, a headless storefront or through Stripe, you need Professional, from $3,500 a month, just to connect your store. If your team is one founder and a freelancer, the learning curve and the 30 to 60 day ramp are real costs. And if you want to watch what a visitor actually did on your site, Northbeam does not record sessions, it models attribution from events, so the qualitative "why did they leave at checkout" question is out of scope.

Arktis vs Northbeam

We build Arktis, so weigh this section accordingly. The two tools answer the same core question, which campaign deserves credit for this order, with different economics and a different scope.

On price, Northbeam scales with ad spend and starts at $1,500 a month with annual terms from Professional up. Arktis scales with traffic and publishes every tier on its pricing page: Starter at $49 a month for up to 50,000 monthly tracked users, Growth at $149 for up to 250,000 with session recordings and custom attribution models, and Scale at $349 for unlimited users with raw export and API access. A brand spending $30,000 a month on ads pays the same as one spending $300,000 if their traffic is similar.

On attribution, both capture click IDs from Meta and Google, both build multi-touch journeys across sessions, and both let you switch between first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay and position-based models. You can try the model comparison on our free attribution model tool before installing anything. Northbeam goes further with view-through attribution, Apex conversion enrichment and MMM Plus, none of which Arktis offers. If those three are on your requirements list, Northbeam is the answer and the price is the price.

On scope, Arktis includes session recordings gated behind explicit visitor consent, so you can watch the sessions of buyers who converted, filtered by source, in the same product as the attribution view, and it connects Stripe and Shopify orders back to the visitor journey without a platform surcharge. It is also built privacy-first, with consent enforced at the database level rather than configured in a consent tool, which matters for European brands. Our guide to GDPR compliant analytics covers what that means in practice.

On time to value, Arktis is a single script tag plus a store connection and shows data the same day. Northbeam is a sales cycle, a contract and a month of onboarding. On integrations, Northbeam is well ahead today: Arktis's Facebook Ads sync is live, the tracker already captures gclid, and Google Ads and TikTok campaign sync are planned but not shipped, so their spend is entered manually per platform and period for now.

The simple rule: under roughly $100,000 a month in ad spend, Arktis gives you multi-touch attribution, conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform next to synced Meta spend, and session recordings for a small fraction of Northbeam's price and none of its ramp. Above $250,000 a month across many channels, with a team that will use MMM and incrementality testing, Northbeam earns its tier. In between, run Arktis first and graduate when the budget questions outgrow it.

Other Northbeam alternatives

Triple Whale is the closest peer, priced on revenue rather than ad spend, with a free plan, a paid Foundation tier that its Shopify App Store listing showed at $219 a month on 1 October 2026, and Moby automations that Northbeam does not have. We compare the two directly in Triple Whale vs Northbeam, and our Triple Whale alternatives guide compares it with six other tools including Hyros, which fits call-based and high-ticket funnels, and AdBeacon, which prices dynamically on tracked revenue with a 30-day free trial. For a Shopify brand that mainly wants profit and lifetime value reporting rather than attribution, Lifetimely starts free and runs from $79 a month.

How to decide

Add up three numbers: your monthly ad spend, the number of paid channels you actively manage, and the hours per week someone on your team can give an attribution tool. If the first is above $250,000, the second is above four, and the third is real, Northbeam is a defensible buy at its list price. If any of the three is small, the smarter sequence is to start with a self-serve tool, prove that multi-touch attribution changes your budget decisions, and revisit Northbeam when the spend justifies the contract. Either way, install the new tool alongside whatever you use today and compare attributed revenue per campaign for one full customer-journey length before you switch anything off.