Monthly tracked user (MTU)

A monthly tracked user (MTU) is a billing unit that counts each distinct user, known or anonymous, who generates tracked events in a month.

Part of the Learn hub and the customer data glossary.

What it means in practice

MTU pricing meters usage by audience size. The vendor counts the distinct users whose activity is tracked in a calendar month and charges against a tier or allowance. Twilio Segment is the best-known example. At the time of writing its public pricing lists a Free plan with 1,000 MTUs, a Team plan at $120 a month including 10,000 MTUs, overage of $12, $11 and $10 per additional 1,000 MTUs by volume band, and custom pricing for Business. Segment's pricing counts anonymous visitors as well as identified users. The page's FAQ mentions a flat $10 per 1,000, so confirm overage rates with Twilio before budgeting.

MTU billing ties cost to how many people appear in your data, not to the value you get from them. Campaigns, bot traffic and busy public pages raise the count even when few visitors become customers. Because "tracked user" is defined by each vendor, the contract definition matters: ask whether anonymous visitors, logged-out sessions, server-side events and merged identities each count.

MTU is one of several meters. Event-based pricing counts messages; profile-based pricing counts stored profiles (Salesforce Data 360 lists $240 per 1,000 profiles a year); consumption credits count operations; a flat licence counts none of these.

Example (retail banking): a bank's public mortgage-calculator pages attract heavy anonymous traffic. Under MTU billing each tracked visitor is billable, so a team may decide to track only authenticated sessions. That choice also supports data minimisation and removes billing as a reason to collect more than needed.

Related terms

• Consumption credits: operation-based metering.
• Perpetual licence: fixed-fee licensing.
• Event stream: the source of tracked events.
• Data minimisation: why tracking less can be a control.
• Packaged customer data platform (CDP): the products that usually meter this way.

Where it matters

• Customer data platform pricing explained: MTU, events, credits and flat licences compared.
• Twilio Segment pricing and alternatives: what MTUs cost at scale.