You drop a link in a social post, the post does better than anything else you published that month, and a few hundred people land on a page nobody has watched a stranger use. A session recording tool is the obvious way to see what happens after the click. The catch: the free plan you installed for exactly this moment often carries a monthly ceiling, and an unusually good post is the fastest way to reach it.
A session cap is not a recording-length limit, it is a headcount
The number on a session recording tool’s pricing page is a count of visits, not a budget of minutes or gigabytes. Mouseflow’s plan comparison table labels the row “Monthly sessions” and puts 500 in the Free column against 5,000 on Essential. Nothing in that row scales with how long a recording runs. A visitor who bounces in four seconds and one who reads for eleven minutes draw down the same unit. [EVIDENCE NEEDED: Mouseflow’s pricing page poses the question “What are sessions?” but the answer text only covers what happens when you run out, so the page does not state what counts as one session.]
The reset behaviour matters more than the number. That same FAQ says the account receives a refill of sessions each month depending on the plan, and that when you run out, all tracking stops until the next refill date, unless you manually request a refill or upgrade in the dashboard. It is a monthly allotment tied to a refill date, not a rolling window topping itself up as older sessions age out.
That is what makes social traffic dangerous to a free plan. A post that gets picked up can send several hundred visits onto one landing page inside a few hours. A month’s worth of traffic arrives in an afternoon, and the allotment is spent on a single day.
What five session recording tools’ free tiers actually offer
| Tool | Standing free plan? | Free-tier cap | What happens at the cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mouseflow | Yes, “Free Forever” | 500 sessions per month | All tracking stops until the next refill date, unless you manually request a refill or upgrade |
| Microsoft Clarity | Yes, “Free forever” | None stated. The site’s own line is “No limits on traffic” | No cap published, so nothing to hit |
| Lucky Orange | No. 7 day free trial only | Cheapest paid tier is Build at $32 per month paid annually, up to 3,500 monthly sessions | Trial expires on a clock, not a session count |
| Crazy Egg | No. 30 day free trial on all plans | Starter is $29 per month billed annually, 5,000 tracked pageviews and 50 recordings per month | Data collection pauses at the monthly limit and resumes on the 1st. “No overages, ever” |
| Hotjar | No pricing page of its own as of 6 September 2026. hotjar.com redirects to Contentsquare | See below | See below |
A free-plan cap meeting a social traffic spike, walked through
What follows is a worked hypothetical built on Mouseflow’s confirmed 500 session allotment. It is not a real account or a case study. The point is the arithmetic.
Picture a small team on a free Mouseflow plan with one landing page taking roughly a dozen visits a day. Over the first twenty days of the billing cycle that is about 240 sessions recorded, leaving something near 260 in the tank. Then one post on day twenty one outperforms the account’s usual output and sends 400 click-throughs to that page in an afternoon.
The first 260 of those visits record normally. Visit 261 does not, and neither does anything after it for the remaining nine days of the cycle. Per Mouseflow’s FAQ, all tracking stops until the next refill date unless somebody notices and requests a refill or upgrades. The recordings already collected are safe. Only sessions after the ceiling go unrecorded.
The asymmetry is what stings. The unrecorded half of a spike is usually the more interesting half, arriving after the post has been reshared, from audiences one or two hops removed from your followers. You end up with a clean recording of your existing audience and a blank space where the new one was.
Hotjar’s free plan doesn’t live at hotjar.com anymore
Checked on 6 September 2026, hotjar.com/pricing/ redirects to contentsquare.com/pricing/, and hotjar.com redirects to contentsquare.com/hotjar/. There is no standalone Hotjar pricing table to read, and so no live free-plan session cap published by Hotjar.
The one figure available sits on Contentsquare’s comparison page for former Hotjar users. In a table headed “Feature”, “Hotjar Free” and “Contentsquare Free”, the row for sessions captured lists 35 per day against 200k per month, a comparison the page repeats in prose.
Treat that as what it is: a vendor’s retrospective description of a plan it absorbed, published as marketing contrast on a page built to move Hotjar users onto Contentsquare. It is not a current Hotjar spec, and this post is not presenting it as one. If Hotjar matters to your decision, load hotjar.com yourself, because redirect targets change without notice mid-migration.
Tools with no free plan left to cap
Two of the five have replaced the session-cap question with a countdown clock:
- Lucky Orange offers a 7 day free trial its pricing page describes as full access to all features, Discovery AI included. There is no permanent free tier on that page. The cheapest paid plan is Build at $32 per month paid annually for up to 3,500 monthly sessions, or $39 per month on the comparison table.
- Crazy Egg runs a 30 day free trial across all plans and publishes no free tier. Starter is $29 per month, billed annually like every Crazy Egg plan, and includes 5,000 tracked pageviews and 50 recordings a month. The pricing page states plainly that Crazy Egg will never charge overages, and that when you hit your monthly tracking limits data collection pauses and automatically resumes on the 1st of the following month.
The one confirmed free tier with no cap at all
Microsoft Clarity is structurally different from the other four. Its homepage carries “Free forever” in the hero and repeats it at the foot of the page alongside “No limits on traffic”. There is no session number to run out of, so the spike scenario above has nothing to collide with.
That is a statement about what Clarity currently offers, verified against its own site on 6 September 2026. No source consulted here explains why Microsoft structures the plan this way, so this post does not speculate. If your requirement is that recording keeps running on a day when traffic is ten times normal, Clarity is the one of the five whose published terms put no number in the way.
What to check on a session recording tool’s pricing page before a social push
- Find the actual number, not the word “free”. Look for a row labelled sessions, recordings or tracked pageviews and write the figure down. Crazy Egg and Mouseflow meter on different units, so their numbers are not directly comparable.
- Check whether the reset is automatic or a request. Mouseflow’s FAQ describes both a scheduled refill date and a manual refill requested in the dashboard. One resumes on its own, the other needs somebody logged in on the day the spike happens.
- Confirm what the cap actually does. Tracking stops until the next refill date is Mouseflow’s documented behaviour. Pause and resume on the 1st is Crazy Egg’s. No limits on traffic is Clarity’s. Only the vendor’s page tells you which you bought.
- Check whether a standing free plan still exists. Lucky Orange and Crazy Egg publish trials, not free tiers. A tool that was free when you last looked may now be free for seven days.
- Do not assume mid-session behaviour. [EVIDENCE NEEDED: none of the pricing pages checked state whether a recording already in progress is saved or discarded when the cap is reached mid-session. Vendor help documentation would settle it.]
Before your next campaign
Setting up tracking on a page social traffic is about to hit? Read why privacy-first analytics tools misreport social traffic as direct and a UTM convention for tracking where social clicks actually land. For the same ceiling problem in another category, see how QR code scan limits behave once a free plan’s cap is reached.
Prices and plan terms above were fetched from each vendor’s own pricing page on 6 September 2026. This is a blog post, not Watchdog data, and not on the re-verification schedule, so confirm any figure against the live page before committing budget. followedapp is published by the team behind RecurPost, and RecurPost is covered here under the same rules as every other vendor.
FAQ
How many sessions does a free session recording plan actually record?
It depends entirely on the vendor. Mouseflow’s Free Forever plan is 500 sessions a month, after which all tracking stops until the next refill date or an upgrade. Microsoft Clarity publishes no session cap and states “No limits on traffic”. Lucky Orange and Crazy Egg publish no free plan at all, only a 7 day and a 30 day trial.
Does Hotjar still have a free plan?
As of 6 September 2026 there is no Hotjar pricing page of its own to answer that from. hotjar.com/pricing/ redirects to contentsquare.com/pricing/ and hotjar.com redirects to contentsquare.com/hotjar/. The only session figure found sits on Contentsquare’s comparison page, which describes Hotjar’s free plan as 35 per day while promoting its own 200k per month. That is Contentsquare’s characterisation on a marketing page, not a live Hotjar spec. Load the redirect target yourself rather than treat 35 per day as a current cap.
Sources
- Mouseflow pricing, HTTP 200, fetched 6 September 2026. Free plan at 500 monthly sessions, “Free Forever plan (500 sessions/month)”, and the FAQ on refills and tracking stopping.
- Microsoft Clarity, HTTP 200, fetched 6 September 2026. “Free forever” and “No limits on traffic”.
- Lucky Orange pricing, HTTP 200, fetched 6 September 2026. 7 day free trial with full access to all features, Build at $32 per month paid annually for up to 3,500 monthly sessions.
- Crazy Egg pricing, HTTP 200, fetched 6 September 2026. 30 day free trial on all plans, Starter at $29 per month with 5,000 tracked pageviews and 50 recordings, “No overages, ever”, and the pause-and-resume FAQ answer.
- Contentsquare’s Hotjar page, HTTP 200, fetched 6 September 2026, reached by redirect from hotjar.com. Comparison table listing “Sessions captured” as 35 per day for Hotjar Free against 200k per month for Contentsquare Free.