Google Optimize Is Gone. The Tools That Replaced It Start at $299/Month.

On September 30, 2023, Google shut down Optimize. No fanfare. No successor product. Just a support page that said: "Any experiments and personalizations still active on that date have ended."

Somewhere between 2 and 3 million websites were running active tests that day. Overnight, they needed a replacement.

What showed up in the gap? Enterprise tools designed for conversion rate optimization agencies with dedicated experimentation teams. Not exactly what the Shopify store owner testing two product page layouts had in mind.

Two and a half years later, small websites are still figuring this out.

What Google Optimize Actually Was

Optimize was free, deeply integrated with Google Analytics, and simple enough that a non-technical founder could run an A/B test in 20 minutes. You didn't need to know statistics. You didn't need a CRO team. You picked two variants, set a goal, and let it run.

That's it. That's all most small sites need.

It wasn't perfect. The free tier had limits. The interface was occasionally frustrating. But at $0/month, it was the only legitimate A/B testing option for millions of businesses running on tight margins.

When it disappeared, those businesses didn't suddenly get bigger budgets. They just lost their tool.

Where the Market Went

The platforms that moved in to fill the gap are genuinely good tools. They're just not built for the same customer.

VWO starts at over $299/month, according to user-reported pricing on Capterra and TrustRadius. It includes heatmaps, session recordings, a visual editor, and a feature experimentation layer. Excellent if you're running a growth team. Overkill if you're testing a headline.

Optimizely doesn't publish pricing. They don't need to: their minimum engagement starts at $36,000/year with annual contracts only. That's confirmed across multiple independent sources including Vendr and Stellar. It's a serious enterprise product for serious enterprise budgets.

Convert.com sits at $199/month billed annually (or $399/month month-to-month), which is arguably the most accessible of the enterprise tier options. But "most accessible enterprise option" is still a significant investment when you're testing your first funnel.

AB Tasty reportedly starts around $60,000/year, per pricing discussions on Reddit. Not a typo.

The median competitor price across the A/B testing tool market now sits around $256/month. That's what MicroGaps found when analyzing the full landscape of tools that have emerged since Optimize shut down. The market moved up, not sideways.

What Most Small Sites Are Actually Doing

Here's the honest answer: nothing.

A lot of websites that were running experiments in 2023 just stopped. They reverted to gut feelings and the occasional Slack debate about button colors.

Some moved to Google Analytics 4's native Experiments feature, which is more capable than it used to be but still requires more technical setup and has real limitations without paying for GA4 360.

A real option that has emerged: Mida.so offers a genuinely free plan for up to 50,000 tested users per month. It's lightweight, integrates with WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow, and doesn't require any engineering time to get started. For sites under that monthly traffic threshold, it's probably the cleanest free alternative available right now.

But for sites with more traffic, or teams that need multi-project support, proper analytics integration, or anything beyond basic split testing, the jump from "free tier" to "enterprise pricing" is steep. There's almost nothing in between.

The Gap Nobody Is Filling Well

This is where it gets interesting from a market perspective.

After Google Optimize shut down, the A/B testing market split cleanly into two tiers: enterprise platforms at $200-400+/month, and free or near-free tools with hard limits. The $15-49/month range, where a bootstrapped SaaS founder or an e-commerce store with real traffic could afford to pay, is largely empty.

That's not a small market. Keyword research across related terms shows roughly 48,600 monthly searches in this category. And that's just what people are actively searching for; the number of website owners who don't know what to search for is significantly higher.

One data point from the MicroGaps research on this market stood out in how the competitive gap actually breaks down across different traffic tiers. The full report goes into specifics, but it's the kind of thing that makes the opening feel narrower and more urgent than the headline numbers suggest.

What You Can Do Right Now

If you're a website owner trying to run A/B tests without spending $300/month:

• Mida.so is the best free option for sites under 50,000 monthly tested users. Start there.
• Nelio A/B Testing is a solid WordPress plugin with paid plans significantly cheaper than the enterprise options, if your site runs on WordPress.
• Convert.com at $199/month billed annually is the most reasonable option if you need enterprise-grade features and can justify the cost.

For everything in between, the honest answer is that the market hasn't caught up yet.

For Builders Paying Attention

This pattern is familiar. A large platform retires a free tool. Enterprise software fills the vacuum but prices for its actual customer: agencies, growth teams, funded startups. The long tail of small businesses and solo founders gets left holding duct-tape solutions.

It happened with ProfitWell, which locked its previously free Stripe analytics to Paddle customers only. That left thousands of indie SaaS founders tracking MRR in spreadsheets, and it opened up the same kind of structural gap we're looking at here. The Stripe analytics dashboard opportunity followed the identical pattern.

A platform kills or restricts a free tool. Enterprise alternatives emerge. The $0-$200 range goes dark. That's exactly where the interesting micro-SaaS opportunities tend to live.

The A/B testing gap is real, the demand data backs it up, and the competitive landscape is well documented. If you want the full breakdown of where the actual opening is, the MicroGaps research report covers the specifics.

Whether someone captures this market cleanly in 2026 is a question worth watching.

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