Adjust got acquired by AppLovin in 2021 for around $1 billion. That should tell you something about who it's built for.
The product is genuinely good. Fraud prevention, audience segmentation, deep linking, multi-touch attribution, cohort analysis — it does all of it, and it does it well. If you're running a mobile game with millions of installs and spending six figures a month on user acquisition, Adjust earns its keep.
But if you're a developer making £400 a month from your app and spending maybe £50 on TikTok campaigns, you're in the wrong building. You walked into a corporate law firm to ask about a parking ticket.
The actual problem with Adjust at small scale
It's not that Adjust is bad. It's that the cost-to-value ratio breaks down when you're small.
There's no public pricing page. You fill in a form, talk to someone in sales, and get quoted based on your volume. Developers I've spoken to report numbers ranging from $500 to $2,000 a month for paid plans, though it varies wildly depending on what you need.
Even if you could get it for $500 a month, that's £400. If your app makes £400 a month in revenue, you'd be spending 100% of it on attribution. That's not a business decision. That's a donation.
The SDK is also heavy. Adjust tracks a lot of data points — device info, session data, event tracking, ad revenue, purchase verification. All of that has a cost in binary size, battery usage, and privacy surface area. For a simple app, you're carrying weight you don't need.
And the dashboard assumes you have a growth marketer who knows what CPIs, eCPAs, and ROAS mean at a glance. If you're a solo developer who just wants to know whether Reddit or TikTok sold more copies of your app, the dashboard is going to feel like a cockpit when you need a speedometer.
What's actually out there
AppsFlyer
The most direct Adjust competitor. Similar feature set, similar market position, similar pricing conversations with sales teams.
AppsFlyer has a free tier called the Zero plan, which gives you basic attribution for up to 10,000 conversions. That's more generous than Adjust's entry point. If you're small enough to stay under that cap, it's genuinely free and functional.
The paid tiers start at around $0.05-0.07 per conversion. The catch: you pay for every conversion, including organic installs you didn't drive through any campaign. That adds up fast if your app has decent App Store visibility.
AppsFlyer is worth considering if you need something comparable to Adjust but want a free starting point.
Branch
Branch comes at attribution from the deep linking side. Their core product is smart links that route users to the right place — app if installed, store if not, web fallback if neither. Attribution is layered on top of that.
If you need deep linking anyway, Branch makes sense because you get attribution as part of the package. If you don't need deep linking, the setup complexity isn't worth it just for attribution.
Branch has a free tier that covers basic functionality, but feature limits push you toward paid plans fairly quickly. And the setup is involved — universal links, app links, SDK integration, dashboard configuration. Plan for a day or two of implementation, not an afternoon.
Kochava
Kochava is the option that comes up when you specifically search for cheaper alternatives. Their Free App Analytics product is legitimately free with unlimited installs and basic attribution.
The free version handles install attribution, basic event tracking, and gives you a functional dashboard. It won't do fraud detection, advanced attribution models, or deep linking — those are paid features.
For a developer who just needs to know which ad campaigns are driving installs, Kochava's free tier does the job. The dashboard is less polished than Adjust's but the data is there.
Singular
Singular's angle is combining attribution with marketing cost data. It pulls spend information from your ad accounts (Meta, Google, TikTok) and matches it against conversion data so you can see ROI per channel in one place.
That's useful if you're running campaigns across five platforms and want a single view of what's working. It's less useful if you're running one TikTok campaign and one Reddit post and already know exactly how much you spent on each.
Pricing is quote-based. Expect enterprise-level numbers.
Airbridge
A Korean company that's been expanding internationally. They focus on "people-based" attribution and have better web-to-app tracking than most competitors. Their pricing is published on their website, which is refreshing in a market where everyone else hides it behind a contact form.
Worth looking at if you need cross-platform attribution (web + app) and want more pricing transparency.
LinkOwl
I built LinkOwl, so read this with that in mind.
The entire reason LinkOwl exists is because I had an app making a few hundred pounds a month and couldn't justify spending even £100 on attribution. I just wanted to know which of my marketing links drove purchases.
LinkOwl works differently from the tools above. There's no monthly fee. You pay 5p per purchase that gets attributed to one of your tracked links. Create a link, share it wherever, and when someone clicks through, installs, and buys something, the purchase shows up against that link. It hooks into RevenueCat and Superwall webhooks for the purchase tracking.
The SDK takes about five minutes to add — a few lines of Swift or React Native. No deep linking setup, no universal links, no postback configuration.
It won't do fraud detection. It won't aggregate your ad spend. It won't build cohort analyses. It answers one question well: which marketing link drove this purchase? If that's all you need, it costs almost nothing.
Making the choice
Here's how I'd think about it:
If your monthly ad spend is over £5,000 and you need fraud detection, multi-touch attribution, and cohort analysis — go with Adjust or AppsFlyer. They're expensive because they're comprehensive, and at that spend level the cost is justified.
If you want free basic attribution and can live with limited features — Kochava's free tier is the best no-cost option available.
If you need deep linking as well as attribution — Branch, despite the setup time.
If you're a solo developer or small team who mostly cares about which marketing channels drive actual purchases — LinkOwl. Five pence per sale, no monthly commitment.
The worst thing you can do is sign up for a tool built for companies spending £50,000 a month on user acquisition when you're spending £50. You'll drown in features you don't need, pay for data you can't act on, and probably give up before the SDK is properly integrated.
Pick the tool that matches where you are now. Not where you hope to be in two years.