Mozart Data announces free tier to encourage smaller businesses to get on platform

Mozart Data came out of the Summer 2020 Y Combinator cohort with an idea to provide a data stack in a box for companies. Since then, it has raised $19 million and attracted 100 customers, but the founders recognize that to attract new users to the platform, especially in today's economic environment, might take some creativity.

Today, the company announced Mozart Sonata, a free tier (and fun play on words), meant to help companies get comfortable with the platform and perhaps eventually grow into the pay versions of the product, Peter Fishman, CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch.

"We wanted to get people using our data infrastructure earlier and earlier, and so we tailored a solution for those companies, who might be facing more extreme economic headwinds," Fishman said.

The company offers a number of services involved in processing data including extracting the data from a variety of sources, placing it in a data warehouse, Mozart's or Snowflake, and then putting that data to work in dashboards, charts and alerts. The idea is to provide all these services for the customer from a single vendor.

The approach appears to be working. The startup doubled the number of customers using the platform since last year's $15 million Series A funding announcement, but the founders wanted to get more people involved. The freemium model builds a natural top of funnel for the product, while making it accessible to a group of potential users, who might not be far enough along to pay for a solution.

"It's certainly the case that we've always liked the land and expand idea, and this is just sort of the extreme of that idea where [we] can bet on the product being so great that [we] can actually not just sell it initially for a small contract and grow that contract, but offer a free tier and have a number of those people convert into paying customers [eventually]," Fishman said.

As company co-founder and CTO Dan Silberman pointed out, this is a way to see how the product works to connect to data sources and build tooling around that data. "In practice, that means you can usually get like one executive dashboard, or a little bit of data alerting on your data in Salesforce or something like that," Silberman said.

Once you see the value and you want to explore more, you would need to move to one of the pay tiers. "And then when you see that's providing you value, and now you want these other dashboards or you want to add these other data sources, then you might start bumping up against the limits of the free plan," he said.

Mozart Sonata is available starting today. Mozart Data launched in 2020 and today has 100 customers and 25 employees.