Bronto

Observability Cost Calculator

Your estimated bill

How the gap grows with volume

Monthly cost by total telemetry volume, keeping your current mix of signals and hosts. Both axes are logarithmic; the dashed line marks your volume.

Cost at common scales

Annual cost with your current signal mix scaled up or down, and each competitor's multiple of Bronto.

How each price is calculated
  • Volumes: logs and traces are entered in GB/day. Metrics are entered as active series and converted to GB for per-GB vendors using the scrape interval and bytes per data point (default 150 bytes uncompressed, including labels). Metric byte sizes vary a lot by protocol and label count, so treat that conversion as the softest number here.
  • Search intensity and team size: unless you choose otherwise, search intensity is 20× when total volume across logs, traces and metrics is 1 TB a month or less, and 100× above that. Above 5 TB a month, vendors that charge per user (New Relic and Grafana Cloud) are priced for at least 10 users.
  • Bronto: $0.10 per GB ingested plus $1 per TB searched, the same rate for logs, metrics and traces, with 12 months of hot retention and unlimited users included. Search intensity applies to the total. Published plans: Starter $10/month (1 TB ingest, 20× search) and Pro $500/month (5 TB ingest, 100× search). Volumes or search beyond Pro use Enterprise usage rates.
  • Datadog: $0.10 per GB ingested plus a per-million-events indexing charge that depends on retention and billing term (30-day annual: $2.50 per million). Events are derived from volume and average event size. Searching indexed logs isn't billed separately. Traces add $31 per APM host (each includes 150 GB of ingested spans and 1 million indexed spans), $0.10/GB span ingest beyond that, and $1.70 per million extra indexed spans. APM hosts also need Infrastructure at $15 per host, which includes 100 custom metrics; every series beyond that is billed at $5 per 100. All series are treated as custom metrics, which is how Datadog bills OpenTelemetry and Prometheus metrics.
  • New Relic: first 100 GB per month free, then $0.40/GB (Original) or $0.60/GB (Data Plus, up to 90-day retention). Logs, traces and metrics share the same meter and free allowance. Full platform users: up to 5 on Standard at $10 for the first and $99 for each additional, or $349 each on Pro (annual); at least 10 are assumed above 5 TB a month.
  • Splunk: Splunk Cloud log ingest licensing priced per GB/day per year, with roughly 90 days of retention. Default rates are interpolated from third-party estimates ($8.1K/yr at 5 GB/day, $24K/yr at 20 GB/day, falling to about $800 per GB/day at 1 TB/day). Real contracts vary widely. Traces and metrics are priced on Splunk Observability Cloud's per-host tiers: $15 per host for infrastructure metrics, $60 per host once APM is included.
  • Grafana Cloud: Pro plan at $19/month, plus $0.05/GB processed and $0.40/GB written after 50 GB free each month. 30 days of retention included, then $0.10/GB per additional 30 days. Querying more than 100× monthly ingest is billed as additional written volume (applied to logs). Traces use the same per-GB rates with their own 50 GB allowance. Metrics cost $6.50 per 1,000 active series beyond 10,000, with 13 months of retention. Pro includes 3 active users, then $8 per user a month; at least 10 users are assumed above 5 TB a month. The $19 platform fee is counted once, although some sources say it applies per product.
  • Sumo Logic: two models. Flex has free log ingest and charges per TB scanned, using Sumo's own pricing-page estimate: $3.14/TB at its 500–750× profile, $2.57 at 750–1,500× and $2.05 at 1,500–2,000×. Below 500× the $3.14 rate is used. By default the scan volume matches the search intensity used for Bronto, so both platforms are priced on the same workload; Sumo's own profiles assume far heavier scanning. Flex storage is charged in credits whose dollar value isn't published for the Flex SKU, so it's left out. The Credits model uses Sumo's Cloud Flex Credit rate card: 25 credits per GB of continuous log ingest and 0.05 credits per GB stored per day, at $0.15 (Essentials), $0.2125 (Enterprise Operations) or $0.25 (Enterprise Suite) per credit. In both models, traces use 35 credits per GB and metrics 10 credits per 1,000 data points per minute per day. Prices are US region; other regions add 10–40%.
  • Dash0: priced per item rather than per GB, with no host, user or query charges: $0.60 per million log records and per million spans (30-day retention) and $0.20 per million metric data points (13-month retention), at Dash0's published monthly rates. Log and trace volumes are converted to records and spans using the average event or span size; metric data points come from active series and the scrape interval. Some third-party listings mention a base subscription with included volume; it isn't on Dash0's current rate card, so it isn't modeled.
  • groundcover: priced per host with no charge for data volume: $30 per host a month on Pro and $35 on Enterprise. groundcover runs in the customer's own cloud account (bring your own cloud), so the storage and compute that hold the data are billed by the cloud provider and aren't included unless you enter your own per-GB estimate. Retention is set by that storage. Host counts here scale with volume in the chart and scale table.
  • Cribl: priced as a log analytics stack on Cribl.Cloud, where 1 credit equals $1: Cribl Stream to ingest and route data ($0.32/GB on Cribl-hosted workers, $0.26 on hybrid), Cribl Lake to keep it ($0.05/GB-month when Cribl manages storage, $0.02 in your own bucket, charged on compressed volume) and Cribl Search to query it, which is billed on compute and entered here as a flat monthly amount. Stream's worker infrastructure, billed per worker-group hour by size, and Edge agents aren't included, so real bills run higher. Cribl is a data pipeline and lake rather than a full observability platform, so dashboards, alerting and APM may need another tool on top.
  • OpenObserve: OpenObserve Cloud Professional at $0.50 per GB ingested for logs, metrics and traces alike, plus $0.01 per GB queried, with no host or seat charges. Logs and traces keep 30 days and metrics 15 months at no extra cost; each additional 30 days of log and trace retention is $0.02/GB. By default the data queried matches the search intensity used for Bronto, so both are priced on the same workload; OpenObserve's columnar storage may scan less for the same search, which is why lower settings are offered. OpenObserve's annual-commitment discounts, Enterprise pricing and free self-hosted edition aren't modeled.
  • Honeycomb: priced on Honeycomb's 2026 Pro plan, which bills monthly event capacity at $3.00 per million events, starting at $150 for 50 million and topping out at 750 million. Every log record and every span is one event, converted from GB using the average event or span size; trace volume can be reduced by sampling. Each tier also includes metric data points (5 per event of capacity), so heavy metric use can push a team into a larger tier. Above 750 million events Honeycomb requires a custom Enterprise contract, which is shown at the Pro rate. Pro tiers are sold in fixed steps, so real bills round up to the next tier. Events and logs keep 60 days and metrics 13 months. There are no per-seat or per-host charges, and the free plan (20 million events) isn't modeled.
  • AWS CloudWatch: US East (N. Virginia) list prices. Logs cost $0.50/GB to ingest on the Standard class or $0.25/GB on Infrequent Access, $0.03/GB-month to store (charged on compressed data; about 5× compression is assumed) and $0.005 per GB scanned by Logs Insights queries. By default the data scanned matches the search intensity used for Bronto. Traces use Transaction Search at $0.35/GB, its starting tier, with the first 1% of spans indexed as X-Ray traces at no charge. Metrics are either custom metrics billed per series ($0.30 each for the first 10,000, falling to $0.02 beyond 1 million) or OpenTelemetry metrics at $0.50 per GB. Free tiers, alarms, dashboards, API requests, vended-log volume discounts and Container Insights aren't included, and other regions cost more.
  • Logz.io: consumption pricing. Logs cost $0.92 per GB ingested with 7 days of retention; each additional day costs $0.03/GB in hot storage, $0.015 in warm or $0.001 in cold, which must be restored before searching. Traces are either $0.92 per GB or $0.16 per million spans, with 10 days of retention. Metrics are $0.40 per 1,000 unique time series per day. Searches aren't billed separately. Committed-volume and Enterprise discounts aren't modeled.
  • Elastic (ELK): defaults to self-managed ELK, the open-source stack run on your own cloud machines. There's no license fee for the basic tier; the cost is infrastructure and people. Disk is the data kept for the retention period, plus about 10% index overhead, times the number of copies (2 by default: a primary and one replica), at $0.08/GB-month, typical of cloud SSD block storage. Compute is one data node per 150 GB/day of ingest, with a minimum of 3 for high availability, at $500 a month each. Engineering time is half an engineer at $180,000 a year, fully loaded, to scale, upgrade, tune and stay on call for the cluster; it stays fixed as volume changes in the chart and scale table, though large clusters usually need more. All of these are editable. Master and Kibana nodes, Logstash or other ingest servers, snapshots, network transfer and paid Elastic subscriptions aren't included. The Elastic Cloud Serverless option prices Elastic's fully managed service instead: logs and traces $0.09/GB to ingest and $0.019/GB-month to retain on Complete ($0.07 and $0.017 on Logs Essentials), metrics $0.023/GB and $0.005/GB-month on Complete, egress 50 GB free then $0.05/GB, and support beyond Standard at 5–15% of the bill. Those are Elastic's "as low as" rates for its highest volume tier.
  • Coralogix: priced per GB ingested, with no host, user or query charges. Logs default to the published $0.42/GB rate. Coralogix also prices logs by pipeline: $1.15/GB for Frequent Search (indexed, fastest queries), $0.50/GB for Monitoring (dashboards and alerts, occasional search) and $0.17/GB for Compliance (archive only); the custom mix blends those rates. Traces are $0.16/GB and metrics $0.05/GB. Long-term data is archived to the customer's own S3 bucket, compressed about 5×, for an effective ~$0.003/GB a month that AWS bills, not Coralogix; it's included so retention is comparable. Hot retention for Frequent Search logs is configurable and its cost isn't published, so it's not modeled.
  • Months are treated as 30 days. All figures are list or estimated prices before negotiated discounts, and exclude RUM, synthetics, profiling, security products and other add-ons.
Sources (checked October 2026)

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