Tools: Self-Hosted Observability: $20/month vs $800/month

The SaaS Quote (Real Numbers) ## The Self-Hosted Stack ## What We Actually Run ## The Hidden Cost: Time ## What You Lose ## What You Gain ## Real Production Numbers ## When SaaS Makes Sense ## Migration Path ## The Realistic Take I run Logtide's production environment, handling 500k logs/day, on a €5.49/month Hetzner server. Datadog quoted me $800/month for the same workload. Here's the honest cost breakdown. I plugged our actual usage into Datadog's pricing calculator: Total: $516/month just for basics. Add retention beyond 15 days? Another $100-200/month. Want custom metrics? More money. Need security monitoring? Keep adding. Real-world Datadog bills easily hit $800-1,200/month for this workload. What you actually need: Infrastructure (Hetzner CX33): Total infrastructure: $9/month Add a domain ($12/year = $1/month) and SSL (Let's Encrypt = free). All-in cost: ~$10-20/month depending on backup strategy. Our production setup on that €5.49 server: Be honest about this part. Total setup: ~10 hours one-time Total ongoing: ~1 hour/month If your time is worth $100/hour: Still way cheaper than Datadog ($9,600/year minimum). The time cost drops significantly after setup. Let's be honest about the downsides. No fancy UI out-of-the-box: Storage with TimescaleDB compression: Datadog for same period: ~$4,800 Self-hosting isn't always the answer. If you're on Datadog and curious: Week 1: Run both in parallel Total migration time: ~16 hours spread over 4 weeks. For most small-to-medium deployments, self-hosted wins on cost. Even if setup takes you 40 hours at $100/hour ($4,000), you break even in 6 months. Every year after that is pure savings. But: If you're a 50-person team with unlimited budget, Datadog's polish might be worth it. The UI is genuinely great. The integrations are extensive. The support is responsive. For everyone else? A $20/month VPS does the job. Running Logtide in production? Self-hosting your observability? Drop your setup and costs below. Curious about the setup? Disclaimer: I build Logtide. These are real numbers from our production environment. Your mileage may vary depending on log volume and retention needs. Disclaimer n2: Some prices/statistics can change by your setup or just bt changes of the provider or currency Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse - 500k logs/day = ~15GB/day - 10 services with APM traces - 30-day log retention - 1 server (we run everything on one box) - Log ingestion: 15GB/day × $0.10 = $45/month (just to collect) - Log indexing: ~250M events × $1.70/million = $425/month (to make them searchable) - APM: 1 host × $31/month = $31/month - Infrastructure monitoring: 1 host × $15/month = $15/month - Logtide (logs + traces + SIEM) - Prometheus (metrics) - Grafana (dashboards) - 4 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, 80GB SSD - €5.49/month ($6/month) - 20TB bandwidth included - EU datacenter (GDPR-compliant) - Hetzner snapshots: €1/month - Off-site to Backblaze B2: ~$2/month - Logtide (PostgreSQL + TimescaleDB) - The actual application (5 microservices) - Redis (for now, making it optional soon) - CPU: 30-40% average - RAM: 6GB / 8GB used - Disk: 25GB / 80GB used (with TimescaleDB compression) - Log query latency: 50-150ms - Handles 10k logs/sec bursts - 30-day retention = 15GB total (compressed from ~150GB raw) - Learning curve: 4-8 hours (if new to self-hosting) - Initial deployment: 2-4 hours - Dashboard setup: 2-3 hours - Updates/patches: 30 minutes - Monitoring the monitoring: 15 minutes - Backup verification: 15 minutes - Setup cost: $1,000 (one-time) - Monthly cost: $100 - Infrastructure: $120 - Time: $1,000 (setup) + $1,200 (ongoing) - Total: $2,320 - Infrastructure: $120 - Time: $1,200 - Total: $1,320/year - Grafana is powerful but not as polished as Datadog - You build your own dashboards - Learning curve exists - When it breaks at 2am, you fix it - Or you wait until morning (if non-critical) - Stack Overflow and GitHub are your friends - Datadog has 99.9% SLA - Self-hosted: you're responsible - (But honestly, Hetzner's uptime is solid) - Datadog scales automatically - You add more servers yourself - Not an issue until you hit millions of logs/day - Logs never leave your server - GDPR-compliant by default - No third-party data processing - $20/month whether you send 100k or 500k logs/day - No surprise bills - Sleep better - It's just PostgreSQL - Export anytime - Switch tools freely - You actually understand your stack - Better debugging skills - Your team learns infrastructure - Raw logs: ~150GB/month - Compressed: ~15GB/month - 90% reduction - 50-150ms for most queries (10M+ logs) - Full-text search with pg_trgm - Fast enough for incident response - Hetzner: €32.94 ($36) - Backups: ~$12 - Team < 5 engineers (time is precious) - Raised funding (cost isn't the bottleneck) - Zero DevOps skills in-house - Need vendor SLA for compliance - Rapid unpredictable scaling - Bootstrapped/pre-revenue - Team has basic DevOps skills - GDPR/privacy requirements - Predictable workload - Want full control - Send logs to Logtide + Datadog - Compare dashboards - Verify all alerts work - Test incident response workflow - Check query performance - Train team on new UI - Stop sending to Datadog - Cancel subscription - Monitor for issues - Fine-tune retention - Build custom dashboards - Document runbooks - Datadog: $9,600/year minimum - Self-hosted: $240/year + setup time - Savings: $9,360/year - Logtide repo: https://github.com/logtide-dev/logtide - Docs: https://logtide.dev/docs - Try cloud version: https://logtide.dev