The Hidden Costs of Cloud Logging
Cloud logging services like Datadog, Splunk, and New Relic advertise simple per-GB pricing. But the actual cost is much higher than it appears:
All figures below are worked from each vendor's own published list prices at a steady 100GB/day (≈3TB/month). They are arithmetic, not quotes — your negotiated rate, committed-use discount and index configuration will move them.
Datadog Log Management - **Ingestion**: $0.10/GB (seems cheap, right?) - **Retention**: $0.05/GB/month beyond the included window - **Indexing**: $1.70/million events for custom indexes - **Ingestion at 100GB/day**: 3,000GB × $0.10 = **$300/month**, before a single event is indexed. Indexing is where the bill actually grows: at 100GB/day of typical JSON application logs you are indexing hundreds of millions of events per month, and $1.70 per million compounds fast.
AWS CloudWatch - **Ingestion**: $0.50/GB - **Storage**: $0.03/GB/month - **Queries**: $0.005/GB scanned - **Ingestion at 100GB/day**: 3,000GB × $0.50 = **$1,500/month**, plus storage, per-query scan charges and egress.
Self-Hosted with Purl: Total Cost of Ownership
Let's calculate the real cost of self-hosting Purl for the same 100GB/day workload:
Infrastructure - **Server**: 8 vCPU, 16GB RAM VPS = ~$80/month (Hetzner/OVH) - **Storage**: 500GB NVMe (100GB/day × 10x compression × 90 days) = included - **Backup storage**: 100GB S3 = ~$2/month
Software - **Purl Pro license**: $39/mo - **ClickHouse**: Free (open source)
Operations - **Maintenance time**: ~1 hour/month (updates, monitoring) - **No dedicated SRE needed** — Purl is designed for zero-maintenance operation
Total: ~$121/month
That is roughly $121/month all-in against **$300/month of Datadog ingestion alone — before indexing — or $1,500/month of CloudWatch ingestion alone**, for the same 100GB/day. The gap widens with volume, because per-GB pricing scales linearly while a self-hosted box mostly does not.
When Cloud Makes Sense
Self-hosting isn't always the answer. Cloud logging makes sense when:
- You have < 1GB/day of logs — free tiers cover you
- You have zero ops capacity — no one to SSH into a server
- Compliance requires a vendor — some auditors prefer named vendors
- Multi-region is critical — cloud providers have global presence
When Self-Hosted Wins
Self-hosting with Purl wins when:
- Cost sensitivity — you're paying $500+/month for cloud logging
- Data sovereignty — logs must stay in your infrastructure
- Volume growth — cloud costs scale linearly, self-hosted costs are nearly flat
- Control — you want to own your data and tooling
The Purl Sweet Spot
Purl is designed for the 80% of teams who don't need Datadog's 500+ integrations but do need reliable, fast log management:
- Free: unlimited servers, agents, users and retention — Purl runs on your
- Pro ($39/mo): adds custom dashboards, AI query and analysis,
- Enterprise ($199/mo): adds SSO/SAML, LDAP/Active
No per-GB fees. No surprise bills. No vendor lock-in.