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:
Datadog Log Management - **Ingestion**: $0.10/GB (seems cheap, right?) - **Retention**: $0.05/GB/month for 15+ days - **Indexing**: $1.70/million events for custom indexes - **Real cost at 100GB/day**: $300/mo ingestion + $150/mo retention + indexes = **$5,000-8,000/month**
Splunk Cloud - **Per GB pricing**: $150/GB/day (not a typo) - **Real cost at 100GB/day**: **$15,000+/month**
AWS CloudWatch - **Ingestion**: $0.50/GB - **Storage**: $0.03/GB/month - **Queries**: $0.005/GB scanned - **Real cost at 100GB/day**: **$1,500-2,500/month** (plus egress fees)
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/month - **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's $121/month vs $5,000-15,000/month for the same workload. Even accounting for engineer time, self-hosting saves 90%+.
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 tier: 3 servers, 7-day retention — perfect for side projects
- Pro ($39/mo): 25 servers, 90-day retention, unlimited users — covers most teams
- Enterprise ($199/mo): Unlimited everything, SSO, audit logs — for regulated industries
No per-GB fees. No surprise bills. No vendor lock-in.