Pricing
Pay for what you send.
Metered on events — one log line, one metric point, or one span. No per-seat tax, no charge for asking questions of your own data, and no penalty for keeping the tail.
Enough to instrument a real side project, not a trial that expires.
3-day retention
- Logs, metrics and traces
- Trace ↔ log ↔ metric correlation
- Live tail and search DSL
- Community support
For teams running production and paying for it out of a real budget.
14-day retention
- Everything in Free
- Unlimited projects and seats
- Alerting to Slack and webhooks
- Uptime checks and public status pages
- Error tracking and issue grouping
- Service maps, golden signals, Apdex
- Email support
Then $0.40 per additional million events.
When observability becomes something other teams depend on.
30-day retention
- Everything in Pro
- Infrastructure: hosts, processes, containers and routes
- AWS: live account map + 30+ security, cost and governance checks
- Mobile monitoring
- Service levels: SLOs, error budgets, burn rate
- Change tracking and deployment markers
- AI query, anomaly detection and explanations
- Cold-tier archival to S3 or R2
- Priority support
Then $0.25 per additional million events.
Your compliance team has opinions. We can meet them.
Custom retention
- Everything in Scale
- Self-hosted or private cloud deployment
- SSO and role-based access control
- Custom retention and data residency
- Contractual SLA
- Dedicated support channel
All plans include every signal type — logs, metrics and traces. We don't sell them separately.
How metering works
What you're actually paying for
One event = one record
A log line, a metric data point, or a span. A typical web request with a few logs and a five-span trace is roughly ten events.
Counted at ingest
Your running total is on the Usage page of your dashboard, so you're never guessing what the invoice will say.
Going past your plan
Each plan lists its rate per additional million events. Overage billing isn't switched on yet, so going over costs nothing extra today.
The rates are anchored to the incumbents, minus the seat tax: at a typical ~1 KB per event, Whale's $0.40 per additional million events mirrors New Relic's published $0.40/GB data rate — but five full-platform seats on New Relic cost another $406–$1,745 per month before any data (their pricing, August 2026). On Whale, seats are free on every paid plan.
Questions
Before you send us anything
What counts as an event?
One log line, one metric data point, or one span. A typical web request with a handful of logs and a five-span trace is roughly ten events. You can watch your count on the Usage page of your dashboard before you commit to a plan.
What happens if I go over?
Overage billing isn't switched on yet, so going past your plan's events costs nothing extra today. When it is, events past your allowance are billed at the per-million rate on your plan.
Do I have to change my instrumentation?
No. Whale speaks OpenTelemetry (OTLP) natively, so any OpenTelemetry SDK or Collector works by changing one exporter endpoint — use OTLP over HTTP for the hosted service. If you are already sending OTLP somewhere else, migration is a config change rather than a re-instrumentation project.
Can I self-host instead?
Yes, on Enterprise. The whole platform runs on your own infrastructure against your own ClickHouse. Most teams start on the hosted product and move only if compliance requires it.
Why is it cheaper than the incumbents?
One columnar store instead of several specialised ones. Logs, metrics and traces share a single ClickHouse cluster, which is dramatically cheaper to run than an inverted index over the same data — and we pass that structural difference on rather than pricing to what the market will bear.
What happens to my data if I leave?
Export it over the query API and we delete it on request. There is no proprietary format holding it hostage — it is OTLP going in and JSON coming out.
Start on the free tier.
No card, no trial clock. Move up when your traffic makes you.