Pricing
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.
For teams running production and paying for it out of a real budget.
Then $0.40 per additional million events.
When observability becomes something other teams depend on.
Then $0.25 per additional million events.
Your compliance team has opinions. We can meet them.
All plans include every signal type — logs, metrics and traces. We don't sell them separately.
How metering works
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.
Your running total is available live on the usage endpoint and in the dashboard, so you're never guessing what the invoice will say.
Set a hard cap and we throttle at the limit, or let it flow and pay per additional million. Your choice, changeable at any time.
Questions
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 live count on GET /usage or in the dashboard before you commit to a plan.
On Free, ingest starts returning 429 and your data is dropped until the next day — nothing is billed by surprise. On paid plans overage is billed at the per-million rate on your tier, and you can set a hard cap instead if you would rather be throttled than charged.
No. Whale speaks OTLP natively over HTTP and gRPC, so any OpenTelemetry SDK or Collector works by changing one exporter endpoint. If you are already sending OTLP somewhere else, migration is a config change rather than a re-instrumentation project.
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.
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.
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.
No card, no trial clock. Move up when your traffic makes you.