OTLP spend calculator
Enter your monthly OTel record volume and see the simpletel plan that fits, its monthly cost including overage, and what happens at the cap — next to the same volume priced on three other backends' published units.
simpletel for 50M records/month
Plan that fitsStarter
Monthly cost$19/mo + $12.50 overage = $31.50/mo
At the cap. Ingest stops at the 50M default cap (2× the 25M included records); raise the cap to 75M (3×) at the same overage. The server enforces the cap — you are never billed for records past it.
simpletel figures are read from this site's plan catalog at request time; the pricing is on the pricing page, and the metered unit is one record.
At the same monthly volume
| simpletel | Honeycomb | Grafana Cloud | Datadog | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 2M records/mo, 7-day retention | 20M events + 100M datapoints/mo, perpetual | 50 GB logs, 10k series, 14-day retention | Trial only (Agent Observability: 40k LLM spans/mo) |
| Entry paid | Starter $19/mo · $190/yr (25M records, 30d) | Pro $150/mo (50M events, up to 750M) | Pro $19/mo + usage | Infra $15/host/mo (annual); APM $31/host (annual) / $36 monthly |
| Metered unit | records; $0.50/M Starter, $0.30/M Team | Per-event subscription; telemetry pipeline from $0.10/GB | Logs $0.05/GB process + $0.40/GB write + $0.10/GB retain; metrics $6.50/1k series; traces metered | Per-host + per-signal; logs $0.10/GB ingest + ~$1.70/M indexed events (secondary-source figure) |
| Retention | 7/30/90d | Not publicly tier-gated | 14 days free; 30d logs/traces, 13mo metrics | 15-day log tiers; LLM add-ons 30/60/90d |
| Your 50M records/mo | Starter — $19/mo + $12.50 overage = $31.50/mo | 50M events/mo: free up to 20M events; above that the Pro subscription starts at $150/mo for 50M events (up to 750M). Records are counted as events, so the definition of a record still has to match theirs. | 50M records/mo ≈ 53.5 GB/mo of OTLP/JSON payload (at simpletel's measured ~1.07 kB per span). Grafana bills logs per GB processed/written/retained and traces through a calculator, so the GB figure depends on your payload size — a record count does not convert to GB by itself. | N records do not map to hosts: Datadog is priced per host plus per signal (logs $0.10/GB ingest + ~$1.70/M indexed events). There is no per-record price. |
Vendor figures as of October 2026, from the vendor's pricing page: Honeycomb, Grafana Cloud, Datadog. Units differ — per-event, per-GB, and per-host — so this is a comparison of published rates, not a quote; only simpletel's own figure is computed from this site's catalog.