simpletel vs Grafana Tempo / Grafana Cloud
Grafana Tempo is the open-source, OTLP-loving trace store under Grafana Cloud. Both are OpenTelemetry-native; the difference is operational weight and how the bill behaves when traffic grows.
Vendor figures as of October 2026, from the vendor's pricing page (https://grafana.com/pricing/). simpletel figures are read from this site's plan catalog at request time.
| Grafana Tempo / Grafana Cloud | simpletel | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Grafana Cloud: 50 GB logs, 10k series, 14-day retention | 2M records/mo, 7-day retention |
| Entry paid | Grafana Cloud Pro $19/mo + usage | Starter $19/mo · $190/yr (25M records, 30d) |
| Metered unit | Logs $0.05/GB process + $0.40/GB write + $0.10/GB retain; metrics $6.50/1k series; traces metered | records; $0.50/M Starter, $0.30/M Team |
| Self-host | Tempo OSS — you run and scale it | One binary + SQLite (smaller footprint) |
| Spend caps | “Send more, charge more”; Adaptive Telemetry | ingest stops at 2x allowance; raisable to 3x |
| Retention | 14 days free; 30d logs/traces, 13mo metrics on Cloud | 7/30/90d |
What Grafana Tempo / Grafana Cloud does better
Ecosystem and cost-optionality. Tempo is OSS and free if you run it yourself, and it plugs into the whole Grafana stack — dashboards, the collector ecosystem, Loki and Mimir alongside it. Grafana Cloud adds a generous free tier (50 GB logs, 14-day retention) and a $19/mo Pro entry.
Where simpletel wins
No cluster to run. simpletel is one binary and one SQLite file on one small VM — no object store, no separate query tier, no version matrix. Managed from the same $19/mo Starter with a hard cap, and onboarding an agent is a single install.
The tradeoff
Self-hosting Tempo is free but you own storage, scaling, and upgrades forever. Grafana's own line — “send more, charge more is broken” — is the same problem simpletel attacks with hard caps, but Grafana Cloud still meters usage on top of the platform fee. simpletel trades horizontal scale for a much smaller operational footprint.
When simpletel is the wrong choice
Pick Tempo if you already run the Grafana stack, need to scale traces across many nodes, or want a self-hosted path with zero vendor relationship and are happy to operate storage and upgrades yourself. simpletel is single-node by design — if you need a horizontally scalable cluster out of the box, it is the wrong choice.