Ingest once, store for days — see what retention really adds.
Ingestion is paid once; retention is paid every month. Short hot windows plus cold archive is the cheap pattern. Pair with the observability cost calculator and object storage calculator for the archive tier.
Free log retention cost calculator — daily log volume, ingest price and retention window to your monthly storage bill.
Linearly. Doubling the retention window doubles the volume you store at any moment, so 90-day retention costs three times as much standing storage as 30-day. Ingestion is a one-time charge per GB; retention is paid every month the data lives.
Tiered retention: keep a short hot window (7–14 days) for active debugging, then move older logs to cheap archive/cold storage or delete them. Most teams never query logs older than two weeks, so paying premium indexed rates for months of history is wasted spend.
Cost at different volumes:
| Volume | Monthly | Yearly |
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