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.
The Log Retention Cost Calculator estimates your monthly bill for storing and ingesting log data. You enter your daily log volume in gigabytes, the ingest price per GB, your retention window in days, and the storage rate per GB per month. From these it separates the two cost drivers: a one-time ingest charge applied as data arrives, and a recurring storage charge that accrues on every gigabyte you keep. Because a longer retention window means more accumulated data sits in storage at once, the retention days act as a multiplier on your standing volume — which is usually the dominant line item once daily volume is steady.
The key trade-off to watch is retention length versus storage cost: doubling the retention window roughly doubles the standing volume you pay to store each month, while ingest cost stays tied to daily throughput. Before extending retention for compliance or debugging, use the calculator to see the recurring impact, and consider tiering older logs to cheaper cold storage or trimming low-value log sources to cut volume at the point of ingest.
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 |
|---|