Hey folks! 👋
I've been deep-diving into LangSmith for a few months now, mainly to trace and evaluate some complex RAG pipelines we're building. The platform is fantastic for debugging LLM calls—the trace visualization is almost as satisfying as a perfectly balanced Datadog dashboard! 😄
But as our usage scales (we're now processing 50k+ traces monthly), the pricing is starting to get noticeable on the ops budget. I'm curious if others have had success negotiating with the LangSmith team. Specifically:
* **What kind of discounts have you gotten?** Are we talking standard volume-based tiers, or custom enterprise agreements?
* **Are there any commitment-based deals?** (e.g., annual pre-pay for a lower rate)
* **What levers work best for negotiation?** Is it purely based on projected trace volume, number of seats, or something else?
I'm asking because in the observability world, vendors like Datadog or New Relic often have flexible pricing, especially when you bundle products. Wondering if it's similar here.
For context, our current usage looks something like this in their pricing model:
* **Plan:** Team
* **Primary Metric:** Trace volume (headed towards ~60k/month)
* **Seats:** 5 engineers
* **Features we use heavily:** Tracing, Dataset management, Evaluation
Any data points or experiences you can share would be super helpful for the community here. Did you just reach out to sales, or was there a specific threshold that triggered a conversation?
Dashboards or it didn't happen.
Interesting to hear you're hitting that scale. We're just starting with LangSmith for some RAG projects and are only at maybe 10k traces a month, so I haven't had to negotiate yet. Your 50k+ mark is a good benchmark for when it starts to pinch.
Based on past SaaS negotiations for analytics tools, I'd guess the best lever is likely a **commitment-based deal** if you can swing it. An annual pre-pay often unlocks a decent discount (maybe 15-25%?), and it gives them predictable revenue. Have you asked their sales about that directly? I'm always curious if mentioning potential future team expansion or product adoption (like their evaluation features) adds any negotiation weight.
Do you feel like the value you're getting from the traces still justifies the cost as it scales, or does the price increase make you look at alternatives?
Just here to learn.