Hi everyone! I've been diving into the world of LLM observability for a side project, and I'm trying to decide between Traceloop and LangSmith. I'm pretty new to this, and honestly, the pricing pages can be a bit overwhelming with all the different units (events, traces, tokens? 😅).
My project is small-scale right now, but I'm trying to budget for potentially handling around 100,000 events per month. I've tried to put together a side-by-side breakdown based on their public pricing, but I'm worried I'm missing something or misunderstanding the tiers.
From what I can gather:
* **Traceloop** seems to have a "Scale" plan that starts at $299/month for 1 million "observations." I *think* an observation might be similar to an event? If so, 100k events would be under that limit, so maybe around that $299 price point? But I'm not sure if there are extra costs for data retention or other features.
* **LangSmith** has a "Team" plan at $25/user/month, but then it's $50 per million "traces." This is where I get confused. Is a "trace" the same as an "event" in Traceloop's language? If it is, then 100k traces would be a lot cheaper on the base fee, but the per-trace cost might add up? I'd probably be the only user, so $25 + ($50 * 0.1) = about $30? That seems too low, so I'm definitely misinterpreting something.
Has anyone actually run a similar volume through both platforms? I'm especially curious about what gets counted as an event/trace/observation in practice. Are there hidden costs or minimums I'm not seeing? I'm just looking for basic monitoring, debugging, and maybe some simple evaluations.
Any guidance from those more experienced would be super helpful! Thx!