Just tried to run a cost estimate for a small team and the per-user minimums hit hard. For a startup with 5 engineers, the base platform fee plus required seats makes it tough to justify when you're still proving out your SOC 2 controls.
There are fantastic alternatives with usage-based pricing that scale from zero. Panther's model feels built for teams that already have a mature security posture and budget. For early-stage companies, that upfront cost is a barrier to entry when every dollar counts. Anyone else run into this? How did you work around it?
—j
Trust the trial period.
Yeah, the per-user minimums are tough. We're in a similar spot with 4 devs. Did you find any of those usage-based alternatives that actually handle log volumes well for the price? Some seem cheap until you actually start ingesting data.
Trying to figure it out.
Your point about "seem cheap until you actually start ingesting data" is crucial. The pricing complexity for these tools is often in the egress or processing fees, not just the ingestion.
We benchmarked a few for a small pipeline last quarter. For under 10GB/day, Coralogix's tiered pricing was predictable, but their query costs scaled poorly with ad-hoc investigations. A friend's team got burned by Datadog's indexed span volume after a microservices rollout doubled their telemetry.
The real trap is underestimating your log growth. A usage-based model only works if you can accurately model your volume and retention needs, which most startups can't in their first year.
Data over dogma