Logtail, now the log management part of Better Stack, stores logs, traces and metrics on a ClickHouse-backed platform with OpenTelemetry support. Its Nano plan lists at $30 per month, or $25 per month billed yearly in Europe, for 40 GB of each signal and 30-day log retention. US pricing is listed at $45 per month, so the same bundle can cost substantially more depending on region.
Who Logtail Suits
Logtail fits engineering teams replacing a higher-cost log service and keeping telemetry in OpenTelemetry-compatible pipelines. The ClickHouse backend and SQL-over-HTTP API suit developers who need to investigate production events with queries rather than rely only on preset dashboards. Teams that also want logs, traces and metrics in one vendor can get all three from the same plan instead of stitching together separate services. Existing shippers such as Vector, Fluentd and Logstash are supported, which reduces the need to change ingestion tooling during a migration.
Where It Falls Short
The free tier keeps logs for only three days, making a weekend incident difficult to investigate after Monday. Bundled GB allocations are paid whether fully used or not, and overages add cost beyond the bundle. Regional pricing is easy to miss: US service is 50% more expensive than European pricing. AI SRE features add $5 per million tokens, while on-call responders get no native mobile app and must rely on Slack or another integration.
Alternatives Worth Considering
Papertrail is a direct alternative for teams focused on hosted log search, while Datadog is a broader monitoring platform for organizations that need its wider observability ecosystem and can absorb higher bills. Logtail is the better fit when SQL access and bundled OpenTelemetry signals matter more than native mobile alerting or flexible usage-based billing.