Observability TCO Calculator
Estimate SaaS observability spend against self-hosted open-source stack costs, migration effort, and break-even timing.
Use this as a planning worksheet before building a shortlist. The defaults are intentionally editable estimates; replace them with your contract, traffic, and staffing numbers before making a migration decision.
Recommended stacks for this scenario
Stack assumptions
Grafana OSS stack
Grafana with Prometheus or Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Alertmanager. Strong default for teams that want composable pieces and familiar dashboards.
Default ops: 8h/week; migration: 140h; confidence: high.
SigNoz all-in-one
OpenTelemetry-native APM, traces, metrics, logs, alerts, and exceptions in one product backed by ClickHouse.
Default ops: 6h/week; migration: 120h; confidence: high.
OpenObserve object-storage stack
Rust-based logs, metrics, traces, RUM, and dashboards designed around inexpensive object storage.
Default ops: 5h/week; migration: 110h; confidence: medium.
Logs-first search stack
OpenSearch Dashboards or Quickwit with Fluent Bit or Vector for teams whose bill is dominated by indexed log search.
Default ops: 7h/week; migration: 130h; confidence: medium.
Errors and uptime stack
GlitchTip or Sentry self-hosted paired with Healthchecks or Uptime Kuma for smaller teams replacing Sentry plus uptime checks.
Default ops: 3h/week; migration: 60h; confidence: medium.
How to read the estimate
- Infrastructure costs are planning estimates: base stack cost plus host, log, trace, retention, and contingency factors.
- Operator time is included because self-hosting is never just an infrastructure bill.
- Break-even only appears when monthly savings are positive after infrastructure and people costs.
- Use the copied scenario link in review docs, then replace assumptions with measured usage during a pilot.