Overview

How node-based pricing works, how it compares to volume-based pricing, expected savings, and what every tier includes.

How does node-based pricing work

A node = any host whose logs 10x handles, whatever the topology and regardless of instance size:

  • Kubernetes: 1 worker node whose logs 10x handles = 1 billing unit
  • VMs / bare metal / ECS on EC2: 1 host whose logs 10x handles = 1 billing unit
  • Central aggregators (Fluentd, Vector, Logstash): a central aggregator does not reduce the count; the hosts that send to it are the nodes
  • Serverless containers (Fargate, Cloud Run, Container Apps): 10 average concurrent tasks = 1 billing unit
  • Lambda and other FaaS: free, not counted

Instance size (vCPU, memory) does not affect count. One question determines your tier: "How many hosts emit the logs 10x processes?"

Everything else is unlimited: log volume, traffic spikes, applications, environments, queries, destinations.

How does this compare to volume-based pricing

Volume-based tools charge per GB. We charge per node.

When your traffic grows, their bill grows proportionally. Yours doesn't.

Datadog bills log ingestion at $0.10 per GB and indexing per million events, at a rate set by retention. Splunk quotes its ingest licence per contract. Cribl meters credits by the volume its pipeline ingests.

All create unpredictable costs that spike during success or incidents. Log10x pricing is based on infrastructure capacity, predictable and doesn't punish growth.

What savings can I expect

Savings depend on which apps you deploy, your daily log volume, per-GB ingestion cost, and how much you divert to S3:

  • Receiver, Compact mode: lossless in-place volume reduction on Splunk (up to 256 KB per event) and self-hosted Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, varying with log structure
  • Receiver, tier down: route noisy event types to the platform's own cheaper tier, where they stay queryable (Datadog Flex Logs, CloudWatch Infrequent Access, Azure Basic Logs, the Coralogix Monitoring tier)
  • Retriever: offload to your own S3 bucket at standard S3 storage rates and fetch the exact events back on demand, with no re-ingest

Enter a monthly bill and node count on the homepage for a figure on your own numbers.

Which products are included

All of them. Every tier includes:

Every tier includes all features and all capacity, and so does the built-in evaluation license an unlicensed engine runs on.