- Free allowance
- Free for personal projects (USD 0/month): 10 monitors and 10 heartbeats with 3-minute checks, 1 status page, Slack and e-mail alerts, 100,000 exceptions per month, 5,000 session replays, 3 GB logs retained for 3 days, 3 GB traces retained for 3 days, 30 GB metrics, 3 GB web events retained for 3...
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, phone unknown
- Binding limit
- retention-clampedlogs, traces and web events retained for 3 days
- Evidence
- documented34 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-03checked 2026-11-02 (live); stale on 2026-12-03
| Free tier | Free for personal projects (USD 0/month): 10 monitors and 10 heartbeats with 3-minute checks, 1 status page, Slack and e-mail alerts, 100,000 exceptions per month, 5,000 session replays, 3 GB logs retained for 3 days, 3 GB traces retained for 3 days, 30 GB metrics, 3 GB web events retained for 3 days; no credit card unit mixed; metered on ; The allowance mixes object counts (monitors, heartbeats, exceptions, session replays) and ingested bytes (3 GB per month each of logs, traces and web events, 30 GB of metrics), so no single unit of the vocabulary fits. The check frequency ranges from 3 minutes on free plans to 30 seconds on paid plans. Logs beyond the allowance cost USD 0.10 per GB ingested in Europe, USD 0.15 in the United States and USD 0.35 in Singapore. |
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| Price | none stated |
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| Limits | - volume-quota 10 monitors and 10 heartbeats, 1 status page source
- request-rate uptime checks every 3 minutes at the shortest on the free plan source
- retention-clamped (binding) logs, traces and web events retained for 3 days source
- volume-quota 3 GB of logs, 3 GB of traces and 3 GB of web events per month, 30 GB of metrics, 100,000 exceptions per month, 5,000 session replays source
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| Binding | retention-clamped Logs, traces and web events older than 3 days are deleted, so the free telemetry is a 3-day debugging window whatever the volume; the 10-monitor count binds the uptime side. |
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| Identity | email The sign-up form asks for an e-mail address and sends a magic link; Better Stack's own comparison page states the free plan needs no credit card. Phone numbers are added after sign-up under Settings, Account settings, up to three per account. Whether a later step asks for a phone number at sign-up is unverified: behind a sign-up. |
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| Egress | unverified: no egress term on the pages read; logs and metrics are read back through a read-only HTTP SQL API |
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| Per-object cap | unverified: no per-log-line or per-event size is stated on the pages read |
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| Retention | Logs, traces and web events: 3 GB per month retained for 3 days on the free plan. Exceptions and session replays: 90 days. (3 days) |
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| Interface | rest The Uptime (Incidents) API follows JSON:API with an Authorization: Bearer token, global or per team; logs and metrics are queried through a read-only HTTP SQL API with a username and password made per connection. The API host uptime.betterstack.com answered 401 to /api/v2/monitors without a token. The pricing page lists running SQL queries with an HTTP API among the features of the Logs & Traces product, whose included allowance of 3 GB per month is the free tier's, and lists standard querying as included; the SQL API documentation allows up to 4 concurrent log queries and 20 concurrent metric queries with standard querying. Whether a free account can create a SQL API connection is unverified: behind a sign-up. Telemetry is accepted as OTLP over HTTP at https://INGESTING_HOST/v1/traces, /v1/metrics and /v1/logs. A remote MCP server at https://mcp.betterstack.com takes OAuth or an API token and is available on every plan, including free. |
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| Tooling | curl or any HTTP client with a Bearer token, the Better Stack Terraform provider, Prometheus or OpenTelemetry collectors for metrics, and the Better Stack MCP server for agent clients |
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| Composes with | An external check every 3 minutes on up to 10 endpoints of free compute services, with heartbeats for scheduled jobs and a 3-day window of logs for debugging. |
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| Reliability | Logs, traces and web events are deleted after 3 days on the free plan. |
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| Notes | One account covers uptime checks, heartbeats, a status page, logs, traces, metrics, error tracking and session replay. The telemetry part is small and short-lived (3 GB a month kept 3 days); the uptime part is 10 monitors at a 3-minute interval. Logs was sold as Logtail before the products were unified into Better Stack, and logtail.com now redirects to betterstack.com/log-management; an archived copy of Logtail's pricing page lists a free plan of 1 GB per month with 3-day retention, against 3 GB per month with 3-day retention on the Better Stack free plan now. |
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| Evidence note | documented Every limit is quoted from a first-party page, and the API host answered 401 without a token. No account was opened, so the free plan's API access and any later sign-up step are unverified; an authenticated API call from a free account would move it to measured. |
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| Parsed numbers | - has-free-tier 1
- request-rate 3 minutes
- volume-quota 3 GB
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