Log Volume Cost Calculator: Datadog, Splunk, Loki (2026)

Log Management Cost Is About Three Things

Every vendor's pricing decomposes into ingest (per GB of logs sent), indexing (turning logs into searchable structure), and retention (per GB-month kept queryable). Loki minimizes indexing cost by indexing only labels. Elasticsearch maximizes search speed by indexing everything. Datadog charges separately for ingest and indexing.

2026 Vendor Pricing Cheat Sheet

• Self-hosted Loki on S3: ~$0.005-0.02/GB
• Grafana Cloud Loki: $0.05/GB
• Datadog Logs: $0.10/GB ingest + indexing fees
• New Relic Logs: $0.30/GB
• CloudWatch Logs: $0.50/GB ingest + $0.03/GB-month storage
• Splunk Cloud: $0.50-2.00/GB by plan

Cost Reduction Playbook

1. Sample low-value logs — drop 90% of INFO/DEBUG, keep 100% of WARN+. Saves 50-80% of volume immediately.
2. Tier retention — hot for 7-14 days, warm for 30, archive (S3 Glacier) for the rest.
3. Drop high-cardinality fields in indexed logs (user_id, request_id) — put them in trace context instead.
4. Compress aggressively — most apps still send uncompressed logs over the wire.
5. Audit by source — find which service/component is producing the most bytes and trim its logger.

See the Log Management Guide for the full architecture decision tree.