Log volume is usually the largest line on an observability bill, so the per-GB rate gets a lot of attention. Here is the 2026 ranking - and why the headline rate is only half the story. Rates are a June-2026 snapshot; see the live cheapest log management ranking and log management comparison.
Ranked by per-GB ingest rate
| Vendor | Log rate | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Elastic | from $0.105/GB ingest | + per-GB-month retention; measured pre-compression |
| Datadog | $0.10/GB ingest | + $1.27 per million events to index |
| Coralogix | $0.42/GB (to $0.17 tiered) | TCO Optimizer routes cold logs cheaper |
| Grafana Cloud | ~$0.45/GB (50 GB free) | Loki; ~$0.05 process + $0.40 write |
| Better Stack | ~$0.50/GB telemetry | Telemetry bundles set included GB |
Vendors using credit, GB/day or event models - Sumo Logic (Flex credits, ingest free), Logz.io (GB/day by retention) and Honeycomb (per event) - are not directly comparable per GB-month.
The trap: ingest rate is not the bill
Datadog advertises $0.10/GB ingest, which looks like the cheapest. But making those logs searchable costs $1.27 per million events to index at 15-day retention - and for most workloads the indexing line is bigger than ingest. Always compare ingest plus indexing/retention, not ingest alone.
The cheat code: tier your logs
The biggest savings are not from switching vendors but from tiering. Coralogix’s TCO Optimizer routes each stream into Frequent Search, Monitoring or Compliance pipelines ($1.15 / $0.50 / $0.17 per GB), and Sumo Logic’s Flex makes ingest free and charges credits only for storage and scanning. Both let you keep cheap, queryable cold logs instead of paying hot rates for everything.
Bottom line
Elastic and Datadog have the lowest ingest rates, but Coralogix and Sumo Logic often win on the real bill once tiering is set up. Estimate yours in the cost calculator, and read how to cut observability costs. Prices are a June-2026 snapshot; verify on each vendor’s pricing page.