Sentry is good.
Performance monitoring, session replay, profiling, release tracking, integrations with everything. If you have a team and need all of that, use Sentry.
But maybe you don't need all of that.
You're running a SaaS with a few hundred users. A side project. An internal tool. You need to know when something breaks, see the stack trace, and fix it.
For that, Sentry is a lot of machine. Self-hosted Sentry needs PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, ClickHouse, 4 CPU cores, and at least 16 GB of RAM. Cloud Sentry starts free, then bills per event.
LogNorth is the opposite trade-off.
One Docker container. SQLite. Runs on a $5 VPS. No external dependencies. No cluster to manage. No event limits.
Fewer features. Zero complexity.
| Sentry | LogNorth | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free tier, then per-event | $99 once. No limits. |
| Self-hosted | Yes (16 GB RAM, 5+ services) | Yes (512 MB RAM, 1 container) |
| Dependencies | PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, Kafka | None. SQLite embedded. |
| Features | Full platform: replays, profiling, tracing | Logs, errors, alerts. That's it. |
| Complexity | Powerful, many moving parts | Radically simple |
How much disk does LogNorth use?
About 1 KB per event including SQLite overhead and indexes.
| Daily volume | 90 days | 1 year | 5 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1k events/day | ~90 MB | ~365 MB | ~1.8 GB |
| 10k events/day | ~900 MB | ~3.6 GB | ~18 GB |
| 25k events/day | ~2.3 GB | ~9 GB | ~45 GB |
A $5 VPS with 25 GB of disk handles most apps comfortably. Set retention to 90 days and old events are cleaned up automatically.
Who LogNorth is for.
Solo developers. Indie hackers. Small teams without a DevOps person. People who want to know when something breaks without managing infrastructure to find out.