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. Far less to run.
| Sentry | LogNorth | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free tier, then from $26/mo with event quotas | $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 | One container |
How much disk does LogNorth use?
About 0.3 KB per event on average, including SQLite overhead and indexes.
| Daily volume | 90 days | 1 year | 5 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1k events/day | ~25 MB | ~100 MB | ~500 MB |
| 10k events/day | ~250 MB | ~1 GB | ~5 GB |
| 25k events/day | ~625 MB | ~2.5 GB | ~12.5 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.
One container. One price. Your data.
Install in under 3 minutes. It keeps your events until you add a license.
Install LogNorth →