The volume problem.
Every request your app handles spits out a dozen log lines. Across a busy service that's millions of requests a day. A hosted platform takes that from thousands of customers at once. Billions of lines, pouring in, forever. Storing it, indexing it, keeping it searchable: that's genuinely hard. Rocket science, even.
So they build for it. Distributed ingestion. Sharded storage. Per-tenant isolation. Search clusters. The machinery is real, and it's expensive to run.
So they meter you by the gigabyte.
Their cost is the volume, so that's how they price it. You pay to ingest every gigabyte, then you pay again, every month, to keep it. Send more logs, pay more. Keep them longer, pay more. Grow your app, pay more.
It's a pricing model that punishes you for the two things you actually want: logging more, and keeping it longer. The better your app does, the bigger the bill, for the privilege of watching it work.
But it's their problem, not yours.
That brutal multi-tenant scale, thousands of customers and billions of lines, is the part you don't have. You have one app. Your logs, and only yours.
Take the other tenants out of the equation and the hard problem disappears. Billions of lines becomes millions. A storage cluster becomes a single file. The same job gets roughly a thousand times simpler. Small enough to run on a box that costs less than lunch.
One container. SQLite. A $5 box.
LogNorth is one Docker container with a single SQLite file behind it. No cluster, no Redis, no Elasticsearch, no Kafka, no DevOps person. It runs on a $5 VPS and keeps every log line searchable, because at your scale that's all it takes.
Boring technology. The kind that still works in 10 years, that you can understand in an afternoon, that lets you sleep at night.
Your data. Your server.
Every hosted logging tool reads your stack traces, your file paths, your user IDs. Self-hosted means your logs stay on your server. No vendor access, no anonymous telemetry, no third-party subprocessor in your privacy policy.
When a customer asks "who can see our logs?" the answer is "only us."
$99 once. Not the treadmill.
One price. Not $29/month climbing to $99/month climbing to "contact sales." Not per-seat, not per-event, not per-gigabyte.
Run the numbers on a small app. A real entry hosted plan is about $26 a month with 90-day retention, so $1,560 over five years. LogNorth is $99 plus a $5 server, so $399. You keep $1,161, and you keep your data, all of it, not just the last 90 days. In ten years the hosted bill is still running. LogNorth is still $99.
And your AI reads it for you.
Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex can query your production logs through a read-only API. Point your agent at a failing endpoint and let it dig.
"Why are payments failing?"
"What changed on sign_up in the last hour?"
"Show me every checkout error today."
It reads the logs, finds the broken request, and tells you the fix, without you opening a dashboard. See how agents use LogNorth →