Papertrail's free tier is 50MB a day, so one bad night of stack traces pushes you onto a paid plan that scales with your worst outage, from $7 a month into the hundreds. Logbin is the pay-once alternative: ship logs from any server over HTTP or syslog, tail them live in a web UI, search everything, and get alerted when ERROR starts screaming. $34, once, on your own box.
This is the full pricing breakdown: what Papertrail actually costs over one, two and three years, what Logbin gives you for $34 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.
What Papertrail actually costs you
At $7/mo, one Papertrail subscription adds up to $84 every year — $252 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Logbin is $34 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.
| Logbin | Papertrail | |
|---|---|---|
| Sticker price | $34 once | $7/mo |
| Cost after 1 year | $34 | $84 |
| Cost after 2 years | $34 | $168 |
| Cost after 3 years | $34 | $252 |
Three years in, the gap is $218 — and every year after that adds another $84 to the subscription side of the ledger.
Logbin vs Papertrail, feature by feature
Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:
| Logbin | Papertrail | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $34 once | $7/mo |
| Volume limits | Your disk | Metered (50MB/day free) |
| Retention | You choose, per source | Tier-dependent |
| Live tail | Yes | Yes |
| Search | Yes | Yes |
| Alerts (regex + threshold) | Yes | Yes |
| Syslog + HTTP + shippers | Yes | Yes |
| Logs leave your infrastructure | Never | Always |
What you get for $34, once
Ship logs over HTTP or syslog, tail them live, search everything and alert when ERROR screams. The highlights:
- 📥 Ingest anything — POST /ingest takes plaintext, JSON, arrays or NDJSON with levels auto-detected, plus a syslog UDP listener that auto-creates sources and two tiny file-shipper scripts.
- 📡 Live tail — An SSE stream with source and level filters, text matching, pause/resume and auto-scroll.
- 🔎 Search and filter — Text search with match highlighting, per-source and per-level filters and saved views.
- 🚨 Alert rules — Fire a webhook or email when a regex like /ERROR|FATAL/ matches N times in M seconds, with cooldowns so one incident is one alert.
A handful of months on a metered log plan already beats Logbin's one-time $34, and the first outage that would have bumped your tier pays it off outright.
Switching is 3 steps
- Buy once on Whop. One payment of $34 gets you the packaged 1-click installer, or clone the MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/log-viewer-aggregator-mvp and run it yourself for free.
- Deploy on your own server. docker compose up on a $5 VPS for real ingestion, or run the Electron desktop build for local dev-log tailing.
- Ship your first line. POST a log line with a source API key, or point the syslog listener and shipper scripts at your servers, then tail and search everything in the UI.
When paying Papertrail is still the right call
Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Papertrail's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying $7/mo for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
If that's you, Logbin is $34, once. For the deeper dive, read the Logbin vs Papertrail head-to-head.
Frequently asked questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes. Logbin is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/log-viewer-aggregator-mvp and always will be. The $34 buys the packaged 1-click installer; building from source is free.
Do my logs ever leave my infrastructure?
Never. Logbin stores everything in SQLite on your own server, so unlike hosted aggregators your logs stay on your box.
How much volume can it really handle?
Honestly, small-team volumes: SQLite comfortably handles millions of rows with retention doing its job. This is not an Elasticsearch cluster and does not pretend to be, and search is LIKE-based rather than a full-text index.
Is this a subscription in disguise?
No. $34 once, no renewal, no per-GB metering, no license server. Deploy it and it keeps aggregating regardless of how loud your logs get.
More on Papertrail pricing
Logbin — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns
Try Logbin — $34, once
Ship logs over HTTP or syslog, tail them live, search everything and alert when ERROR screams.