🪵 Logbin
Self-hosted log aggregation with live tail, search and alert rules.
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.
Logbin screenshot is being captured — the app is shipped and real.
Features
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.
Per-source retention
Auto-purge old rows (default 14 days) to keep SQLite lean, with rotatable per-source API keys and color-coded sources.
Desktop mode or VPS
Electron app for local dev-log tailing, Docker for the real thing.
Logbin vs Papertrail
Papertrail at $7/mo runs roughly $84/year — $168 over two years. Logbin is $34, once.
| 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 |
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.
Three steps, no subscription
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 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.
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes. Logbin is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/log-viewer-aggregator 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.
Own Logbin forever
$34 once. Deploy on your own server — your data never leaves it. No renewal, no account with us, no meter. Or build it yourself from the MIT source — it's the same app.