Why the $0.02/1M events claim was wrong (and what we learned)
Real-world infrastructure costs of high-throughput telemetry at scale and how our pipeline achieves true efficiency.
Early on, our deck claimed a cost of $0.02 per million events. It was a nice number — and it was wrong. A million events on ClickHouse-grade infrastructure costs roughly $9–$15 to process, and pretending otherwise is exactly the kind of math that fails diligence and misleads customers.
What we got right is the structural point underneath: telemetry is infrastructure, and its cost should behave like infrastructure. Per-event processing on a tuned pipeline is dramatically cheaper than per-event pricing on a legacy analytics vendor, which is where the real savings come from.
We retired the $0.02 figure, replaced it with a measured target around $12 per million events at scale, and built an internal cost dashboard so the number is never aspirational again. When we publish a number, it should be one we can verify on our own infrastructure.
The lesson for us — and for any company pitching infrastructure — is that honesty about unit economics is a moat. Customers who understand your cost model trust your pricing; the ones who don't, walk away when they do the math.
Tracabit records traffic, events, crashes and web vitals with one script tag, and lets your coding agent read them over MCP.
Start free