Editorial take
Why it stands out
Do not confuse OpenTelemetry pricing with Grafana or Datadog bills—those backends own the invoice.
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Tool profile
Open standard for collecting traces, metrics, and logs across apps and infrastructure.
Microservices needing consistent trace context propagation
CNCF standard for traces, metrics, and logs: vendor-neutral SDKs, collectors, and semantic conventions so telemetry exports to any backend.
The OpenTelemetry project publishes Apache-2.0 SDKs and the Collector without charging per developer. Costs are entirely operational: VMs or Kubernetes for collectors, egress to SaaS backends, and storage inside vendors such as Grafana Cloud, Datadog, Honeycomb, or self-hosted Prometheus/Tempo/Loki stacks.
Invest in semantic conventions and collector pipelines early—retrofits are expensive once every service invents its own attribute names.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Do not confuse OpenTelemetry pricing with Grafana or Datadog bills—those backends own the invoice.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Apache Kafka
Free planEvent streaming and event-driven architectures
Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput pipelines, pub/sub, and stream-processing ecosystems.
Choose Kafka when replayable event streams and ecosystem breadth matter more than the lightest possible operational footprint.
Pricing snapshot
OpenTelemetry is a free Apache-2.0 CNCF project with no license or seat fees. Your real costs come from collector infrastructure, network egress, and whichever backend stores and queries the telemetry.
Arcjet
Free planApplication runtime security
Runtime security toolkit for modern applications and AI systems that helps teams enforce quotas, block bots, prevent prompt abuse, and ship app-level protections in code.
Closer to application-runtime security and abuse-prevention tooling than to classic perimeter appliances.
