Sentry alternatives without per-event bills

Sentry alternatives without per-event bills

I got a $387 invoice from Sentry the month a Reddit thread linked my side project. The traffic spike fired roughly 5x my normal events, the reservoir on my Team plan ran out by mid-month, and overage kicked in at fractions of a cent per event. Fractions of a cent times a few million events is a real number. The site was free for users; the monitoring wasn't.

I paid the bill. I didn't enjoy it. I went looking for alternatives, started keeping notes, eventually wrote some of those notes into a product, and now I've used or evaluated every fixed-price competitor I could find. This post is the cleaned-up version of those notes — what's out there, what each one trades off, and what the actual numbers look like at 100K, 1M, and 10M events per month.

If you're reading this because you got a similar invoice, or because you're staring at the upgrade modal trying to predict next month's traffic — yes, the pricing model is the problem, not your math. There are tools that don't bill that way.

Why per-event pricing is structurally bad for small teams

Per-event pricing — Sentry's "reservoir plus overage" model — has a clean economic story for the vendor: cost scales with usage. The story breaks down on the buyer side because the bug-storm and the bill-storm are the same storm.

The events that put you over reservoir are almost never your boring background errors. They're the spike caused by a deploy that crashed the React tree, or the third-party SDK that started throwing on every page, or the one Reddit link. In those weeks you actually want to focus on the bug. Per-event pricing makes that the same week you're also worried about the invoice. Worse, the cheap mitigations — turning down tracesSampleRate, dropping breadcrumbs, raising your beforeSend filter to drop noisy errors — also hide the signal you needed in the first place.

The defense is "set a hard quota and stop ingestion when you hit it." Sentry supports that. So does every other per-event tool. The problem is now you're flying blind during the exact period you most want eyes on the system. Either you pay the surprise bill or you lose the data. There is no third option in that model.

Fixed-price billing fixes this by moving the constraint somewhere less load-bearing. You hit a soft cap, the vendor pauses ingestion until next cycle, and your invoice doesn't move. Some signal is lost, but the failure mode is predictable instead of expensive.

That's the trade. The rest of this post is about which fixed-price (or close-to-fixed-price) alternatives are worth a look.

The fixed-price (and fixed-tier) alternatives

Six tools that solve roughly the same shape of problem. Each has trade-offs; I'll be specific about them.

Bugsnag (now SmartBear) — older error tracker, owns a chunk of the mobile market. Pricing is per-event with reservoirs, similar to Sentry, but the entry tier is generous. Lite is $0 for 7,500 events; Standard is around $59/month. If you're shipping mobile, Bugsnag is the polished option. If you're web-only, you're paying for symbolication and OS-version coverage you don't need.

Honeybadger — fixed-tier pricing, web-and-Rails-leaning. Plans run from a $26/month tier upward. Solid product, opinionated dashboard, no replay, no profiling. Good answer for "I want Sentry for a Rails app and never want to think about overage."

AppSignal — request-based pricing rather than event-based, which behaves a little better for high-traffic web apps. Plans start in the $19/month range. Strong on Ruby and Elixir; their JS support is real but feels secondary to those.

Rollbar — older player. Pricing is per-event. Free tier covers 5,000 events; paid plans start at $21/month with reservoirs and overage above. Mechanically similar to Sentry but cheaper at the small-shop end.

Highlight.io — usage-based with a generous free tier. Highlight's distinctive feature is session replay, which means storage cost and pricing nonlinearity. Their free tier is 500 sessions and 1,000 errors; paid tiers scale by both. If you specifically want replay, Highlight or Sentry are the realistic answers; if you don't, you're paying for a feature you don't use.

Netwarden Apps — what I built. Fully fixed monthly pricing, no per-event line item, ever. Free tier is 1 project; Solo is $9/month, Studio $29, Agency $79. The wedge feature — which I'll explain below — is dependency-update CVE alerts on the same dashboard. Self-hostable on a single Bun binary.

I'm leaving Datadog's APM-error tracking off this list on purpose. It's not in the same category — different buyer, different price point, and at the volumes a hobbyist or small team is dealing with, the answer is "no."

The real math at three volumes

This is the table you came for. Numbers as of May 2026 from each vendor's published pricing page. I've assumed a single project per tool; multi-project setups change the math for some of these.

| Volume | Sentry | Bugsnag | Honeybadger | AppSignal | Rollbar | Highlight | Netwarden Apps | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | 100K events/mo | Team $26 | Standard $59 | Small $26 | Trial $19 | Essentials $21 | Free | Solo $9 | | 1M events/mo | Business $80 + ~$29 overage = ~$109 | Standard $59 + overage | Medium $79 | Standard $54 | Advanced $99 + overage | Pay-as-you-go ~$80 | Studio $29 | | 10M events/mo | Business + ~$352 overage = ~$432 | Custom (call sales) | Large $169 + overage | Enterprise (call sales) | Custom | $200+ | Agency $79 |

A few notes on the table. Sentry's "reservoir" feature lets you smooth spikes by buying ahead, which softens the 1M and 10M scenarios in practice — if you're consistent. The overage rates I cited assume you are not consistent, which is the case I care about. Rollbar's pricing has shifted toward per-event since I last wrote about them; verify on their page before committing. Highlight's pricing is usage-based and depends heavily on whether you turn replay on; the numbers above assume replay off.

The Netwarden Apps row is flat by design. That's the entire pricing model. No reservoir, no overage line, no calculator. Hit the soft cap, ingestion pauses for 24 hours, no invoice movement.

What Sentry has that the alternatives don't

I want to be honest about this before pitching anything. Sentry is good. I used it for years. There are real reasons to keep paying them.

Session replay. Sentry's replay product is genuinely useful for "user reported a bug, I can't reproduce, let me watch what they did." Highlight has this too. None of the other tools on the list — including Netwarden — ship replay. I'm not building replay; the storage costs are at odds with $9/month.

Distributed tracing and APM. Sentry's Performance product traces requests across services, gives you span trees, p95 latencies, slow queries, the works. If you have a real distributed system to trace, Sentry's APM is mature. Netwarden has request timing and breadcrumbs; we don't have span trees and we won't soon.

Profiling. Sentry ships continuous profiling with flame graphs. Useful if your bottleneck isn't visible from logs. Out of scope for everyone else on this list.

Compliance posture. Sentry has SOC 2, BAA, the enterprise checklist. If your buyer requires compliance attestations, Sentry's the path of least resistance. Most of the alternatives are not there yet, and Netwarden is honest about not being there either.

Years of polish. Sentry's JavaScript SDK has been hardened against eight years of edge cases — Cloudflare Workers, Next.js middleware quirks, Vite's source-map oddities, the React 19 hydration changes. Newer SDKs, including ours, will look thin in side-by-side reviews until they've absorbed those years of bug reports.

If any of those are load-bearing for you, stay on Sentry. The rest of this post assumes they aren't.

What the alternatives have that Sentry doesn't

Each alternative wins on something specific. The Netwarden-specific wins are the ones I know best, so I'll lead with those, but I'll cite the others too.

Dependency-update CVE alerts (Netwarden's wedge). This is the thing none of the other error trackers do. On SDK init, the Netwarden client reads your resolved lockfile and reports the package + version pairs to the platform. A daily cron cross-references those against the OSV.dev advisory feed across eight ecosystems — npm, PyPI, RubyGems, Go modules, Cargo, Maven, NuGet, Composer. When a CVE patch lands for a package you're shipping, you get an email and a push notification with the fixed version printed as a copy-paste line. Sentry doesn't do this. Bugsnag doesn't. Honeybadger doesn't. The closest comparable is Snyk or Dependabot, which are different products at different prices. Netwarden ships it free with the error tracker. The detailed walkthrough is in the Apps launch post.

Self-host on a single binary (Netwarden's other wedge). Sentry's self-hosted is a docker-compose stack with seven services and meaningful operational baggage; their team has publicly de-prioritized self-hosted in favor of SaaS. Netwarden's self-hosted is a single Bun-compiled binary, bring-your-own SQLite or Postgres, run it. Same surface as the hosted product, no feature gates. Honeybadger and Rollbar are SaaS-only.

Honest mobile coverage. Bugsnag's mobile SDKs — iOS, Android, Unity — are still the most polished on the list. If mobile is your primary target, Bugsnag is a real answer.

Bundled with host monitoring. Netwarden also runs a Linux/Windows/macOS host-monitor agent, and Apps lives in the same tenant. If you also need "is my $5 VPS up, what's its disk look like, are there failed SSH logins" — that's the same dashboard, the same invoice. Nothing else on the list does this.

How to pick

A short decision tree:

• You need session replay. → Sentry or Highlight. Stop reading.
• You ship a mobile app and care about iOS/Android symbolication. → Bugsnag.
• You're on Rails or Elixir and want a fixed-tier price. → Honeybadger or AppSignal.
• You need errors at fixed price for a web/Node/Python app. → Honeybadger or Netwarden Apps.
• You also want CVE alerts for your package.json or requirements.txt. → Netwarden Apps. (Nothing else on this list ships this.)
• You want to self-host the error tracker on one binary, no docker-compose. → Netwarden Apps.
• You also need host-level monitoring (CPU, disk, processes, SSH). → Netwarden Apps, bundled with the host agent.
• You have a SOC 2 / BAA requirement. → Sentry.

If your answer is "I want fixed price and I want the dependency-update alerts and I might self-host eventually," that's the slot Apps was built for. The pricing page has the four tiers — Free, Solo at $9, Studio at $29, Agency at $79 — and the Sentry comparison page has the side-by-side.

Closing — and an honest CTA

I built Netwarden Apps because I wanted Sentry without the surprise bill, and once I started building it I noticed I could throw in the dependency-update wedge for nearly free because we were already running the security pipeline for hosts. That's the product. It's $9/month for one developer with a couple of side projects, $29 for a small team, $79 for an agency running multiple client apps. The Free tier covers one project with no card.

If you're a Sentry user who's tired of doing math on event volume, the migration path is mechanical — most of the SDK calls have the same shape. There's a step-by-step migration guide for the specifics.

If Apps doesn't fit, one of the other tools on this list probably does. Honeybadger is a good answer for Rails-heavy shops. Bugsnag is the right answer if mobile is the main target. AppSignal if you're on Ruby or Elixir. Don't let the upgrade-modal anxiety push you onto a per-event tier you don't actually need — the alternatives exist and they work.

— Thiago

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Keep reading

• Announcing Netwarden Apps (alpha) — the launch post and product overview.
• Migrating from Sentry to Netwarden in 30 minutes — the SDK swap walkthrough.
• Pricing — the full tier breakdown with no per-event line item.
• Apps features — the long-form capability tour.