Langfuse

Solo

suitable

The free tier covers 50,000 units a month and two seats, with retention ending after 30 days. That is enough for a single application in trial, and the MIT-licensed core can also be self-hosted at no charge.

Mid-market

suitable

Twenty-nine dollars a month with unlimited seats and 90 days of retention suits a team running one or two AI features in production. The unknown is consumption, because every recorded event counts and multi-step chains produce many events per request.

Enterprise

suitable with caveats

Conditional, because the very parts a large organisation must have sit at the expensive end. Single sign-on and fine-grained roles cost an extra 300 dollars a month, audit logs and SCIM provisioning only arrive in the 2,499 dollar plan. When self-hosting, those same features sit behind a paid licence key whose price is not published.

Off-the-shelf

Log model calls into the observability stack you already run

If you already run an observability platform, model calls can be filed there as ordinary traces. That saves a separate procurement, access rights are settled and the storage location is known. What is missing is any semantics for input, output, prompt version and score. You can see that a call was slow or expensive, but not whether the answer was usable. With AI features that is precisely the question that matters.

AI-native

One of the competing AI-native platforms

The category as a whole is AI-native and Langfuse is part of it. The difference between vendors barely lies in features any more, but in the licence, the storage location and who owns the vendor. Langfuse distinguishes itself through the MIT-licensed core and the selectable EU region. Choosing a closed platform instead gives up exactly that escape route and leaves you dependent on the vendor's export interface.

Build it yourself

Trace collection into your own database

The ingestion path is manageable: standard OpenTelemetry traces into your own database plus a plain view on top. That holds as long as only developers look at it. It breaks on the parts that carry the real effort, namely evaluation runs against fixed test cases, prompt versions with approval, and an interface where domain experts without coding skills can judge answers. Building that layer yourself costs more, permanently, than it returns.

Entry price

Free for 50,000 units a month, two seats and 30 days of retention. The first paid plan costs 29 dollars a month and includes 100,000 units, unlimited seats and 90 days of retention. Alternatively the MIT-licensed core can be self-hosted at no charge.

Source · As of2026-07-30

What gets expensive

In two places. First consumption: beyond the included quota, each additional 100,000 units costs 8 dollars, falling to 6 dollars at volume. A chain with many intermediate steps per request produces a multiple of the expected units, and nobody models that in advance. Second the governance features: single sign-on and roles add 300 dollars a month, while audit logs and SCIM jump the bill from 199 to 2,499 dollars a month. If you only need those because an audit demands them, you pay that jump mid-year.