Best free error tracking: hosted quota vs $0 self-host
best free error tracking
Free splits two ways. SaaS free tiers cap events. Self-host $0 licenses leave you paying the VPS. Sentry Developer is one user; confirm the live error quota.
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One SERP query, two products. Rank inside a column. Do not average them. Hosted free means someone else runs the cluster and you get a monthly quota. License free means you clone the code, the fee is $0 if the license fits, and you pay VPS, disk, and backups.
Public pricing restated 2026-10-05 from vendor pages and this site. Re-check before you buy. Wider roster: Sentry alternatives. Cheapest predictable bill (including paid flats): Cheapest error tracking.
Hosted free tiers
PostHog Errors publishes about 100k exceptions a month on the free errors product, then paid PostHog plans, on their own SDK. That is the volume play if you already live in PostHog.
Sentry Developer is free for one user. Third-party roundups commonly cite 5k errors a month on Developer; confirm the live quota on sentry.io/pricing. Team is about $26 a month (annual default as fetched 2026-10-05) with 50k errors included, then pay-as-you-go. Developer is a solo trial quota, not a team plan. A second teammate, or a loop that blows past the free quota, ends the free month. If you are evaluating Sentry's suite including replay and tracing, stay on Developer until the seat or the quota breaks. The moment you need more than one person or a crash loop, you are on paid Sentry or on a different host.
Honeybadger Developer is commonly listed around 5k errors a month and one user, then Team from about $26, with no self-host. GlitchTip Cloud offers a small free sample (about 1k events on their public pricing), then paid. Bugsink hosted eval is about 15k events and one user, then paid hosted from about $16 for 75k (fetched from bugsink.com 2026-10-05). Epure has no free hosted tier. Cloud list prices on this site are Pro $29, Scale $89,, and Cloud is not live as of 2026-10-05.
When Sentry Developer is enough
You are one person, the app is quiet, and you want Sentry's replay and tracing while you try the product. Stay until the quota or the seat count breaks. Do not plan a two-person SaaS onboarding on Developer. That is the gotcha folded here from the old Sentry free tier page.
$0 self-host licenses
GlitchTip: MIT, about four containers, 256 MB min / 512 MB recommended in their install docs. Bugsink: Polyform Shield, one container, SQLite-first; Shield is not OSI. Epure: Apache 2.0, two containers (Rust + PostgreSQL 16). Dated idle receipts live on Resource footprint; link them, do not invent a new MiB. Hardware still costs money. PostHog self-host is a full analytics compose. Sentry self-host is FSL and a 20+ container flotilla with an official COMPOSE_PROFILES=errors-only profile that is still heavy. Honeybadger has no self-host. Telebugs is $299 once; leave it off a $0 shortlist.
What happens after free
Hosted free tiers throttle, drop, or push a paid plan. Self-host has no vendor overage meter. Spikes still cost CPU and disk on your box. On Epure, a spike valve can return HTTP 202 while dropping excess bodies for a hot fingerprint, and a hard hourly cap can return 403 ingest_cap_exceeded. You see the count. You do not get a surprise SaaS invoice. Details: Spike valve.
Lived free-tier miss
I watched a solo founder invite a contractor to the Sentry project on a Monday. Developer allows one user. The invite failed the plan, not the product. They either upgraded to Team at about $26 plus pay-as-you-go, or they moved the DSN to a self-host that does not meter seats. We moved the DSN to Epure on a $6-class VPS that already ran Postgres-shaped workloads. The contractor got a login on the box we operated. The bill that month was the VPS, not a seat line item.
Second gotcha: a retry loop on a free hosted quota burns the month in an afternoon. The same loop on self-host fills disk or trips the spike valve. Different failure, same bug. Keep the count; fix the loop.
Scoreboard
Free SaaS quota
- PostHog
- ~100k exceptions/mo
- Sentry
- Developer: 1 user (confirm live error quota)
- GlitchTip
- ~1k then paid
- Bugsink
- ~15k eval
- Epure
- None (Cloud not a free tier; not live)
Self-host license
- PostHog
- MIT (large stack)
- Sentry
- FSL
- GlitchTip
- MIT · $0
- Bugsink
- Shield · $0
- Epure
- Apache 2.0 · $0
After quota
- PostHog
- Paid PostHog
- Sentry
- Team ~$26 / 50k then PAYG
- GlitchTip
- Paid Cloud
- Bugsink
- Paid hosted from ~$16
- Epure
- Self-host: your hardware
SDK
- PostHog
- Own
- Sentry
- Native
- GlitchTip
- DSN swap
- Bugsink
- DSN swap
- Epure
- DSN swap (exceptions)
| Dimension | PostHog | Sentry | GlitchTip | Bugsink | Epure |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free SaaS quota | ~100k exceptions/mo | Developer: 1 user (confirm live error quota) | ~1k then paid | ~15k eval | None (Cloud not a free tier; not live) |
| Self-host license | MIT (large stack) | FSL | MIT · $0 | Shield · $0 | Apache 2.0 · $0 |
| After quota | Paid PostHog | Team ~$26 / 50k then PAYG | Paid Cloud | Paid hosted from ~$16 | Self-host: your hardware |
| SDK | Own | Native | DSN swap | DSN swap | DSN swap (exceptions) |
Pick the free that matches the invoice you refuse
Pick Epure if counsel wants OSI (Apache 2.0), you will run a VPS, and you already ship Sentry SDKs. Pick PostHog for hosted free volume inside their product. Pick GlitchTip for MIT self-host. Pick Bugsink for one container when Shield is acceptable. Pick Sentry Developer only while you are solo and evaluating the suite.
Install path: Quickstart, Installation, Verify.
Free is not the same as cheap
A free hosted quota can become the most expensive month you have when a deploy loops and pay-as-you-go wakes up after an upgrade. A $0 license can be cheaper software and still cost a senior engineer's Friday if the compose is a science project. Rank free inside a column. Then read Cheapest error tracking for the bill you can predict, including cases where a small paid flat beats a "free" meter.
Disclose bias
This page is first-party Epure content. The Apache self-host row is the product we ship. The scoreboard still lists PostHog, Sentry, GlitchTip, and Bugsink with public numbers so you can disagree with the pick. Re-fetch vendor pricing on the day you decide.