Logs without a shocking bill
Observability that doesn't cost more than the app.
My stack for this
- 01Amazon CloudWatch
The critical lines: WARN and ERROR, alarms, metric filters, Live Tail. JSON log format, retention set, no payloads.
- 02Amazon Data Firehose
The chatty bulk, side by side: your logger batches DEBUG/INFO into Firehose, which writes to S3. About $75 per TB instead of about $673.
- 03DuckDB
Search the S3 logs from a laptop or a Lambda when someone asks what happened.
- 04Cloudflare Workers
Workers Logs moves to $0.25/GB on 1 December 2026.
The picks, in brief
What each one is, my verdict, and what it costs. Every name opens the full entry: when to use it and when not, the gotchas with their fixes, provisioning and alternatives.
Good features. Keep it for the logs you watch live and alarm on; send the chatty bulk through Firehose to S3.
Pricing: Sydney: Lambda logs $0.67/GB ingested (the first discount starts at 10 TB a month); Infrequent Access class $0.335/GB; storage $0.033/GB-month. Lambda's built-in delivery to S3 also costs $0.335/GB. Free tier: 5 GB a month.
The cheapest way to land a stream of records in S3. No servers, no consumers to write, and about $0.04/GB in Sydney.
Pricing: Sydney, Direct PUT: $0.037/GB ingested (first 500 TB), billed per record in 5 KB steps. JSON to Parquet conversion $0.023/GB. Dynamic partitioning $0.025/GB plus per-object fees (avoidable). Then normal S3 storage.
SQL over Parquet that runs anywhere, from my laptop to a Lambda. Next to Athena, not instead of it.
Pricing: Free and MIT-licensed. In Lambda you pay compute and S3 GETs: a query that reads 1 GB costs about $0.002, against $0.005 on Athena, with no 10 MB minimum per query.
The edge primitive. It sits between your users and your real backend, and it's very, very good at that.
Pricing: $5 a month per account, including 10M requests and 30M CPU-ms. Then $0.30 per million requests and $0.02 per million CPU-ms. Billed on CPU time only: waiting is free. No egress charges.
Where they sit
The layers of the stack this job touches, with every tool named on this page.
Edge
Between your users and your backend.
APIs, queues and events
How requests and events move.
Data
Databases, migrations and the data lake.
Observability
Logs, metrics, alarms.
Want this stack in your AWS account?
Cloudless Labs is a Sydney consultancy. We migrate on-premises systems to AWS, build serverless apps on this stack, and coach teams to ship with Claude Code and Codex.