Sentry vs Bugsnag vs Rollbar: Real Error Monitoring Cost per 100 Million Events in 2026
The short answer: at 100 million error events a month, only Sentry publishes enough of a rate card to price the volume, and the price is large: about $15,038 a month on the Team plan and about $30,175 on the Business plan at Sentry's reserved-volume rates, even though both plans advertise the same 50,000 included errors. Bugsnag and Rollbar both price by monthly event volume, but neither publishes a rate card that reaches 100 million events, so their cost at this scale is QUOTE-ONLY / UNKNOWN. The more useful finding is how little the headline plan prices say. Sentry's $26 Team and $80 Business plans are base fees on top of a metered overage whose per-event rate is roughly 3.1 times higher on Business at the first tier and 2 times higher at the top tier, so the plan decision matters more than the volume decision until volume is very large. Because all three vendors price accepted events, sampling and rate-limiting before the SDK sends an event is usually a bigger lever than choosing a vendor.
The billing-unit mismatch, up front
An "event" is not the same object across the three. Sentry bills each accepted error event and meters other data separately: spans, session replays, logs, metrics, attachments, cron and uptime monitors, and Seer AI usage all draw from the same pay-as-you-go budget, each with its own rate. Bugsnag bills monthly events (error occurrences) and treats sessions (for stability scores) as a separate quantity. Rollbar bills occurrences; its grouping consolidates many occurrences into one item, which makes the dashboard look smaller than the bill because the unit billed is the occurrence, not the item. Normalizing "100 million events" therefore means 100 million accepted exception reports at the SDK, with none filtered, rate-limited or deduplicated before the platform counts them; any real deployment's billable count will be lower than raw SDK exceptions.
What each vendor actually bills
Sentry (OFFICIAL, sentry.io/pricing and docs.sentry.io/pricing; per-tier rates as published in current plan breakdowns). Developer: free, 5,000 errors, 1 user. Team: $26 a month on annual billing ($29 monthly), unlimited users, 50,000 errors, 5 million spans, 50 replays, 5 GB of logs. Business: $80 a month on annual billing ($89 monthly), the same included volume, adding SAML SSO, advanced quota management and longer retention. Enterprise: custom. Beyond the included volume, errors bill per event in tiers, and reserved (prepaid) volume is about 20% cheaper than pay-as-you-go. Reserved error rates: Team $0.00029 per error from 50,000 to 100,000, $0.00018 from 100,000 to 500,000, $0.00015 above 500,000; Business $0.00089, $0.0005 and $0.0003 respectively. Pay-as-you-go starts 25% higher (Team $0.0003625 and Business $0.0011125 at the first tier) and falls with volume, reaching $0.00015 for Team at 20 million and above; the intermediate pay-as-you-go tiers are not itemized in a form that can be priced here. Data sent after reserved volume and the pay-as-you-go budget are exhausted is dropped. Unused reserved volume expires monthly.
Bugsnag (REPORTED; SmartBear's published plan summaries). Plans scale by monthly events, with a free tier reported at 7,500 events a month, paid plans starting around $59 a month for the Team tier and a Standard tier around $99 a month for 25,000 events, and plan selectors reported to extend to 300 million events or more. A separate third-party summary lists "Select" and "Preferred" tiers at $20 and $33 a month for 150,000 and 300,000 events, which conflicts with the figures above and may describe an older plan structure. A price at 100 million events is not published.
Rollbar (OFFICIAL for plan structure, rollbar.com; REPORTED for exact tiers). Free: 5,000 occurrences a month, unlimited users and projects. Rollbar's own comparison material lists Essentials from $9 a month with 10,000 events and 4,000 AI credits, and Advanced from $13 with 10,000 events and 8,000 AI credits, with session replay included on every plan including Free; a third-party roundup lists higher entry prices ($15 and $32), so entry prices should be confirmed. Rollbar states that it stops at the plan limit by default and that on-demand events beyond it bill at the plan's own per-event rate with no premium, with an optional overage budget as a hard dollar cap. The per-event rate and the plans available at 100 million occurrences are not published.
Normalizing the workload
All ILLUSTRATIVE. 100 million accepted error events a month; a 20-engineer team; one production portfolio; no performance traces, replays or logs. Sentry's cost is computed from reserved rates; the comparison is not extended to Bugsnag or Rollbar because the necessary rate is not public. Two reference volumes are shown for scale.
Cost at the normalized workload
Formula: Sentry = plan base + Σ (events in tier × tier rate), with the first 50,000 included.
| Monthly accepted errors | Sentry Team (reserved) | Sentry Business (reserved) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 million | $187.50 | $474.50 |
| 10 million | $1,537.50 | $3,174.50 |
| 100 million | $15,037.50 | $30,174.50 |
At 100 million on Team: $26 base + $14.50 (50K at $0.00029) + $72.00 (400K at $0.00018) + $14,925.00 (99.5M at $0.00015) = $15,037.50, an effective rate of about $150 per million errors. On Business: $80 + $44.50 + $200.00 + $29,850.00 = $30,174.50, about $302 per million. Bugsnag and Rollbar at 100 million: QUOTE-ONLY / UNKNOWN. Third-party contract estimates put organizations at 10 million or more events a month in the $50,000–$150,000+ a year range on Sentry Business (REPORTED), which is the same order of magnitude as the reserved rate card's $3,175 a month (about $38,100 a year) at 10 million events.
Why Team versus Business is the largest decision
Both Sentry plans include 50,000 errors. The higher plan buys SSO, audit and quota controls, and longer retention, but it also roughly triples the first-tier overage rate and doubles the high-volume rate. Moving a 100-million-event workload from Team to Business adds $15,137 a month in error charges alone for features unrelated to volume. A team that needs SAML SSO for compliance at that volume should ask whether an Enterprise contract, which can negotiate the per-event rate, is cheaper than Business pay-as-you-go.
The levers that matter more than vendor choice
Because the billable unit is an accepted event, cost falls with: client-side sample rates (a 10% sample takes 100 million raw events to 10 million, and Sentry Team from $15,038 to $1,538); rate limiting per project and per key, which stops a single crash loop from consuming the month's quota; inbound filters and fingerprint-based dropping for known noisy errors; and spend caps (Sentry's pay-as-you-go budget, Rollbar's overage budget), which prevent runaway invoices at the cost of dropped data when exhausted. Grouping and issue consolidation are not cost levers on any of the three: Rollbar's dashboard consolidates aggressively but bills occurrences, and Sentry's issue grouping is separate from event counting.
Sensitivity
- Sample rate and rate limits. The dominant lever: each halving of accepted events roughly halves the Sentry bill at high volume.
- Plan tier on Sentry. Business's overage rate is about double Team's at the top tier, so 100 million events costs $15,137 more on Business.
- Reserved versus pay-as-you-go. Reserved volume is about 20% cheaper at the first tier but expires monthly and cannot be refunded if volume falls.
- Other data types on Sentry. Spans, replays, logs and Seer usage share one pay-as-you-go budget, so enabling tracing at this error volume adds charges not modeled here.
Budgeting traps
- Reading "$26 a month" as the price. It is a base fee under a metered overage; at 1 million errors the real Team bill is $187.50.
- Assuming Business is Team with more features at a similar volume price. Its error overage rate is higher at every published tier.
- Treating Rollbar's item count as the billing unit. Items are grouped issues; occurrences are billed.
- Comparing vendors on different entry prices. Rollbar and Bugsnag entry prices differ across sources; confirm before using them.
- Letting a crash loop run unchecked. Without per-project rate limits, one failing release can consume a month's reserved volume in hours.
What to ask before you buy
Ask Bugsnag and Rollbar for a quote at your expected monthly event volume, since neither publishes one. Ask Sentry for an Enterprise rate if you expect more than a few million events a month, and ask exactly which data types draw from the shared pay-as-you-go budget. Measure how many exceptions your SDKs send and how many survive sampling, filtering and rate limits before comparing any per-event price.