# Telemetry cost estimator

Estimate how much traces, logs and metrics your traffic produces each day, how much storage that needs, and which plan fits it.

## How it works

Daily volume is your requests per day times what each request produces: spans times their average size, plus log lines times their size. Metrics add a steady amount per series and scrape.

Storage is the daily volume times the retention period, divided by the compression ratio. Columnar stores like ClickHouse usually compress telemetry between 5 and 15 times.

```
daily = requests × (spans × span size + logs × log size) + metrics
storage = daily × retention ÷ compression
```

## Questions

### How big is a span?

Usually 300 bytes to 1 KB, depending on how many attributes it carries. Spans with large SQL statements or payloads are bigger.

### How can I cut the volume?

Sample traces you don't need in full, drop debug logs in production, and keep high-cardinality values out of metric labels.

### Does sampling lose errors?

Head sampling can. Tail sampling, or keeping all error traces, lets you sample the rest without losing failures.

## Related tools

- [Log volume estimator](https://powertraces.com/tools/log-volume)
- [Metric cardinality calculator](https://powertraces.com/tools/metric-cardinality)
- [Retention & storage calculator](https://powertraces.com/tools/retention-storage)
- [Data transfer estimator](https://powertraces.com/tools/data-transfer)

[All tools](https://powertraces.com/tools)