Logging and trace fees

Every other line in this estate is priced by account or by tenant. Logs and traces are priced by traffic. They are the lines that move when the product gets used, and they are set by four switches most teams never open.

Audience Business analyst, platform engineer, compliance reviewer Status Current · Version 1.0 Owner Platform engineer (role) Evidence basis Vendor list prices read 16 September 2026 Review cycle Quarterly, and whenever a vendor announces a billing change Related BYO Xano and BigQuery against Google's agent platform

1.8.1 At a glance: metered or flat

Open the interactive comparison: Metered or Flat

The same loyalty event stream, carried two ways. Both paths start at the Cloudflare Worker, which receives Shopify's webhooks and runs the permissions boundary, and both end in BigQuery. Only the middle differs, and lines that cost the same in both are grouped first. Totals: $99.00 vs $90.01 at 300k events, $183 vs $90.15 at 3M, $1,032 vs $103 at 30M.

In words: at 30M events a month the Google metered path costs about $1,032 and the Xano + Cloudflare fixed path about $103, a difference of $929. The largest single line is Workflows orchestration at about $900, priced at $0.01 per 1,000 steps. The Pub/Sub socket itself is only about $1.84, egress about $3.43 and Cloud Trace about $29.50. At 3M events the totals are about $183 against $90, and at 300k events about $99 against $90. The Cloudflare Worker, BigQuery ingest and the $85 Xano Essential plan cost the same on both paths.

Illustrative, not measured: ~300-byte events billed at the 1 KiB minimum, 3 Workflows steps per event, 1 log entry and 5 spans per event, one callback per event. Xano Essential is paid in both paths.

1.8.2 The question this answers

Google's agent monitoring dashboard asks to enable four services before it shows anything: cloudtrace.googleapis.com, monitoring.googleapis.com, logging.googleapis.com and bigquery.googleapis.com. Each is free up to an allotment and billed by volume after it. Cloudflare begins billing Worker traces on 1 October 2026. Xano bills a fixed fee.

What will monitoring cost at our traffic, and which settings decide it?

1.8.3 Vocabulary

1.8.4 The rate card

Google Cloud

Spans generated automatically by App Engine Standard, Cloud Run and Cloud Run functions are not charged. Spans an application sends itself are.

Cloudflare Workers

The 20 million events are shared by logs and traces. Turning tracing on uses up the allowance that logging had to itself.

Xano

1.8.5 Worked example: one month, three volumes

Illustrative, not measured. Assumes one log entry of about 1 KiB and five spans per request, no sampling and no exclusions.

Read the last row carefully. At 30 million requests, Cloudflare tracing costs about three times Google tracing. Cloudflare prices a span at $0.60 per million against Google's $0.20, and a span shares the allowance a log line would otherwise use. "No egress" does not mean "cheaper for everything".

Log size moves the Google side instead. At 10 KiB per entry, which is realistic for an AI agent conversation that logs prompts and tool calls, 30 million requests is about 286 GiB. That is $118 a month for Cloud Logging, and nothing extra on Cloudflare, which bills per event regardless of size up to 256 KB.

1.8.6 The four settings that decide the bill

1. Sampling rate. On Cloudflare, observability.head_sampling_rate takes a value from 0 to 1. At 0.1, 30 million requests become 3 million events, inside the included allowance. On Google, the trace sampler in the client library does the same for spans.
2. Exclusion filters. On Google, an exclusion on the _Default sink drops health checks, static asset requests and debug output before they are billed. Exclusions are the only lever that lowers ingestion without lowering sampling.
3. Retention. Keep _Default at 30 days unless a named obligation requires longer. Past 30 days, Google bills $0.01 per GiB-month, and every extra month of stored logs is another month of stored personal data.
4. Whether tracing is on at all. A trace is worth its fee while a request crosses several services and something is being diagnosed. Left on permanently at 100%, it is the line that grows fastest after 1 October 2026.

1.8.7 What it costs to keep the bill low

1.8.8 Logs are personal data

A log entry that records a customer id, an email address, an IP address or a prompt holds personal data. Retention is then a GDPR question as well as a billing one: storage limitation requires keeping it no longer than its purpose needs, and an erasure request covers it. Two consequences:

• Do not log what you would not store. Consent decisions, tokens and identifiers belong in the record they govern, not in free-text log lines that no erasure path reaches.
• Google's _Required bucket keeps audit logs for 400 days and cannot be shortened. That is appropriate for admin audit events and a reason never to write customer data into them.

1.8.9 What to do next

Ordered by deadline.

1. Before 1 October 2026: decide Worker tracing. Leave it unconfigured, or set head_sampling_rate below 1 before enabling traces. Owner: platform engineer.
2. Set a sampling rate on any Worker that logs every request. observability.enabled: true with no rate means 100%. Owner: platform engineer.
3. Before pressing "Enable all" on Google's agent monitoring: add a _Default exclusion for health checks and static assets, and a budget alert on the project. Owner: Google Cloud project owner.
4. Compare each Worker's dashboard logging setting with its configuration file. A setting changed in the dashboard is not in configuration, and the first invoice shows it before any review does. Owner: platform engineer.
5. After 30 days, replace this page's illustrative volumes with the billed quantities from both invoices. Owner: business analyst.

1.8.10 What this document does not claim

This is a price comparison at list rates, not a bill. The volumes are assumptions and are marked as such. Rates were read from each vendor's pricing page on 16 September 2026 and change without notice. The Cloudflare trace billing date is Cloudflare's own announcement. Xano's pricing page lists no logging or tracing line, so none is assumed. This is not legal advice on retention periods.

Sources

• Google Cloud Observability pricing
• Cloudflare Workers Logs
• Cloudflare Workers Traces
• Cloudflare Workers pricing
• Xano pricing