> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://langwatch.ai/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Pricing

> How LangWatch Cloud pricing works, with events, data retention, and answers to common questions.

LangWatch Cloud pricing is built around two ideas: **seats scale with your team, and usage stays cheap.** Building reliable AI systems is collaborative work: engineers iterate, product teams define success metrics, domain experts review outputs, and stakeholders track performance. We price around that collaboration and keep usage costs low, so more tracking, evaluations, and production traffic adds little to your bill.

<Card title="Start for free, no credit card required" icon="rocket" href="https://app.langwatch.ai">
  The free plan gives you immediate access to all core features, including evaluations, monitoring, and agent simulations.
</Card>

## Events

LangWatch Cloud pricing is based on the number of **ingested events per billing period.**

An event is a standard telemetry point, the building block of everything you observe in LangWatch. The most common one is a **span**: a single step in your system, such as an LLM call, a tool execution, a retrieval step, a span timer firing, or the point at which an error occurred.

A **billable event** is any of these:

* **A span, log or metric your app sent us.** The telemetry that makes up a request to your agent or LLM application, or to a coding assistant you track. Spans are the individual steps; logs and metrics are what those steps recorded along the way.
* **An evaluation result.** One score from an evaluator, whether it ran on live traffic or over a dataset.
* **A step of an experiment run.** A sweep counts its start, each dataset row it ran, and each score it produced, so one experiment is many events rather than one.
* **A step of a scenario simulation.** A run counts its start plus each turn of the conversation.

Spans dominate the count whenever your app sends traces, but testing produces billable events too: an experiment over 100 rows with 2 evaluators is roughly 300 events. There are no separate charges per feature on top of this, and everything you create (prompts, evaluators, datasets, dashboards) is free.

For the exact arithmetic per family, what is never billed, and how retries are deduplicated, see [What counts as a billable event](/docs/pricing/billable-events).

### What's included

Each plan includes a base volume of events stored for a default window. For example, the **Growth** plan includes **200,000 events stored for 30 days.** If you need more, a longer retention window or higher volume, you can [extend retention](#extending-retention) with an Enterprise plan or a self-hosted license.

## Custom data retention

Retention controls how long your events are kept before they're automatically removed. Default retention depends on your plan:

| Plan                | Default retention         |
| ------------------- | ------------------------- |
| Free                | 14 days                   |
| Accelerate (legacy) | 30 days                   |
| Growth              | 30 days                   |
| Custom / Enterprise | Defined with you directly |

### Extending retention

The windows above are LangWatch Cloud plans. Going beyond your plan's default window, keeping events longer or storing a higher volume, is available on **Enterprise plans**; it isn't a self-serve toggle on the standard Cloud tiers.

On Enterprise, extended storage is priced from **€3 per GB** and configured as part of your agreement, so you only pay for the additional storage you actually use.

Self-hosted deployments are different: the data sits in your own database, so there is no window we impose and no volume we meter. Retention is yours to configure, with or without a license. What a license adds there is multi-class retention, a separate policy per data category. See [Editions and licensing](/docs/self-hosting/licensing).

<Note>
  To extend retention beyond your plan default, reach out to your contact or [enterprise@langwatch.ai](mailto:enterprise@langwatch.ai). Self-hosting? See the [self-hosting docs](/docs/self-hosting/overview) to configure retention with a license.
</Note>

## Frequently asked questions

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="How does pricing behave as I scale up?">
    There are no sudden pricing jumps tied to volume. LangWatch is designed so teams can track all agent activity, run continuous evaluations, and scale to production workloads without their bill spiking. Seats scale with team size, and event pricing stays low, so a growing workload adds little to your bill.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Is there a free plan?">
    Yes. You can start for free with LangWatch Cloud, no credit card required. The free plan gives you immediate access to all core features: evaluations, monitoring, and agent simulations. It's ideal for developers who want to experiment or run small-scale testing.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What if I'm working with sensitive data from the start?">
    Run LangWatch locally on your own machine. All features are available from our [open-source repository](https://github.com/langwatch/langwatch), so you can build with sensitive data without it leaving your environment.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What is the difference between a full member and a lite member?">
    Which seat someone occupies follows from what they can do. A **full member** can change things: build prompts, run experiments, edit datasets, configure the gateway. A **lite member** can only look at what the team produces. They open the projects they are invited to and read traces, analytics, evaluations, scenario runs, datasets, prompts and experiments, and they can leave annotations on what they read. They cannot see costs, and they cannot create, edit or delete anything else.

    Those are permissions rather than screens, so the same limits apply wherever they reach the data, including the API and the MCP server. Read-only reviewers, stakeholders watching dashboards, and anyone who comments but does not build are lite members. See [Seats](/docs/ai-governance/roles-and-permissions#seats) for the full breakdown.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What counts as a billable event?">
    Billable events are the spans, logs and metrics your app or a tracked coding assistant sends, evaluation results, the steps of an experiment run, and the steps of a scenario simulation. Pricing is based on the total number of ingested events per billing period. [The full list is here](/docs/pricing/billable-events), including how many events a sweep or a simulation produces, what is never billed, and how retries are deduplicated.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can I customize how long my data is retained?">
    On LangWatch Cloud each plan includes a default retention window (see the table above), and extending it, a longer window or a higher volume of stored events, is available on **Enterprise plans**. Reach out to [enterprise@langwatch.ai](mailto:enterprise@langwatch.ai) to set this up. Self-hosted, the data is in your own database: retention is yours to configure with or without a license, and a license adds multi-class retention policies per data category.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Are webhooks and the billing events API included in my plan?">
    The [webhook endpoints platform](/docs/features/webhooks) (signed event delivery to your systems) and the [billing events surface](/docs/ai-gateway/billing-events) (per-request spend events, reconciliation pulls, replay) are **Enterprise** capabilities, on Cloud and on self-hosted licenses alike. They exist for platforms that rebill their own customers and need billing-grade delivery guarantees. Spend records are retained for a fixed 13 months independent of your data-retention settings. Reach out to [enterprise@langwatch.ai](mailto:enterprise@langwatch.ai) to enable them.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can I self-host or run a hybrid setup?">
    Yes. LangWatch is available both [self-hosted](/docs/self-hosting/overview) and [hybrid](/docs/hybrid-setup/overview). With the hybrid option you get the convenience of running on our Cloud while your data stays on your side. See the self-hosting docs or reach out for more information. You can run the self-hosted version for free, with unlimited users, projects, and events on your own hardware. If you require enterprise features such as SSO, RBAC, SCIM, gateway webhooks, or a support SLA, [reach out to us](mailto:enterprise@langwatch.ai). See [Editions and licensing](/docs/self-hosting/licensing) for what a license adds.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Where is my data stored?">
    For LangWatch Cloud, data is stored securely in the EU. For the US, Pacific, and other regions, contact us at [contact@langwatch.ai](mailto:contact@langwatch.ai) and we'll meet your requirements. For Enterprise users, we offer on-premise options so your data stays entirely within your own infrastructure. Nothing leaves your environment.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Do you support custom contracts and procurement reviews?">
    Yes. We know procurement and legal teams often have their own review processes. For Enterprise and regulated-industry plans, we support custom contracting and custom workflows.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Is LangWatch secure and compliant?">
    LangWatch is ISO 27001 and GDPR compliant. Enterprise customers can request our security documentation, pentest results, and vendor assessments. For more, see [langwatch.ai/security](https://langwatch.ai/security).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can my security team review your security documentation?">
    Yes. Your security team can access the full set of LangWatch security documentation, including:

    * **Pentest report**, performed by a CREST-certified third-party security firm, covering LangWatch Cloud and hybrid setups.
    * **Data flow & architecture diagrams**, including deployment models, encryption protocols (in-transit and at-rest), and data boundaries.
    * **Latest ISO 27001 reports**, covering more than SOC 2.

    Reach out to our team at [enterprise@langwatch.ai](mailto:enterprise@langwatch.ai).
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>