Better Stack

Better Stack is an observability and incident-response platform that consolidates uptime monitoring, log management, distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, error tracking, on-call scheduling, incident management and status pages into one product. The company positions the suite as a lower-cost substitute for point tools such as Datadog, New Relic and PagerDuty, publishing a comparison in which 1 TB each of traces, logs and metrics per month is priced at roughly $687 versus an estimated $55,574 on Datadog under stated assumptions.

The platform's telemetry layer is built on the ClickHouse database, which the company credits for query speed and for allowing customers to keep data in hot storage longer. Data can be queried with SQL, PromQL, drag-and-drop dashboards or simple log filtering, and logs can be stored in a customer's own S3 bucket. Tracing is OpenTelemetry-native and includes an eBPF-based service map that instruments clusters without code changes, plus Apdex and RED metrics and a visual "bubble up" exploration mode. Uptime monitoring includes Playwright-based transaction checks with a real Chrome browser, edge-based traceroute and MTR diagnostics, screenshots of failing pages, and unlimited phone-call, SMS and push alerts per responder license.

More recently the company has marketed an "AI SRE": a Slack- and Teams-native agent that investigates incidents using the customer's logs, metrics, traces, errors and web events, performs agentic root-cause analysis, drafts post-mortems, suggests Linear tickets, creates GitHub pull requests and exposes telemetry to external LLM workflows through an MCP server. Additional platform capabilities listed include smart incident merging, call routing to the on-call engineer, branded and white-label status pages, SSO, Terraform provisioning, audit logs, and reporting on MTTA and MTTR.

Founding story

Better Stack was founded in 2021 by Juraj Masar (co-founder and CEO) and Veronika Kolejak (co-founder and COO), who said they set out to build the observability tools they had wanted during earlier engineering jobs. Tomas Hromada serves as CTO.

Business model

Self-serve and sales-assisted SaaS subscription. Better Stack sells per-responder licenses for incident management, on-call and monitoring, and separate usage- or bundle-based telemetry plans for logs, traces and metrics, with paid add-ons for status page features, call routing and enterprise controls.

Recurring subscription revenue with tiered pricing: a free plan for personal projects; a Responder license at $34/month ($29 billed annually) covering uptime, incident management, on-call and status pages; telemetry bundles (Nano, Micro, Mega, Tera) ranging from $25 to $1,470 per month depending on retention tier and billing period; and metered ingestion/retention pricing such as $0.15 per GB ingested and $0.08 per GB per month retained for logs and traces. Add-ons include $9 per responder per month for advanced Slack/Teams incident workflows, $15 per month per extra public status page, $250 per month for call-routing phone numbers, white-labeling and customer-hosted storage, and $5 per million tokens for AI SRE chat. A 60-day money-back guarantee is offered.

Traction

By the January 2024 funding announcement, Better Stack reported 200,000+ developers and 4,000+ customers, including enterprises (Time Magazine, Salesforce, ESET, Accenture, Decathlon, Rakuten), startups (Brave, Hugging Face, Apollo, Drata) and non-profits (Unicef, Raspberry Pi). The company said it became profitable in 2023 while continuing to grow and without consuming its prior venture funding.

Latest developments

Current product marketing centers on an agentic AI SRE — a Slack/MS Teams-native assistant with a Claude Code-like interface that performs root-cause analysis over the customer's telemetry, writes post-mortems, suggests Linear tickets and opens GitHub pull requests — alongside an MCP server, eBPF-based service maps, OpenTelemetry-native tracing, session replay, web events and real user monitoring. The company is also running a migration offer covering the remainder of a prospective customer's Datadog contract.