Reimagining pricing: Axiom's new approach

Takeaways:

For the past two years, we've been on a journey to make event data infrastructure accessible to everyone—from solo developers hacking on weekend projects to the teams behind leading AI models and publicly traded enterprises. Along the way, we've learned a ton about what works, what doesn't, and how people actually want to pay for the infrastructure that powers their most critical systems.

Today, we're excited to share the results of that learning: a ground-up reimagining of how Axiom is priced and sold.

Learning from our customers

When we launched Axiom, we built a pricing model that reflected traditional log management pricing—with distinct tiers from Personal to Team to Enterprise. This served us well in the early days, and we're grateful to the thousands of customers who joined us on this journey.

Our legacy pricing model provided a clear path that matched many customers' expectations for how infrastructure should be priced. But as our customer base grew more diverse, we noticed interesting patterns emerging.

Some growing companies loved our platform but found themselves in a challenging middle ground—outgrowing the Team plan but not quite ready for the full Enterprise package. Others had unique usage patterns that didn't fit neatly into our ingestion-focused model, particularly those building entire platforms on top of Axiom, or maintaining long-term compliance log archives.

What we learned is that the best pricing isn't about tiers or bundles—it's about alignment. The closer we could align our pricing to how customers actually derive value from Axiom, the more sense it would make for everyone.

So we started reimagining what pricing could look like if we built it from the ground up based on everything we've learned.

Two ways to deploy, countless ways to grow

The foundation of our new approach is simple: you choose where you want to run Axiom, and we provide pricing that makes sense for that choice.

Axiom Cloud: Pay as you grow

Axiom Cloud is our fully managed service—perfect for teams that want to focus on their data, not their infrastructure. After a generous Always Free allowance of 1,000 GB of data loading, 100 GB-hours of query compute, and 100 GB of storage, you pay only for what you use:

• A modest monthly platform fee ($25)
• Data loading compute (measured in compute credits*)
• Query compute (also measured in compute credits*)
• Storage for your compressed data

*Don't worry—no credit calculus here. 1 credit = $1 by default. This approach lets us offer volume discounts automatically as you grow, with additional discounts available when you commit to pre-purchasing credits.

What's great about this approach is that your costs align perfectly with your actual usage. No more paying for ingestion tiers you haven't grown into yet, or for features you don't need.

Here's what it looks like in practice for a health tech startup:

They're sending around 20TB of data to Axiom each month and running about 8,000 GB-hours of queries. With 12 months of retention, they're paying less than $4,000 per month on Axiom Cloud. Based on our pricing research, this represents significant savings (over 50%!) compared to other popular vendors.

Bring Your Own Cloud: Your data, your terms

For our largest customers—especially those with compliance requirements or substantial cloud provider discounts—we're introducing Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC).

With BYOC, Axiom runs in your AWS environment, fully managed by our team. You pay a predictable annual platform fee based on your organization size with unlimited data loading, queries, and storage included. You only pay your cloud provider for hosting Axiom which, thanks to our state-of-the-art EventDB architecture, costs staggeringly less than traditional solutions.

This means you can process petabytes of data without worrying about vendor costs scaling with your usage. It's perfect for the multinational corporation that's processing petabytes monthly with hundreds of thousands of GB-hours of queries—they pay a predictable platform fee to Axiom, and tap into the AWS Enterprise Discount Program for running Axiom in your infrastructure.

Why this actually reduces costs

You might be wondering: is this just a clever way to charge more?

Quite the opposite—most organizations will actually see their costs go down with our new model. This is possible because Axiom is, and always has been, built on a totally re-imagined event database architecture (EventDB) built by our team from the ground up—not using off-the-shelf components. This foundation gives us efficiency advantages that we're excited to pass on to you.

First, you only pay for what you actually use. In the old model, customers sometimes paid for ingestion tiers they weren't fully utilizing.

Second, volume discounts kick in automatically as your usage grows. No negotiations required. The more you use, the less you pay per unit—with rates decreasing as your usage increases for both data loading and query operations. For example, data loading starts at 0.12 credits per GB and can drop as low as 0.09 credits per GB at high volumes.

Third, once you know your workload, you can pre-purchase compute credits at a discount, further reducing your effective rates. These pre-purchased credits don't expire, giving you flexibility for future usage.

And finally, for large organizations using BYOC, you benefit from direct cloud billing and your existing enterprise discounts, often leading to substantial savings.

Features when you need them

One of the biggest frustrations with our legacy model was that enterprise features were bundled together. If you needed SAML SSO but not Directory Sync, tough luck—you had to pay for the whole Enterprise package.

Now, Axiom Cloud customers can add enterprise features à la carte:

• SAML Single Sign-On: $100/month
• Directory Sync: $100/month
• Role-Based Access Control: $50/month
• Audit Logs: $50/month

This means a growing startup can add the features they need as they scale, rather than facing a big price jump all at once.

And for BYOC customers, all these enterprise features are included by default in the platform fee—no nickel-and-diming.

Tools to keep you in control

We've all had that moment of panic when an unexpected cloud bill arrives. That's why we've built robust tools to help you monitor and manage your Axiom spend:

• Real-time usage dashboards showing exactly what you're consuming
• Alerts that notify you when you're approaching thresholds
• Billing thresholds that trigger invoices at specific amounts, helping you avoid surprises

These tools take the guesswork out of your spend, giving you confidence that you'll never face an unexpectedly large bill.

What this means for you

If you're already using Axiom, transitioning to the new model is straightforward:

• Personal or Team plan users can switch to Axiom Cloud directly from your billing settings
• Enterprise customers can reach out to discuss the best path forward, including options for pre-purchasing compute credits.

And if you're new to Axiom, you can start with our completely free Personal tier, or jump straight to Axiom Cloud for $25/month which includes a generous Always Free allowance (1,000 GB of data loading, 100 GB-hours of query compute, and 100 GB of storage).

Why this matters

This isn't just a pricing change—it's a fundamental reimagining of how both log management products and event data infrastructure more broadly is sold and consumed.

We're eliminating the typical pattern of protracted sales conversations, dreaded annual renewals, and complex licensing that has dominated our industry for too long.

Instead, we're creating a model where you can go from a completely free tier to enterprise-grade infrastructure without ever talking to a salesperson if you don't want to. Simply provide a credit card, choose your preferred add-ons, and scale your usage as needed.

For the largest enterprises, we're offering a deployment option that aligns with how you actually manage costs and compliance, giving you complete data ownership with predictable pricing.

In an industry increasingly moving toward AI-augmented futures, having a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective foundation for your event data isn't just nice to have—it's essential. And we want Axiom to be that foundation, with pricing that makes sense at every stage of your journey.

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Have questions about our new pricing? Check out our detailed pricing breakdown or schedule a conversation with our team.