Is building your own agent observability cheaper than Rius?

Full transparency on what this calculator does and doesn't account for.

• Database costs are estimated from actual data volume, not trace count alone: monthly ingestion GB = traces × average trace size, stored GB = (monthly ingestion ÷ 30) × retention days. Assumes a fixed 30-day retention window with 100% of traces retained.
• Hosting/compute costs scale with request throughput (trace count), not stored volume.
• Actual infrastructure costs depend on retention, telemetry size, and workload characteristics.
• The self-built feature set automatically scales up to match whichever Rius tier your trace volume compares against, so the comparison stays apples-to-apples. Advanced settings lets you add or remove features manually.
• A flat 12h research and evaluation allowance is included once in every estimate, covering time spent comparing databases, hosting, and architecture patterns. It is scaled by your chosen seniority and AI-acceleration level.
• Security hardening and operational tooling beyond what's listed are intentionally excluded from the estimate.
• Rius entitlements like SLAs, dedicated Slack, onboarding, and audit logs are support and operational offerings, not engineering work. They're shown as highlights next to the Rius price, not modeled as build hours.
• Agent Token MCP and Query MCP are included in every Rius tier and are not modeled as separate self-built line items.
• AI-acceleration multipliers (Conservative, Typical, AI-native) are estimates of how much faster a team builds and maintains the product when using AI coding tools. Actual gains vary by team and codebase.
• Operational overhead accounts for recurring work such as deployments, dependency upgrades, database housekeeping, capacity adjustments, and resolving ingestion or infrastructure issues. It scales with monthly trace volume.
• Query and processing compute estimates the additional compute required for trace queries, filtering, aggregations, alert evaluation, cost calculations, and background processing.