SIEM Economics
Log360 charges by log source — not by how many gigabytes that source generates. Your SIEM bill stays flat whether it's a quiet Tuesday or the middle of a ransomware incident.
The Problem with Today's SIEM Pricing
When your SIEM invoice grows every time a log source gets chatty, security teams start making decisions based on cost — not risk. Here's what that looks like in practice.
A newly deployed EDR agent starts generating 40GB/day of telemetry — 8× your baseline. Under ingestion-based pricing, this one endpoint pushes your monthly invoice by thousands of dollars. The response? Filtering out "lower priority" events to stay on budget. The attacker hides in exactly that noise.
+$3,200/month surprise billDuring a security incident, log volume spikes 10× as systems generate alerts, failed logins, and lateral movement events. The SIEM you're paying to catch the attack charges you extra for the data generated by the attack. Your worst day is also your most expensive billing period.
Incident volume = unexpected overageCompliance requires 12 months of log retention. But at $2.40/GB/month, storing a year of data from 500 sources costs more than the SIEM license itself. Teams default to 30–60 days, then discover during a forensic investigation that the evidence window closed six months ago.
Evidence deleted to control costsThe base license looks affordable. Then come the ingestion fees, the premium storage tier, the long-term retention add-on, the UEBA module, the SOAR connector pack, the threat intelligence feed subscription. By month six, the "competitive" cloud SIEM costs three times the initial quote.
Add-on tax exceeds base licensePricing Model Comparison
The difference isn't just mathematical — it changes how your team makes security decisions.
| Cost Factor | Ingestion / Consumption-Based SIEMs | Log360 (Per-Source) |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing unit | Per GB ingested | Per log source |
| Bill during a security incident | Spikes with log volume | Unchanged |
| Incentive for log collection | Collect less to save money | Collect everything |
| Long-term retention cost | Storage fee per GB/month | Storage add-on only |
| UEBA included | Separate SKU / per-user fee | Included in license |
| SOAR / automation included | Per-playbook-run or add-on | Included in license |
| Compliance reporting included | Module or add-on | Included in license |
| Cost predictability over 3 years | Variable — grows with data | Predictable — grows with sources |
Market Reality
Approximate annual cost at 500GB/day ingestion volume, based on publicly available pricing and analyst research. Exact figures vary by contract — use as directional guidance.
| SIEM Category | Typical Annual Cost | UEBA Included? | SOAR Included? | Key Variable |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ingestion-based cloud SIEM (premium tier) | $365K – $730K | Add-on | Add-on | GB/day ingested |
| Cloud-native SIEM (capacity-based) | $274K – $639K | Add-on | Partial | Data capacity tier |
| Legacy SIEM (perpetual + maintenance) | $200K – $500K | Separate product | Separate product | EPS + deployment size |
| Standalone UEBA (added to SIEM) | $180K – $480K | Core product | No | Per user/entity |
| Standalone SOAR (added to SIEM) | $60K – $200K | No | Core product | Per playbook run or user |
| ✓ Log360 (SIEM + UEBA + SOAR + Compliance) | Fraction of above | ✓ Included | ✓ Included | Log source count only |
* Market figures are approximate industry benchmarks based on published analyst research and public pricing. Individual pricing varies by contract, volume, and negotiation. Contact us for a direct comparison against your current SIEM spend.
How It Works
The pricing model is a deliberate architectural choice — not an accident. Here's the logic.
Your Windows Domain Controller is one source whether it generates 1GB or 100GB per day. Noisy sources don't penalize you. You collect everything — and correlate across everything.
Adding a new server adds one source to your count. A cyberattack that multiplies log volume doesn't change your license tier. You budget based on infrastructure growth — which you control.
Hot storage (searchable, real-time) and cold archive (compressed, S3-compatible) are separate tiers. You choose what to keep hot. Storage optimization is a capacity choice, not a compliance trade-off.
The same log data feeds SIEM detection, UEBA behavioral models, SOAR playbook triggers, and compliance reports — from a single ingestion pipeline. No duplicate data, no duplicate cost.
Your source count changes slowly and deliberately — new servers, new cloud accounts, new network zones. Renewal conversations are about environment growth, not about what happened to your log volume last year.
There is no "SIEM Essentials" that locks UEBA behind an upgrade. Every licensed deployment includes detection, behavioral analytics, automation, and compliance reporting. Feature gates don't exist.
Storage Architecture
Log360's storage architecture lets you balance query speed against storage cost — keeping high-value, recent data instantly searchable while archiving historical logs affordably.
Indexed, real-time searchable. Instant query response for active investigations and dashboards.
0–90 days (configurable)Compressed on-disk. Queryable within seconds. Ideal for compliance lookback and trending analysis.
90 days – 1 yearS3-compatible object storage. Compressed, deduplicated. Restored on-demand for forensic review.
1 – 7 yearsRoute streams to external data lakes, secondary SIEMs, or MSSP platforms via standard syslog.
Real-time, no copy storedPer-source retention control: Set different retention periods for different source types. Keep firewall logs for 12 months, DNS logs for 30 days, and privileged user session logs for 7 years — all from a single policy interface without tiered license upgrades.
One License. Every Capability. Zero Add-On Tax.
Most security vendors sell SIEM, UEBA, SOAR, and compliance as separate SKUs — each with its own ingestion pipeline, data store, and renewal cycle. Log360 bundles all four into a unified platform on a single data lake.
One ingestion pipeline. One data lake. Four capabilities with zero API stitching between them.
When UEBA detects anomalous behavior, SIEM fires an alert, and SOAR triggers a containment playbook — all within the same data pipeline, with no API calls between separate vendor platforms. No data duplication. No integration maintenance. No latency from data leaving and re-entering the system.
Typical Multi-Vendor Stack
Estimated total: $500K – $1.3M/year across 3–5 vendors
Log360 — Unified Platform
One renewal. No mid-year surprises. Fraction of multi-vendor cost.
Hidden Cost
The sticker price of a SIEM is just the beginning. Multi-vendor security stacks accumulate integration debt — the compounding cost of building and maintaining the connectors that hold the stack together.
Every non-native integration requires a custom connector. Initial build takes weeks. Each vendor API update potentially breaks it silently — often discovered only when an alert that should have fired doesn't.
Typical cost: 0.5–1 FTE per year to build and maintainWhen your SIEM vendor ships a major release, custom connectors to UEBA, SOAR, and third-party tools may fail. Regression testing across the full integration stack can take weeks — during which detections may be silently missing data.
Typical cost: 2–4 weeks of engineering per major releaseSIEM and UEBA from different vendors normalize logs differently. Events that correlate cleanly within one platform lose fidelity when passed across an API boundary — field names change, timestamps shift, context is stripped.
Typical cost: 15–30% correlation accuracy loss across vendor boundariesThe engineer who built the custom connector is often the only person who knows how it works. When they leave, the connector becomes a black box. Debugging it during an incident is the worst possible time to reverse-engineer someone else's integration code.
Typical cost: months of productivity loss per staff departureSIEM, UEBA, SOAR, and compliance are developed on the same codebase, share the same data schema, and release on the same cycle. There are no connectors to maintain between modules — because there are no module boundaries. When Log360 ships an update, everything updates together.
| Integration Cost Factor | Multi-Vendor Stack | Log360 |
|---|---|---|
| Cross-module connectors to maintain | 3–8 custom integrations | Zero |
| FTE time on connector maintenance | 0.5–1 FTE/year | Zero |
| Regression testing after vendor updates | 2–4 weeks per major release | Zero — same release cycle |
| Data normalization loss at API boundaries | 15–30% field fidelity loss | Zero — shared schema |
| Cross-module correlation latency | API round-trip delay | Sub-second, in-pipeline |
| Tribal knowledge risk | High — connector-specific expertise | Low — standard platform knowledge |
Tell us your source count. We'll give you a real number — not a starting price that balloons with add-ons.
