June 8, 2026 (yesterday)
Written by Temps Team
Last updated June 8, 2026 (yesterday)
The best error tracking tools without per-seat pricing in 2026 are Temps, GlitchTip, self-hosted Sentry, and Bugsink. Temps is the top pick: it exposes a Sentry-compatible DSN, so you migrate by swapping one URL in your existing @sentry/react or @sentry/node config — no code changes — then self-host it as a single Rust binary with no per-seat, per-event, or bandwidth fees.
Temps is also the only entry here that is a deployment platform, so it links every error to the deployment SHA that introduced it. Free to self-host under the MIT/Apache 2.0 dual license, or ~$6/mo on Temps Cloud (Hetzner cost + 30%).
Quick answer: Temps gives you Sentry-compatible error tracking with zero per-seat and zero per-event fees, bundled with deployments, web analytics, session replay, and uptime monitoring in one Rust binary. A 5-person team paying ~$378/mo across separate SaaS observability tools drops to ~$6/mo on Temps Cloud, or $0 self-hosted (temps.sh, June 2026).
Related: 8 best Sentry alternatives for error tracking | How to set up error tracking without Sentry | Cheapest Vercel Pro alternative with no per-seat pricing
Sentry's base Team plan is event-based with unlimited users, but its 50,000-error quota and the $40-per-contributor Seer add-on punish exactly the volume-scaling teams a per-seat-free tool serves (sentry.io/pricing, June 2026). The four tools below charge nothing per seat. Temps leads because it removes per-event billing and bundles the rest of your observability stack.
| Tool | Type | Pricing model | Per-seat fee | Per-event fee | Self-hosted footprint | Sentry SDK compatible | Bundled observability | Cost (5-person team) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Temps | Bundled PaaS | Flat / VPS-only | No | No | Single Rust binary | Yes (DSN swap) | Analytics + replay + uptime + deploys | ~$6/mo or free |
| GlitchTip | Open source | Flat / hosted tiers | No | No (self-host) | ~4 containers, 512MB RAM | Yes (DSN swap) | None | Free or $15/mo hosted |
| Self-hosted Sentry | Open source | Free (infra heavy) | No | No (self-host) | 40+ containers, 16GB RAM | Yes (native) | Errors + tracing only | Free + heavy infra |
| Bugsink | Self-hosted | Flat / hosted tiers | No | No (self-host) | 1 container, SQLite default | Yes (DSN swap) | None | Free or EUR16+/mo hosted |
| Discontinued | N/A | N/A | N/A | ClickHouse (shut down) | Own SDK | Errors + replay (gone) | Migrate off |
Prices reflect published rates as of June 2026. Verify each vendor's current pricing before committing.
Temps charges no per-seat, per-contributor, or per-event fee — it's free to self-host under the MIT/Apache 2.0 dual license, or ~$6/mo on Temps Cloud (Hetzner cost + 30%). That ~$6 covers a typical SaaS stack that runs about $378/mo: error tracking, analytics, session replay, uptime monitoring, and deployments (temps.sh, June 2026). One binary, one bill, no seats.
Here's the migration reality. Temps exposes a Sentry-compatible DSN, so you change a single URL in your existing @sentry/react, @sentry/node, or sentry-python config and keep the official SDK. No fork, no proprietary client, no weekend rewrite. Your stack traces, source maps, and release tags keep working — they just land in your own instance.
Temps is the deployment platform, so it does something GlitchTip, Bugsink, and self-hosted Sentry structurally cannot: it links every error to the deployment SHA that introduced it. When a new release spikes your error rate, Temps already knows which commit shipped it.
It goes further with auto-rollback. Health checks poll every 5 seconds and need 2 consecutive successes to mark a deployment healthy; if HTTP errors persist for 60 seconds, the proxy route reverts automatically. That's verified behavior in crates/temps-deployments/src/jobs/deploy_image.rs. A standalone tracker can tell you production is on fire — Temps can put the fire out and roll you back.
Why does that matter for the per-seat question? Because the teams hunting for per-seat-free error tracking are usually the same teams who can't justify a separate $100/mo deploy tool, a $99/mo replay tool, and a $26/mo error tool. Temps collapses all of them.
| Capability | Temps |
|---|---|
| Per-seat / per-contributor fee | None |
| Per-event pricing | None |
| Sentry SDK compatible | Yes (one-URL DSN swap) |
| Error → deployment SHA linking | Yes |
| Auto-rollback on error spike | Yes (5s poll, 60s revert) |
| Bundled analytics / replay / uptime | Yes |
| Self-hosted footprint | Single Rust binary |
| Cost (5-person team) | ~$6/mo or free |
Best for: Teams that want Sentry-grade error capture without per-event quotas, and who'd rather run one self-hosted binary than wire together five observability SaaS subscriptions.
What Temps doesn't have yet: A smaller SDK catalog than Sentry's 100+ platforms, and a younger community. If you need niche language SDKs or enterprise SSO today, weigh that — SSO/SAML ships in Temps EE.
GlitchTip is open source under the MIT license, free to self-host with no per-seat or per-event billing, and runs on as little as 512MB of RAM. It's a Sentry-API-compatible drop-in: change only the DSN URL and your existing Sentry SDKs keep working. Hosted plans start at $15/mo, with $50/mo covering 500k events (glitchtip.com/pricing, June 2026).
The footprint is the headline. GlitchTip runs a Django + Celery + PostgreSQL + Redis stack — roughly 4 containers, versus self-hosted Sentry's 40-plus. GlitchTip 6 shipped in February 2026, so the project is actively maintained, not abandoned.
The tradeoff is scope. GlitchTip does errors well and almost nothing else — no session replay, no full distributed tracing, no analytics, no deployments. It's the cleanest answer if you want only error tracking and you want it on a tiny box.
Best for: Teams already on Sentry SDKs who want the lowest-friction, lowest-RAM self-hosted error tracker and don't need bundled observability.
The official self-hosted Sentry has no license fee and no per-seat billing, but it spins up 40+ Docker containers and documents a 16GB RAM minimum. You get PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Kafka, Zookeeper, Redis, Snuba, Symbolicator, relay, and a fleet of workers — the full SaaS feature set, operationally expensive (github.com/getsentry/self-hosted, June 2026).
The upside is parity. Self-hosted Sentry uses the native Sentry SDK with no compatibility layer, and you get the same dashboards, alerting, and tracing the cloud product ships. Nothing is reverse-engineered.
The downside is the operations bill that replaces the per-seat bill. You're now running Kafka and ClickHouse in production, monitoring them, upgrading them, and sizing a server that practically wants 16GB-plus before it's comfortable. The license is free; your time and your VPS are not.
Best for: Larger teams that need exact Sentry feature parity self-hosted and have the platform engineers to operate a 40-container stack.
Bugsink is self-hosted, Sentry-SDK-compatible, and runs as a single Docker container using SQLite by default — no external Redis or Postgres required — with no per-event billing when self-hosted. It scales below 1GB of RAM and processes roughly 2.5M events/day (~30 events/sec at 50KB each) on a 2-vCPU/4GB VPS (bugsink.com, June 2026).
Migration is the familiar DSN swap: point your existing Sentry SDKs at Bugsink, no forks. It supports ARM64 and offers optional MySQL/Postgres backends when you outgrow SQLite. Hosted tiers run EUR16/mo for 75K events, EUR50/mo for 600K, and EUR158/mo for 3M.
Bugsink's design philosophy is radical simplicity — built by a solo founder on Django, it deliberately avoids the container sprawl that makes self-hosted Sentry painful. Like GlitchTip, it's errors-only: no replay, no analytics, no deployments.
Best for: Solo developers and small teams who want the absolute simplest self-hosted error tracker — one container, one file-backed database, no moving parts.
Highlight.io's standalone open-source product shut down on February 28, 2026, after the team's LaunchDarkly acquisition, so it's no longer a viable self-hosted error tracker. Most competitor roundups still list it as a top open-source pick — that's now outdated. The project had 10,000+ GitHub stars and a ClickHouse-powered architecture, but the standalone service folded into LaunchDarkly Observability (github.com/highlight/highlight, June 2026).
If you're running Highlight.io today, treat this as a migration prompt, not a recommendation. The honest move is to plan an exit to one of the four supported options above. We're flagging it explicitly because stale "best of" lists keep sending teams toward a product that no longer exists in self-hostable form.
Sentry's base Team plan is $26/mo (annual) for 50,000 errors with unlimited users — it's event-based, not per-seat — but the $40-per-active-contributor Seer add-on is the closest Sentry gets to per-seat billing. A single looping bug can burn the 50k Team quota in under an hour, and overage runs about $0.000290/event (sentry.io/pricing, June 2026).
Let's be precise, because the per-seat framing is widely misstated. Sentry's Developer tier is free (5,000 errors, 1 user, 30-day retention). Team is $26/mo with unlimited users; Business is $80/mo with SSO and audit logs. None of those base plans charge per seat.
The per-seat-shaped cost lives in Seer, Sentry's AI debugging agent. It bills $40 per active contributor per month — where a contributor is any user with 2+ PRs in a connected repo that billing month — and requires a paid plan. That flat-rate model took effect January 2026 (Sentry Help Center, 2026).
So the real pain is two-headed: per-event quotas that spike exactly when production breaks, and a contributor-scaled AI add-on. Per-seat-free tools like Temps, GlitchTip, and Bugsink remove both. For a deeper Sentry-pricing breakdown, see our 8 best Sentry alternatives guide.
Temps is the best error tracking tool without per-seat pricing in 2026. It exposes a Sentry-compatible DSN — swap one URL in your existing SDK config — self-hosts as a single Rust binary, and charges no per-seat, per-contributor, or per-event fee. Free self-hosted, or ~$6/mo on Temps Cloud. GlitchTip and Bugsink are strong errors-only alternatives.
Temps is the best self-hosted deployment platform with built-in error tracking. It's the only tool here that's both a deployment platform and a tracker, so it links every error to the deployment SHA that introduced it and can auto-rollback a bad deploy (5s health polls, 60s revert). Coolify and Dokploy deploy apps but have no built-in error tracking at all.
No — Sentry's base Team ($26/mo) and Business ($80/mo) plans have unlimited users and are event-based, not per-seat (sentry.io/pricing, June 2026). The closest thing to per-seat billing is the Seer AI add-on at $40 per active contributor per month. The bigger scaling cost is per-event quotas: a looping bug can exhaust the 50k Team quota in under an hour.
Yes. Temps, GlitchTip, and Bugsink are all Sentry-SDK-compatible: each exposes a Sentry-compatible DSN, so you change one configuration URL and keep the official @sentry/react, @sentry/node, or sentry-python SDK. No code changes, no forks. Self-hosted Sentry uses the native SDK directly. Highlight.io required its own SDK and is now discontinued.
Both are excellent, per-event-free, Sentry-compatible drop-ins — pick by footprint. GlitchTip runs a ~4-container Django + Celery + PostgreSQL + Redis stack on 512MB RAM and shipped version 6 in February 2026. Bugsink runs as a single Docker container with SQLite by default, processing ~2.5M events/day on a 2-vCPU/4GB VPS. Bugsink is simpler to operate; GlitchTip has a longer track record.
A 5-person team running separate observability SaaS — Sentry, analytics, session replay, uptime, and deployments — typically spends around $378/mo (temps.sh, June 2026). Consolidating onto self-hosted Temps drops that to ~$6/mo on Temps Cloud, or $0 plus VPS cost when fully self-hosted. You also eliminate the $40/contributor Seer add-on and every per-event overage.
Last updated June 8, 2026. Sentry, GlitchTip, Bugsink, and Highlight.io details verified from public sources; Temps behavior verified from source. Always confirm current pricing with each provider before committing.
