Pricing
Per-collector pricing. No volume-based bills.
LinkMesh is billed by the number of managed OpenTelemetry Collectors — not by GB, events, samples, or any volume metric. The first 25 Collectors are free for demo and evaluation use. Scale beyond that and the bill stays tied to fleet size, not to how much telemetry your infrastructure produces.
Community
€0
Forever
Up to 25 managed Collectors with the full feature set. Built for evaluation, homelabs, and small production fleets.
Install- ✓ 25 managed OpenTelemetry Collectors
- ✓ Full feature set — no paywalled features
- ✓ On-premises — control plane runs in your infra
- ✓ Community support via documentation
- ✓ No data ever leaves your network
Enterprise
CHF 12
Per Collector / month · billed annually
Production deployments at scale — pay-per-collector with no volume surprise, priority support, and a license envelope tailored to your fleet.
Buy Enterprise- ✓ Bill caps at CHF 30,000/year above 200 Collectors
- ✓ Unlimited Collectors (priced per Collector)
- ✓ OpAMP-managed or full-stack — pick what fits your fleet
- ✓ Host telemetry (CPU, memory) on the Collector page
- ✓ Priority email support
- ✓ Data handling & DPA
Why per-collector?
Volume-based pricing penalizes the work you actually want to do — onboard more services, capture more signals, retain longer for incident review. Collector-based pricing aligns the bill with the operational shape of your fleet, not the accidental shape of your traffic.
| LinkMesh | Volume-based platforms | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing dimension | Number of managed Collectors | GB ingested / events / samples |
| Cost predictability | Plan-and-forget — bills track headcount-equivalent | Costs grow with telemetry volume; budget surprises |
| High-volume on-prem | Right fit — volume doesn't affect price | Punishes successful onboarding |
| Free evaluation | 25 Collectors free, full feature set | Usage-based; meter starts immediately |
| Where data lives | Your infrastructure — never leaves | Vendor-hosted by default |
FAQ
Billing in a nutshell
Simple. No volume-based pricing — ever. You pay per managed Collector, and the first 25 are free.
What counts as a "managed Collector"?
A unique OpenTelemetry Collector instance enrolled with the LinkMesh
control plane via mTLS gRPC (with the LinkMesh agent) or OpAMP (with
your own upstream otelcol-contrib or Grafana Alloy). Each
unique collector.id counts once, regardless of how much
telemetry it processes.
What happens when I hit my Collector cap?
Existing Collectors keep working — the cap is enforced forward-only. New enrollment attempts return a "License cap reached" error with a renewal hint; the UI's header badge turns red and pulses so the operator sees the at-cap state on every page. Resolve by deregistering unused Collectors or by talking to us about a higher cap.
What happens if my license expires?
Your telemetry never stops flowing — Collectors keep running their last-applied configuration regardless of license state. LinkMesh has five operating states:
- • Community — no license file, up to 25 free Collectors.
- • Active — valid license, everything works.
- • Grace — expired within the renewal window, full operation plus a renewal banner.
- • Read-only — expired beyond the renewal window, telemetry continues but config edits and new enrollments are blocked until you renew.
- • Suspended — long-expired AND fleet is more than 2× the contracted cap. A deliberate-overage safeguard with multiple in-product warning banners before it fires.
Upload a renewed license envelope via Settings → License at any point to return to Active.
Does telemetry volume affect price?
No. You can send 100 GB or 100 TB through a managed Collector — the price is the same. Your downstream observability backend may charge by volume, but LinkMesh itself doesn't.
Is there an upper limit on the bill?
Yes. Above 200 managed Collectors the bill flattens to CHF 30,000 per year — the per-Collector charge stops accumulating. Concretely: at 250 Collectors you pay CHF 30K; at 2,500 Collectors you still pay CHF 30K.
This is a deliberate revenue cap on our side, not a customer constraint.
Predictability is the procurement pitch — enterprise buyers can plan a known
annual ceiling instead of running an open-ended counter as the fleet grows.
The licensing system handles the transition automatically: past the threshold,
your issued envelope carries an unlimited flag and the server's
enrollment gate stops counting.
Does any data leave my infrastructure?
No telemetry data leaves your infrastructure unless you explicitly route it to an external destination. The LinkMesh control plane runs on-premises in customer-controlled clusters; Collectors run on customer hosts; pipelines route to customer-chosen destinations. See Trust for the verifiable specifics, including how PII can be masked before egress.
Are the first 25 Collectors really free?
Yes. Up to 25 managed Collectors are free for demo, evaluation, or small production deployments. You get the full feature set — Collector enrollment, pipeline configuration, PII masking, routing, multi-destination export — with no time limit.
How do I install?
See linkmesh.io/install
for the menu. Standalone Linux hosts use the one-line curl installer;
Kubernetes clusters use the DaemonSet guide
on docs.linkmesh.io; teams already running upstream
otelcol-contrib or Alloy enroll their existing collector
via OpAMP.
How does the Buy flow work?
Click Buy Enterprise above and you'll land on the OpenSight subscription page where you pick the number of Collectors you need. Checkout is handled by Stripe; payment is annual, billed in CHF (VAT inclusive for Swiss customers). After payment, your signed license envelope arrives by email within a few minutes — upload it via Settings → License in your LinkMesh server and you're Active.
Can I get a refund?
Annual plans are non-refundable once your license envelope has been issued. This is by design — the Community tier (25 Collectors, forever-free) is the perpetual trial. Evaluate LinkMesh at full feature parity with up to 25 Collectors before committing to a paid plan; once you're sure, scale up with confidence.
Why annual instead of monthly?
License envelopes have an annual cadence by design — the signed artifact
you upload to your LinkMesh server has a one-year expiresAt.
Annual billing matches that lifecycle: one renewal, one envelope, one
simple cycle. The displayed CHF 12/month figure is for budgeting comparison;
the actual charge is CHF 144 per Collector per year, billed up front.