Sentry Free Drops Your Errors at 5,000. No Overage.
Sentry does not bill you for overages on the free plan. It stops accepting events until the month resets, which is a very different failure mode from a surprise invoice.
Sentry's free Developer plan costs $0 and includes one user, 5,000 errors a month, 5 million spans, 50 session replays, 5GB of logs, one uptime monitor, one cron monitor, ten dashboards, 30-day retention and MCP access. At the quota, events are dropped rather than billed as overage. Team is $26 a month billed annually and lifts errors to 50,000.1
Error monitoring is a tool you hope not to need, and then need all at once. That makes free-tier limits here more consequential than in most categories, because the month you hit the ceiling is the month something is genuinely broken.
Sentry's free plan is generous on breadth and strict on behaviour at the edge. Both parts are worth understanding before you deploy.
What the free plan actually includes
| Developer | Team | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $26/mo annual, $29 monthly |
| Users | 1 | Unlimited |
| Errors per month | 5,000 | 50,000 |
| Spans per month | 5 million | 5 million |
| Session replays | 50 | Higher |
| Logs | 5GB | Higher |
| Uptime monitors | 1 | More |
| Cron monitors | 1 | More |
| Retention | 30 days | 90 days |
| At quota | Events dropped | Configurable |
MCP access on the free plan is worth flagging. Sentry exposes its data to AI coding tools through the Model Context Protocol even at $0, which means an agent can query an issue and its stack trace without a paid seat.
At 5,000 errors, the lights go out
There is no pay-as-you-go on Developer. When the monthly error quota is consumed, Sentry stops accepting new events for the rest of the period.
This is arguably the right design for a free tier, because it cannot generate a bill. It is also the worst possible behaviour during an incident, when a bug that fires in a loop can consume a monthly allowance in minutes.
A retry storm is the classic case. One misconfigured client retrying a failing call can generate thousands of events in a short window, and on the free plan that means losing visibility for the rest of the month at the exact moment you needed it.
The mitigation is sampling and inbound filters set up before, not after. Rate limiting on the client side matters more than the quota itself.
One user means no team on free
Developer is a single-seat plan. A second engineer needs Team, at $26 a month billed annually.
That price lands in the same place as Postman's free tier, which also went single-user in 2026. Both products decided that collaboration is the paid boundary, and both are right about where the willingness to pay starts.
For a solo developer or a founder debugging production alone, free is a complete tool. For a team of three it is $624 a year, which is real money for error monitoring.
Spans, replays and logs are separate metres
Sentry does not charge by errors alone. Traces are measured in spans, replays in sessions and logs in gigabytes, each with its own allowance.
Free includes 5 million spans, which sounds enormous and is for most small applications. Fifty session replays is the tighter figure: at 50 replays you are sampling heavily or only capturing replays on error, and that is a deliberate configuration decision rather than a default you can ignore.
Thirty days of retention is the quiet limit. It is enough to debug anything current and not enough to answer a question about what happened last quarter.
Seer is paid only
Sentry's AI debugging features are bundled into Seer, priced at $40 per active contributor a month on top of the plan. It does not appear on the free Developer plan at any level.
Worth knowing because reviews of Sentry increasingly lead with AI-assisted root cause analysis, and none of that is what a free account gets.
When the free plan is enough
A solo developer or a founder on call alone, running one or two services. Small applications producing dozens or low hundreds of errors a month, where 5,000 is genuinely far away.
It is also enough to adopt error monitoring properly for the first time, because all of the integration work is the same on every plan. The issues themselves usually land in a tracker, and Linear's 250-issue free cap is the constraint waiting on the other end.
When it stops being enough
The second developer, or a spike that burns the month in an afternoon. Both push toward Team at $26, which brings 50,000 errors, unlimited users and 90-day retention.
If the real need is uptime alerts rather than stack traces, the free plan's single monitor is insufficient and a dedicated uptime service is the cheaper answer.
Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry free?
Yes, on the Developer plan: one user, 5,000 errors a month, 30-day retention, all core error and performance monitoring.
What happens when Sentry Free runs out of errors?
Events are dropped until the quota resets. Developer has no pay-as-you-go overage.
Can more than one person use Sentry Free?
No. Developer is a single-user plan. Additional users require Team at $26 a month billed annually.
Does Sentry Free include session replay?
Yes, up to 50 replays a month, alongside 5GB of logs and 5 million spans.
Is Seer included in Sentry Free?
No. Seer is $40 per active contributor a month and is not available on Developer.
Plan contents, quotas and pricing verified against Sentry's pricing documentation on 20 October 2026.
Sources
- Sentry pricing: sentry.io/pricing. Used for: Developer quotas, the drop-at-limit behaviour and Team pricing.
All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 20 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.
