Short answer: the cheapest log management choice is the one that preserves enough structured context to reconstruct a failed checkout, while keeping ingestion, retention, egress, and operator time inside a known budget. For a startup serving media customers in Europe and the US, compare CloudWatch, Grafana Loki Cloud, Logtail, and Papertrail against the same event model and retention plan, not just their advertised storage line.
A checkout failure is rarely one bad line. It is a sequence: a customer submits an order, the payment provider responds, inventory is reserved, a receipt is queued, and the browser receives a result. A log system that stores text but loses the request ID, region, or outcome can be inexpensive and still fail the incident-reconstruction test.
This is an experiment note, not a vendor ranking. The simple approach is to ship every application line to one searchable destination and keep it for as long as the budget permits. The chosen approach is narrower: emit structured events, separate operational logs from high-volume debug data, and measure how quickly a small team can answer “what happened to checkout 8f31?” before choosing a backend. Measure first. Copy later.
