It quickly becomes expensive if you're routinely sending a measurable amount data to it. Disqus has two physical servers dedicated to it. Both of them are larg

It quickly becomes expensive if you're routinely sending a measurable amount data to it. Disqus has two physical servers dedicated to it. Both of them are larger than any of the web/worker machines getsentry.com runs. On top of those costs, they also have the upkeep cost of running those servers, doing software upgrades, and, if anything goes wrong, debugging things. Obviously Disqus isn't a great example, since we built the software and know how to run it, but companies much smaller than Disqus don't really have the reason to invest the money or time into setting up infrastructure to support it. Delicious is using Sentry on their new JavaScript-centric site, and for the amount of data they're sending, they'd be spending a lot more on hosting costs and infrastructure maintenance. It's not ideal for everyone (some companies push a lot of data through Sentry), and we don't necessarily aim to serve someone who may be sending millions of events in a day. What we typically see is that most people are sending somewhere between 5,000 and 50,000 events, which is right about the size where it's not practical to host the instance yourself. It definitely beats maintaining RabbitMQ, Redis, Memcache, Celery, WSGI, Postgres, and soon, Elastic Search.