Simple and Predictable Pricing

FAQ

What counts as a request?

These actions count as requests in Tideways:

• A web request initiated by a browser, crawler, or API client that is handled by the application.
• A background job processed by a message or job queue in your application.
• Every individual cronjob or PHP script execution as part of your application.

You can ignore individual requests or whole transactions through the UI or API so that they do not get counted towards the request limit.

What happens when I reach the request limit?

The request limit is a soft quota, and after reaching it, recording of data will continue without interruption. At the end of every month, we will notify you when the limit was exceeded, and after two consecutive months above the limit, an automatic upgrade for the next matching request tier is selected automatically. If you cut down the collected requests below the current request tier again, then this upgrade is automatically cancelled.

What happens when I reach the trace trigger quota?

When the monthly trace trigger quota is reached, then triggering traces with callgraphs through Chrome Extension, Commandline, or Tracepoints is disabled until the end of the month.

What is a service?

With a service, you can track a complete application or a small part of an application. You can organize services and applications that belong together into a project or create multiple projects, each with different services.

Usually, you use services to represent individual applications or modules in a larger set of dependent applications or a monolithic application.

Different projects should be used when there are little dependencies or interaction between the applications; for example, a WordPress landing page for a Symfony or Laravel-based SaaS could be represented as two projects.

How can I compare Tideways requests and traces/minute to Sentry span events?

Tideways has two separate data models,

1. one for aggregated performance monitoring data, which is counted in requests.
2. one for detailed profiling traces, which is counted in traces/minute, and where each trace can contain up to 500 or 1500 spans depending on the plan.

Traces are sampled with an intelligent algorithm that aims for a wide range of deep insights across many services and transactions of a project. Only a few spans of each trace are indexed and searchable individually, so that there is no need to charge for spans—and a much higher number of spans can be stored for a similar price to Sentry.

Monitoring data stores the timings of every single request without exception to give a full picture of the distribution of performance in an application. In Sentry, data must be processed as a trace to be used in performance monitoring. As soon as you apply sampling, you don’t see the full picture of the application performance anymore.

An average trace in Tideways contains around 100-500 spans, depending on the supported framework or application.

How can I compare Tideways requests and traces/minute to Laravel Nightwatch events?

Tideways has sampling built into the core of the product as first-class citizen. Instead of sampling leading to data not being recorded at all, Tideways always processes 100% of requests and calls and then aggregates and samples this data on the local agent only after including 100% of that information into our lightweight monitoring data model.

By sampling on a trace and not individual events, Tideways can provide insights on the total amount of cache calls and their duration even though it does not process each individual cache call.

What is data retention, and how does it work?

Monitoring systems collect a vast amount of data, and this has a huge effect on processing and storage costs. To be able to provide an affordable product to you, we have to limit the duration that we store monitoring and tracing data. Data that is older than the retention of your project is automatically purged. We aggregate high-level monitoring data into a historical view to allow comparison with old versions of your project in the past. The larger your license is, the longer we store historic data.

What are basic and advanced integrations?

Basic integrations include email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams for notifications. Advanced integrations include PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Splunk On-Call, and Webhooks.

What Training Opportunities do you offer?

As part of the Enterprise plan, you have access to a complimentary premium onboarding workshop. This workshop is available for a one-time fee of 249 € for Team or Business customers.

Do you offer long-term, fixed-scope contracts as well?

Yes, all contracts can also be subscribed to on an annual basis. If you choose yearly payment, you get 10% off compared to a monthly payment.

Which payment intervals are available?

Your benefit of an annual subscription: With a yearly payment scheme, you get 10% off on the monthly prices.

What payment methods do you accept?

For both monthly and yearly contracts, we accept credit cards and SEPA Direct Debit payments.

If your company is located in the European Union, we can also accept payment by wire transfer for yearly contracts starting with the Business plan.

What currencies do you accept?

We accept euros and United States dollars. You can pay with euros from every country; US dollars are only available to companies from non Euro-countries.

Are prices including or excluding VAT?

All prices are excluding VAT. We are based in Germany, which means that you have to pay extra VAT if you are based in Europe. Our payment provider handles the European reverse-charge VAT process. If we cannot validate your VAT number, we might charge you based on the European Digital Goods VAT regulations. Please be aware that, for regulatory reasons, we require a valid EU VAT number if you order from a European country.

International customers (non-European Union) do not have to pay VAT/sales tax.

Wasn’t there a project- and service-based pricing previously?

Yes, there was until July 2025. If you have an active or disabled trial from 2025, you can contact [email protected] and ask to subscribe to this old model.

Do you have special offers for non-profit organizations?

Yes, we can offer you considerable discounts if you are a registered non-profit organization (NGO) or educational institution in the US or Europe and match our criteria. Please get in contact for more information.

How is my data secured and protected?

All data is sent to our servers using SSL encryption. We follow a “safe by default” policy and only transmit data that cannot contain personal data of your website users. Activating features that send additional data always explains potential risks.

On top of that, you are in full control of which additional data you want to send yourself.

We follow the European Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR), and our privacy policy includes all third-party processors we work with and what data they process for what reason. In addition, we sign data processing agreements (DPA) (German: Auftragsdatenverarbeitungsvertrag) with you if necessary.

Where do you store my data?

We are hosting Tideways in SysEleven’s data centers located in Berlin, Germany, and store all your account, monitoring, and profiling data there.

Do you offer training and consulting to help improve our applications performance?

We are putting a lot of work into building Tideways so that it can be used with little training or consulting necessary by us. There are the documentation and the academy video courses to get you started.

When you subscribe to the Enterprise plan, then you are eligible for a 75-90 minute onboarding workshop on your own account and code base and for a quarterly session of 45 minutes to review optimal use of your account, train on new features, or discuss a performance problem of your choice.

For consulting work on performance problems by one of our performance experts, the price is 189 € / $199 for 30 of minutes screen time and includes an email to wrap up open questions and point to discussed topics in the documentation. Training and consulting sessions can be recorded and shared with you. Please get in contact with [email protected] for details.