{"question": "best application performance monitoring for startups", "category": "application-performance-monitoring", "category_name": "application performance monitoring", "audience": "startups", "audience_name": "startups", "engine": "Claude (Anthropic) with web search", "model": "claude-opus-5", "asked_at": "2026-09-27T23:10:48Z", "permalink": "https://bikoosh.com/answers/s/application-performance-monitoring-startups-2026-09-27", "question_page": "https://bikoosh.com/answers/q/application-performance-monitoring/startups", "brands_named": [{"position": 1, "brand": "Sentry", "label": "mentioned"}, {"position": 2, "brand": "Postgres", "label": "mentioned"}, {"position": 3, "brand": "New Relic", "label": "mentioned"}, {"position": 4, "brand": "Grafana Cloud", "label": "mentioned"}, {"position": 5, "brand": "OpenTelemetry", "label": "mentioned"}, {"position": 6, "brand": "Better Stack", "label": "mentioned"}, {"position": 7, "brand": "SigNoz", "label": "mentioned"}, {"position": 8, "brand": "Datadog", "label": "mentioned"}, {"position": 9, "brand": "Rollbar", "label": "mentioned"}], "sources_cited": [{"url": "https://sentry.io/pricing/", "domain": "sentry.io", "source_type": "vendor"}, {"url": "https://docs.sentry.io/pricing/", "domain": "docs.sentry.io", "source_type": "vendor"}, {"url": "https://newrelic.com/pricing/free-tier", "domain": "newrelic.com", "source_type": "vendor"}, {"url": "https://newrelic.com/pricing", "domain": "newrelic.com", "source_type": "vendor"}, {"url": "https://www.vantage.sh/blog/datadog-vs-grafana-cost", "domain": "vantage.sh", "source_type": "other"}, {"url": "https://rollbar.com/blog/best-apm-tools/", "domain": "rollbar.com", "source_type": "vendor"}, {"url": "https://coralogix.com/guides/application-performance-monitoring-tools/", "domain": "coralogix.com", "source_type": "other"}, {"url": "https://www.g2.com/categories/application-performance-monitoring-apm", "domain": "g2.com", "source_type": "review"}], "answer_text": "## What I'd actually recommend\n\n**1. Sentry** - Start here. For most startups, \"APM\" in practice means \"why did this request fail or get slow,\" and Sentry answers that better than anything else at seed stage. Error tracking plus tracing in one tool, SDK setup is genuinely 15 minutes, and the traces link straight to the stack trace and release that broke things. Free Developer plan to start; Team is $26/mo with 50K errors and 5M spans. Its weakness is infrastructure metrics - it won't tell you your Postgres connection pool is exhausted.\n\n**2. New Relic** - The best value if you want a full platform rather than just app-level errors. 100 GB/month of free ingest, perpetual, no credit card, with unlimited basic users and access to everything (APM, infra, logs, serverless). Then $0.35/GB. For a pre-Series B team, that frequently means $0/month for real APM. The UI is dense and the user-tier model is the thing to read carefully - \"full platform users\" are what actually cost money.\n\n**3. Grafana Cloud** - Pick this if you're already committed to OpenTelemetry and Prometheus and want no vendor lock-in on instrumentation. Free tier is 10k metric series, 50 GB each of logs/traces/profiles, 3", "answer_truncated": true, "measurement": "One answer from one engine on one date. Not a ranking and not a claim about the world; brands the engine did not name are not recorded.", "limitation": "Coverage: Claude (Anthropic) with web search. Other engines not included.", "alerts": {"name": "Answer Watch Pro", "price_usd": 79, "period": "month", "gets": "daily change alerts for up to 5 brands in what one AI answer engine says, history, CSV export. Coverage: Claude (Anthropic) with web search. Other engines not included", "url": "https://bikoosh.com/answers"}}