Independent Real User Monitoring cost research
RUMCost.com is published by Digital Signet, an independent research practice founded by Oliver Wakefield-Smith. We do not take affiliate commissions on vendor links, and no vendor pays for placement in our matrix.
What this site is
RUMCost.com is a procurement reference for Real User Monitoring software. It exists because every vendor in the category publishes pricing in a different unit (per-session, per-pageview, per-GB, per-token, quote-only), and the existing comparison sites are either vendor-published marketing (Datadog explaining why Datadog is the right choice), aggregator review pages without pricing data (G2, TrustRadius, Capterra), or out-of-date listicles. There was no place on the internet where the actual current per-1,000-session math was published side-by-side across all the major vendors. We built one.
What this site is not
- It is not an affiliate site. We do not earn commission when a visitor signs up for any of the vendors listed. The links to vendor pricing pages and signup flows are plain URLs.
- It is not paid placement. No vendor pays for inclusion in the matrix, prominence in the homepage hero, or favourable framing on the per-vendor pages.
- It is not a Software-as-a-Service product. There is no signup, no login, no email capture (the calculator is fully client-side and your inputs never leave your browser).
- It is not the alcoholic spirit. RUM in the observability context is an acronym for Real User Monitoring. This site does not cover rum the beverage. See the disambiguation banner at the top of every page.
Who runs it
Digital Signet is an independent research practice based in the UK. The founder, Oliver Wakefield-Smith, has spent the last several years building independent cost-comparison sites across software, professional services, and consumer categories. Sister sites in the observability cluster include monitoringcost.com (APM, logs, infrastructure monitoring), siemcost.com (SIEM), mdrcost.com (MDR), and incidentcost.com (incident response cost).
Why “rumcost.com”
We chose rumcost.com because it is the exact-match domain for the software category. We knew before buying it that the head term “rum cost” carries dominant consumer-alcohol search intent in both the US and UK. We accept that. The site is optimised for the long-tail of vendor-specific procurement queries (“Datadog RUM pricing”, “SpeedCurve pricing”, “real user monitoring cost comparison”) rather than the head term. The disambiguation banner at the top of every page makes the software context unmistakable. If you arrived here looking for the price of a bottle of Mount Gay, you are in the wrong place, we apologise for the confusion.
How to reach us
Email oliver@digitalsignet.com with corrections, vendor pricing updates, sponsorship questions (we do not currently sell sponsorship), or research collaboration ideas. We respond within 48 hours during UK business days.
What we publish
- A multi-vendor RUM cost calculator covering 18 vendors.
- A methodology page showing every source URL and verification date.
- Per-vendor pricing detail pages with model explainers, free-tier specifics, and gotchas (18 pages).
- Cross-category comparison pages (RUM vs APM, RUM vs synthetic, RUM vs error monitoring, RUM vs replay-only, RUM vs page analytics).
- Budget-band guides (small business, mid-market, enterprise, agencies).
- Volume-band cost pages (100K pageviews, 1M, 10M, 100M).
- Editorial essays on hidden costs, Core Web Vitals, INP, implementation, ROI, open-source alternatives, and reducing RUM costs.