SIEM pricing in 2026: what small IT teams actually pay

If you look after somewhere between 20 and 200 Windows machines and have priced a SIEM, you have probably run into per-GB ingestion pricing. It can make monitoring your security logs cost more than the servers that produce them. Even a small Windows network can write several GB of logs a day. When each gigabyte is billed, the obvious way to control cost is to collect less, and the logs that get dropped tend to be the ones you would need during an investigation.

Typical costs for the larger SIEMs

License or ingest costs at about 10 GB of logs per day, before storage, staff and setup:

Splunk doesn’t publish prices. The low figure is a reseller’s AWS Marketplace listing ($1,265 per GB of daily ingestion per year at 10–19 GB a day), and the high one is the top of the list-price range reported by Vendr. Sentinel is Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go rate of about $4.30 per GB in East US. IBM sold QRadar SaaS to Palo Alto Networks in 2024 and quotes on-premises QRadar per customer. Elastic publishes per-GB rates for ingestion and retention.

Even at this modest scale, Splunk and Sentinel cost more than $10,000 a year in license or ingest fees alone. Because the price follows data volume, turning on more logging also raises the bill, so more thorough monitoring costs more.

A flat-rate option

Arden’s pricing hasn’t been announced yet. It will be a flat monthly rate based on the size of your environment, with no per-GB ingest fees. Arden runs on a Windows machine on your own network and reads Windows event logs directly. Agents send logs only to that machine, logs are stored on its local disk, and detection runs on hardware you already own, with nothing sent to a cloud service. Since log volume doesn’t affect the price, you can turn on the audit policies your compliance framework calls for and enable PowerShell script block logging without worrying about the bill.

The detection rules look for activity that often comes before ransomware or data theft, including use of stolen credentials, lateral movement between machines, and persistence mechanisms that survive a reboot. Arden detects many of these attacks, not all of them, and it only raises alerts; it does not block anything. The Network edition brings alerts from multiple servers into one dashboard and can send notifications when something is detected. Arden itself is a single executable.

The Arden dashboard groups alerts across endpoints, maps them to MITRE ATT&CK and sorts them by severity.

Start with your servers

Most of the useful evidence of an attack ends up on domain controllers, file servers and systems that hold regulated data. Starting with three to five of those servers puts detection where it is most likely to matter. You can add workstations later if the budget allows.

Arden only handles Windows event logs. If you need Linux syslog, cloud audit trails or correlation across platforms, an enterprise SIEM is the better fit. If your security monitoring today amounts to opening Event Viewer when something seems wrong, Arden is meant for that situation: detection on your Windows logs at a predictable cost. See our detection engine overview, read how Arden detects lateral movement, or learn what the hidden costs of a traditional SIEM actually look like.