If you have been wondering how to get started with Axiom for beginners, the bottom line is that the free Personal plan costs $0 per month, is permanent rather than a trial, requires no credit card, and includes 500 GB of monthly data loading, full APL access, and every integration Axiom supports, per its official pricing page. Setup takes minutes: create an organization, make a dataset, generate a token, and send events. It is not for teams that need more than one seat, retention beyond 30 days, or edge regions outside the US.
How This Guide Was Built
This guide was built entirely from Axiom’s official sources: the numbers below were verified on Axiom’s official pricing page and its limits reference on September 14, 2026, covering free plan quotas, ingest limits, and the setup flow. We did not run Axiom hands-on for this guide. Last verified: September 2026.
We checked the Personal plan’s quotas, storage and retention caps, notifier options, paid add-on prices, and the platform-wide ingest limits. Free-tier terms change, so treat anything past the verification date as subject to change.
What Axiom Is and What the Free Plan Includes
Axiom is a cloud-native log management and observability platform built for high-volume event data, used by more than 30,000 organizations according to Axiom docs. Its free Personal plan includes 500 GB of monthly data loading, 10 GB-hours of query compute, 25 GB of storage, full APL access, and every integration at no cost [1].
| Resource | Free Personal plan |
|---|---|
| Price | $0/month, permanent, no credit card |
| Data loading | 500 GB/month (also the hard cap) |
| Query compute | 10 GB-hours/month |
| Storage | 25 GB |
| Retention | 30 days (maximum on this plan) |
| Datasets | 3 (soft limit, liftable on request) |
| Fields per dataset | 256 |
| Users | 1 |
| Monitors | 3 |
| Notifiers | Email and Discord |
| Edge deployments | US only |
| Bandwidth, API access, data sources | Unlimited under the Fair Use Policy |
| Support | Community |
Under the hood, Axiom’s design targets 25-50x compression, and the platform ships an MCP server plus SRE and Metrics skills alongside integrations for Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Workers, Supabase, Convex, Grafana, Terraform, AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, Vector, CloudWatch, Tailscale, and CI/CD tooling.
How to get started with Axiom for beginners?
To get started with Axiom for beginners, sign up at axiom.co, create an organization, create your first dataset, generate an API token, send events to that dataset over OTLP/HTTP, and query them in APL, as documented in Axiom docs. The whole path takes minutes and never asks for a credit card.
1. Create your account and organization
Head to axiom.co and choose Start free, then create your organization. Axiom’s official pricing page confirms the Personal plan is a permanent $0 per month with no credit card, so you can explore before committing anything. Your organization holds your datasets, tokens, and monitors.
2. Create your first dataset
Datasets are the buckets where events land, and the free plan includes three of them. Dataset and field counts are soft limits Axiom can lift on request, but plan around 3 datasets and 256 fields each initially. Name your first dataset clearly, such as dev_logs, because your ingest requests will reference it.
3. Generate an API token
In your organization settings, create an API token with ingest scope, adding query scope if you plan to search from code. Every request authenticates with an Authorization: Bearer <API_TOKEN> header, per Axiom docs. Store the token in a secrets manager rather than your repository.
4. Send your first events over OTLP/HTTP
Point your OpenTelemetry Collector or SDK at /v1/traces, /v1/logs, or /v1/metrics, and attach the headers Authorization: Bearer <API_TOKEN> plus X-Axiom-Dataset: <DATASET_NAME>, as Axiom’s OpenTelemetry send-data guide shows. Every event needs a _time timestamp; if one is missing, Axiom assigns the ingest time. Keep batches at or under 10,000 events and individual fields at or under 1 MB.
5. Query your data in APL
Open the query view and use APL, Axiom’s query language, which is fully available on the free plan alongside your 10 GB-hours of monthly compute. Start by filtering your dataset on _time, then aggregate or join fields as needed. Query concurrency is a soft limit, so heavy dashboard usage is worth raising with Axiom.
6. Add a monitor with an Email or Discord notifier
Monitors run a saved query on a schedule and notify you when results match a condition. The free plan includes 3 monitors and two notifier channels, Email and Discord, so wire one up in your first week to catch ingestion gaps early.
What the Free Tier Does Not Give You
The free tier gives you exactly one user seat, a maximum of 3 datasets, 30-day retention at most, and US-only edge deployments, according to Axiom’s limits reference [1]. It also omits an SLA, HIPAA BAA coverage, volume discounts, and the SSO, RBAC, and Audit Log add-ons, which cost extra on paid plans.
- One user seat. Teammates require Axiom Cloud, whose allowances extend to 1,000 users and 100 datasets.
- Soft caps on datasets, fields, and query concurrency. These are liftable on request, but you must ask.
- 30-day maximum retention. Axiom Cloud retention is configurable; the free plan tops out at a month.
- US edge deployments only, with no region choice, no SLA, and community support only.
- Paid security and compliance extras. SAML SSO runs $100/month, RBAC $50/month, Audit Log $50/month, and Directory Sync $100/month, all self-serve in the console; SOC 2 Type II and GDPR apply platform-wide, while a HIPAA BAA is an add-on.
- No volume discounts or pre-purchased credits. Axiom Cloud’s automatic discounts and credits of up to 40% off belong to its $25/month platform tier.
Common Mistakes
The most common mistakes on Axiom’s free tier are exceeding the 500 GB monthly load cap, sending oversized OpenTelemetry batches that fail on HTTP 413, posting JSON to the metrics endpoint, and using the wrong dataset header, per Axiom’s limits reference. Assuming longer retention or ignoring reserved field names causes silent data problems too.
- Blowing the 500 GB/month cap. It is both the allowance and the hard maximum on Personal, so debug-level logging from busy services can exhaust it mid-month. Sample or filter before ingest.
- Losing OpenTelemetry batches to HTTP 413. Axiom caps fields at 1 MB and batches at 10,000 events; oversize requests return HTTP 413, which the OTel Collector treats as permanent and drops. Configure the batch processor and set
send_batch_max_size. - Posting JSON to the metrics endpoint.
/v1/metricsacceptsapplication/x-protobufonly, requests max out at 4 MiB uncompressed, and metric and attribute names are capped at 256 bytes. - Using the wrong header. Logs and traces use
X-Axiom-Dataset, but metrics needx-axiom-metrics-dataset. - Assuming longer retention. At 30 days, the maximum on Personal, older data disappears even when you are nowhere near the 25 GB storage cap.
- Ignoring reserved field names. Fields named
_blockInfo,_cursor,_rowID,_source, or_sysTimeare renamed to_user_<name>, so queries on the original names return nothing.
FAQ
These questions cover the three things beginners ask most about Axiom’s free plan: whether the $0 price is permanent, whether metrics work on the free tier, and what happens past 500 GB per month, answered from Axiom’s official pricing page and docs.
Is Axiom’s free plan really permanent, or is it a trial?
It is permanent, not a trial: the Personal plan costs $0 per month with no time limit and no credit card required, according to Axiom’s official pricing page. You keep 500 GB of monthly data loading, 10 GB-hours of query compute, and 25 GB of storage indefinitely, and you can stay on the free plan as long as it fits.
Can I send metrics to Axiom’s free tier?
Yes, metrics work on the free tier, with caveats: send them as application/x-protobuf to /v1/metrics, because JSON is not accepted, and use the x-axiom-metrics-dataset header instead of X-Axiom-Dataset, per Axiom docs. Requests max out at 4 MiB uncompressed.
What happens if I exceed 500 GB per month on the free plan?
You cannot exceed it by design, because that figure is both the monthly allowance and the hard maximum on the Personal plan, per Axiom’s limits reference. There is no overage billing since no card is on file, so plan sampling and filtering carefully, or move to Axiom Cloud, whose Always Free allowance is 1 TB per month.
Where to Go Next
Axiom covers logs, metrics, and traces, so pair it with error tracking or dashboards from another free tier. We document those limits in our guides to Grafana Cloud’s free tier, Better Stack’s free tier, and Sentry’s free tier. For a quick reference on Sentry specifically, see our Sentry tool entry.
Sources
[1] Axiom Limits — https://axiom.co/docs/reference/limits (pricing)