Your production REST APIs are the invisible plumbing that keeps your product running. When they break, customers notice — and your team scrambles. But for small teams, startups, and lean engineering orgs, the cost of enterprise-grade observability can feel like a second mortgage.
We dug into the market to find the tools that give you real production monitoring — error tracking, performance insights, uptime signals — without blowing past $100 a month. Here are the things actually worth buying.
Why API Monitoring Matters (Even on a Budget)
A single undetected API regression can cascade into minutes or hours of degraded experience. Modern observability tools don't just log errors — they surface stability trends, pinpoint breaking changes, and help your team sleep better at night.1 The trick is finding a tool that gives you that safety net without requiring an enterprise budget.
The Best API Monitoring Tools Under $100/Month
Treblle — Best Value ($25/mo)
Treblle's Starter plan is the budget champion of API observability. For $25/month, you get 5 million API requests and support for 5 APIs — enough to cover most small-to-mid-size production deployments.1 Treblle specializes in REST API observability with real-time logging, request/response inspection, and endpoint performance metrics. If you're running a lean stack and need maximum coverage per dollar, this is your pick.
Best for: Teams that want dedicated API observability (not just error tracking) at a fraction of the cost of competitors.
Bugsnag — Best for Stability ($99/mo)
Bugsnag pioneered the concept of stability scoring — a single metric that tells you how healthy your application is at a glance. Their Small Team plan runs $99/month and includes error monitoring with full context: stack traces, breadcrumbs, and user impact data.2 The stability score is genuinely useful for tracking regressions across deployments. At exactly $99, it sits right at our budget ceiling but delivers enterprise-grade error tracking that scales with you.
Best for: Teams that want a clear, quantified view of application stability and are willing to pay for it.
Airbrake — Best for Simplicity ($99/mo)
Airbrake has been a mainstay in error tracking for years, and its Starter plan at $99/month keeps things refreshingly straightforward.3 You get error grouping, deployment tracking, and integrations with Slack, GitHub, and your CI pipeline — all without the configuration overhead that plagues more complex tools. Airbrake's strength is its simplicity: deploy the agent, set up your project, and start seeing errors in minutes.
Best for: Teams that want a no-fuss error tracker that just works, with minimal setup time.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Dimension | Treblle | Bugsnag | Airbrake |
|---|
| Price | $25/mo | $99/mo | $99/mo |
| Request Limit | 5M req/mo | Unlimited errors | Unlimited errors |
| Core Feature | Real-time API logs | Stability scoring | Streamlined setup |
| Best For | API-first teams | Stability-focused teams | Simplicity seekers |
How We Picked
We evaluated each tool against three criteria: price (must be ≤$100/month for a production-ready plan), coverage (must support REST API monitoring in production), and signal quality (must surface actionable data, not just noise). All three picks deliver on these fronts, with Treblle standing out for its unbeatable price-to-value ratio.
The Bottom Line
If you're building and shipping REST APIs on a budget, you don't have to choose between observability and affordability. Treblle gives you the most API-specific bang for your buck at $25/mo. Bugsnag offers the deepest stability insights at the top of the budget range. And Airbrake gets out of your way and lets you focus on fixing bugs.
Recomate earns affiliate commissions when you purchase through the links above. We only recommend tools we've researched and believe deliver genuine value for their price.
