I Self-Hosted Langfuse so My LLM Traces Would Stop Living On Someone Else’s Bill

A developer self-hosted Langfuse, an open-source LLM engineering platform, after its cloud Pro tier costs became significant at over 100,000 traces per month in March. The platform, acquired by ClickHouse in January 2026, remains MIT licensed and fully self-hostable via Docker Compose or Kubernetes. Self-hosting took an afternoon to get working and about a week for production readiness.

Member-only story I Self-Hosted Langfuse so My LLM Traces Would Stop Living On Someone Else’s Bill We crossed 100K traces a month in March. That’s the point where Langfuse Cloud’s Pro tier stops feeling like a rounding error and starts showing up in the “why is our tooling spend up 40%” Slack thread. Two options. Negotiate an enterprise contract for a tool we mostly used to answer “why did the agent say that.” Or run the exact same open-source stack ourselves, on infrastructure we already pay for. I took option two. It runs an afternoon to get something working and about a week to get something I’d trust in production. This is the guide I wanted going in. One thing before we start. Langfuse was acquired by ClickHouse in January 2026. The core platform remains MIT licensed and fully self-hostable, and self-hosting via Docker Compose or Kubernetes is unchanged and continues to be actively maintained. Nothing here depends on a vendor relationship that could evaporate. If you’re picking observability infrastructure for a company that plans to exist in five years, that’s not a footnote. Why bother, when you could just pay for it Langfuse is an open-source LLM engineering platform: tracing, evals, metrics, prompt management, playground, and datasets, instrumented through…