Papertrail’s free tier is 50MB a day, so one bad night of stack traces pushes you onto a paid plan that scales with your worst outage, from $7 a month into the hundreds. Logbin is the pay-once alternative: ship logs from any server over HTTP or syslog, tail them live in a web UI, search everything, and get alerted when ERROR starts screaming. $34, once, on your own box.

• Ingest anything — POST /ingest takes plaintext, JSON, arrays or NDJSON with levels auto-detected, plus a syslog UDP listener that auto-creates sources and two tiny file-shipper scripts.
• Live tail — An SSE stream with source and level filters, text matching, pause/resume and auto-scroll.
• Search and filter — Text search with match highlighting, per-source and per-level filters and saved views.
• Alert rules — Fire a webhook or email when a regex like /ERROR|FATAL/ matches N times in M seconds, with cooldowns so one incident is one alert.
• Per-source retention — Auto-purge old rows (default 14 days) to keep SQLite lean, with rotatable per-source API keys and color-coded sources.
• Desktop mode or VPS — Electron app for local dev-log tailing, Docker for the real thing.

Runs as a Windows desktop app or on any $5 VPS (Docker included).

What’s included:

• Full source code (MIT): https://github.com/bensblueprints/log-viewer-aggregator
• Lifetime v1 updates
• Setup guide (README quick start)