Logz.io Revenue: What Tomer Levy Shared in 2017, and the Number He Kept Private

Logz.io does not publish its revenue, and in mid-2017 its co-founder and CEO, Tomer Levy, told Nathan Latka why: “we made a decision in the company not to share our numbers for competitive reasons.” What he did say, in an interview dated June 6, 2017, is a short list. There was no revenue in 2014 (“No, zero.”). Of 2015, the year the product launched in October, he said: “I think we were 6 figures at that point.” Asked whether the company had broken the million-dollar run rate, he answered: “Oh, of course.” The larger Logz.io figures heard in the episode, $300,000 a month and a “well over $3,000,000 annual run rate”, are Nathan’s arithmetic, built on a customer count Levy declined to give.

The interview is more useful for how Logz.io sold than for what it earned. The company had built its business on ELK, an open-source stack its team had not written, and turned that community into a funnel feeding contracts that ran from a few hundred dollars a month to a few hundred thousand a year. Levy was specific about pricing, churn, acquisition cost and the money raised. What follows attributes each figure to whoever said it, then sets out the rounds and growth the company has announced since.

Logz.io revenue: what Levy said, and what was Nathan’s

The revenue exchange runs from 10:25 to 14:13 on the recording, plus Nathan’s closing recap, and it is easy to misread because Nathan does most of the talking. This is who said what.

Times are minutes and seconds into the interview, as on the interview page’s transcript.

Nathan’s floor deserves a closer look, because both of its inputs were his. The 300 came from his own question, “call it like 300 paid, something like that?”, which Levy turned down: “I’ll keep that one private, but a few hundreds.” The $1,000 a month came from treating $10,000 a year, the bottom of Levy’s SMB tier, as the least any customer paid, and rounding up; a $10,000 contract is about $833 a month. Levy had already described a self-service tier below that, at “a few thousand dollars a year”. Multiplied out, 300 × $1,000 × 12 is $3.6 million, which is where the recap’s “well over $3,000,000” comes from. Levy’s reply called the floor too low without replacing it, and Nathan said as much on air: “He won’t confirm or deny this.”

So the record in Levy’s own words, at the time of the interview, is zero in 2014, six figures in the launch year, past a $1 million run rate by mid-2017, and higher than Nathan’s floor by an amount he would not name. Nathan defined the run rate on air as the current month’s revenue times 12, the standard annual run rate. Levy’s own aside on the unit: “For ARR, we like to count ARR because it sounds higher.”

Renting distribution from a project Logz.io didn’t write

Logz.io sold hosted log analytics: it took the machine data that servers, databases and applications generate and cut the time engineers spend tracing problems through it. Levy named Intermedia and British Airways among its customers. Buyers were mostly SRE, DevOps and IT operations teams, and about a quarter of customers were security teams. Underneath sat ELK, which Levy said had about half a million downloads a month, and which he described for a non-technical listener: “So think about it like a set of libraries. You install them on a server and they basically take all the data, any data you have.” And: “You put it into this one bucket and what ELK allows you to do is basically visualize the data and understand what’s important in it.”

Nathan asked whether Logz.io had launched the open-source project on purpose, as lead generation for a paid product. Levy’s answer was the most candid line of the episode: “So unfortunately, we’re not the one who actually developed the open source from the beginning.” What Logz.io built was the log-management application on top, delivered as a cloud service so customers did not have to install and maintain ELK themselves, with machine learning and other features added over it. He called the model “Open SaaS, Open Source as a Service”, and gave Pantheon, Cloudera, Hortonworks and GitHub as other examples of it. They were examples, not competitors.

That left the obvious problem, which Nathan put to him: if anyone can use ELK for free, how does Logz.io make sure it is the one getting the leads? Content, started as the company launched. “Today we’re the number one contributor of content to the ELK community. So if you search Google for ELK on AWS, ELK in production, we’re number one in Google in all of these searches.” That was his claim in 2017, and the funnel it fed was wide. He said “thousands of new companies sign up to our platform every quarter”, and that about a thousand companies in 80 countries used the product, of which “A few 100 of them are paying customers.” The thousand includes free users. It is also the count the company had published about seven months earlier, when its Series B announcement said Logz.io served “more than 1,000 companies from 80 countries.”

The open source has to be good enough to get started, good enough, easy to get started and use it so it will have mass distribution, but it has to get to a point where it’s hard to scale it, it’s hard to make it production grade, and this is where commercial companies have a lot of leverage.

Tomer Levy, co-founder and CEO of Logz.io, 2017

The same logic set the competition. “So we actually compete mostly with engineers setting up their own open source,” Levy said, and only then named Elastic and AWS, whose offering he described as a simplified version of the open source. His answer to both was to go up-market: “we see ourselves as more of a premium product, we’re much more expensive.”

Pricing, deal size and churn

Asked what the average customer paid, Levy described four rungs. Self-service, bought online, cost a few hundred dollars a month, “a few thousand dollars a year”. The SMB cohort “would pay about 10 ks, 10 to 15 ks a year for the product.” What he called SME, small and medium enterprise, “would usually pay 50 ks per year minimum, and then would go to a few 100 Ks for the high end enterprises.” Nathan proposed a sweet spot of $10,000 to $40,000 in annual contract value and Levy agreed, then gave his own number: “So if you look at the last 10 deals, probably around 40 k.” That is roughly $40,000 a year in annual contract value on the most recent deals, not an average across the whole base, which also included self-service accounts paying a few thousand dollars a year.

Retention is what made the small entry points pay. Nathan asked about monthly churn; Levy answered in years. Self-service churned the most, and even that was “still single digits yearly, like still less than 10% yearly.” For customers paying around $10,000 a year or more, he put it “very close to zero.” So Logz.io let customers start small. “So we’re very much a land and expand business,” he said. “If they feel comfortable coming in with a small project for five or ten or twenty ks, that’s perfect for us. And if you’re happy, and usually you are happy, you will grow.”

Acquisition cost and the team behind it

Levy would not put a dollar figure on customer acquisition cost, but he placed it: “currently it’s extremely low. It’s way beyond the standard of the industry because we bring customer through content.” On payback for the cohorts above self-serve, he said: “Usually you would see kind of the return period would be, I would say twelve to twenty four months for this kind of business. We’re way below these numbers.” The 12-to-24-month range is his industry benchmark, not a Logz.io figure. Pressed on whether Logz.io earned the cost back inside the first year, he said it depended on the customer and the cohort, and that “it can be first year”. The words that follow on the recording, “definitely by the second”, cannot be cleanly assigned to either speaker, so this piece gives Logz.io no exact payback period.

The go-to-market team was small for a 70-person company. “Marketing is a pretty big team, like relatively, I would say probably eight or nine. Sales team is about 10,” Levy said. A minute later Nathan read that back as eight salespeople and seven marketing people, and Levy answered “Yes, something like that”; his first, unprompted answer is the one to keep. Most of the company was R&D and product, with R&D in Tel Aviv and most go-to-market work in a growing Boston office, where Levy was speaking from. For comparison, see the CAC benchmarks other founders have given on the show.

Paid search was a minor line. “A few thousand dollars a month, it’s really small,” Levy said, and when Nathan suggested $5,000 he widened it to “something maybe 5 to 15, depending on the month”. Events were the bigger bet: “Especially this year, we’re massively investing in events,” through a team of community evangelists who spoke at conferences. “It’s very hard to measure, but this is one investment.” For sponsorships and events in 2017 he expected to spend “Hundreds of thousands of dollars”, and agreed with Nathan that it would stay under $1 million. The two are separate budgets and he gave no total.

Gross margin and the Amazon bill

Hosting other companies’ log data is expensive, and Levy did not pretend otherwise. Asked whether gross margin sat in the mid-80s like other SaaS companies, he said it was “about that, maybe a bit lower,” and that Logz.io would be “around that number, I hope next year.” Nathan’s later “call it 80% gross margin”, repeated in his recap, is his own shorthand; Levy never said 80. The pressure was the cloud bill: “We have Amazon bill that go to the millions.” Nathan put that at $1 million to $5 million a year paid to Amazon for hosting, and Levy answered “Absolutely.”

Cutting it was not the priority. He described the choice a management or board meeting faces with two spare engineers, a feature that brings in customers or work that reduces cost, and said it “usually goes to not reduce the cost, but focus on growth and focus on expansion.” A company acquiring customers this cheaply could afford to leave some margin on the table, and in 2017 Logz.io chose to.

The funding, then and since

Levy said Logz.io could have stayed small. “We raised money, but we could have built a lifestyle business out of this company very easily because we had traction day zero. We made a decision we want to build something big.” The traction began with five design partners, “five brave companies who said they’re gonna work with us”, who did not pay (“No, we didn’t charge them money.”), and a product opened to sign-ups before the team thought it was good enough. His advice from that: “open it up, people will understand, you’ll iterate fast, we just jumped into it.”

On the recording he put the total at “$24,000,000 in these two and a half years”, adding: “The last round was in October. We raised the $15,600,000”. When Nathan asked whether that was October 2016, he said yes. The company’s own announcements fill in the rest. Its first round, $8 million, was announced with the product launch on October 5, 2015. The second was announced on November 15, 2016 as a $16 million Series B. $8 million plus Levy’s $15.6 million is $23.6 million, which rounds to his $24 million; at the announced $16 million it is exactly $24 million.

Amounts and lead investors from each round’s Logz.io announcement. The 2020 announcement gives no round letter; Series E is Calcalist’s label. The five rounds total $121.6 million with the 2016 round at Levy’s $15.6 million, or $122 million at the announced $16 million; the company’s November 2020 announcement put the total at “more than $120 million”. Its newsroom lists no round after that.

Since the interview

What Logz.io has published since 2017

Logz.io is privately held, and it still does not publish revenue. Globes noted in May 2019 that “The company does not publish its financial results.” What the company has put out are growth multiples and customer counts, each dated:

• Nov 2017 With the Series C, “more than tripling revenue YoY”, a customer base that had “roughly tripled YoY to more than 400”, and 100 employees, 25 of them in Boston.
• Feb 2019 Growth in 2018 “exceeded targets”, with 270 new customers and a team of over 150 employees.
• May 2019 With the Series D, “more than doubling their business in 2018” and more than 700 customers.
• Nov 2020 Over 800 customers. Levy told Calcalist the last two quarters had been the company’s best ever for adding new clients.
• Mar 2023 Co-founder Asaf Yigal, named alongside Levy in the 2015 launch announcement, became chief technology officer.
• Jun 2025 “over 1,200 enterprise customers”.
• Apr 2026 Launch of OrionIQ, “a new agentic observability platform”, announced by Levy as CEO.

The 400 customers of November 2017 sit comfortably with the “few hundreds” of paying customers Levy would not count precisely five months earlier. None of these announcements gives a revenue base to multiply from, so they cannot be turned back into a dollar figure for 2017. The product has moved as well: the ELK log service of the interview had become, by November 2020, what the company called a “unified, open source observability platform for log, metrics and tracing analytics”. Logz.io’s current figures and estimates are on its GetLatka profile.

The interview closed with Nathan’s rapid-fire questions. Levy’s book was Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things, the CEO he was studying was Jeff Bezos, his tool was Grammarly, and he slept six to seven hours a night. Asked what he wished he had known at 20, he left the business out of it entirely: “very few people actually figured it out, and it’s okay. Everyone is struggling. Take it easy. You’ll figure it out.”