Why You're Probably Paying 5x Too Much for SIEM

The $150,000 Invoice That Made Me Angry

Let me paint you a picture. It's Q4, budget planning season. Your CFO walks into your office with a Splunk invoice and the kind of expression usually reserved for finding out someone used the company card at a strip club.

"Can you explain," she says, placing the invoice on your desk like it's evidence in a murder trial, "why our SIEM costs $150,000 per year?"

You open your mouth to explain the value of security information and event management, threat detection, compliance requirements, and incident response capabilities. But before you can launch into your well-rehearsed justification, she continues:

"Because I just got off the phone with our board insurance broker, and our cyber insurance policy costs $45,000 annually. Our SIEM costs more than three times our actual insurance. Make it make sense."

Welcome to the wonderful world of enterprise security software pricing, where vendors have convinced us that protecting our data should cost more than the data itself is worth.

What SIEM Actually Does

Before we dive into the pricing insanity, let's establish what SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) actually does. Because if you're paying $150K+ annually, you should at least know what you're buying.

SIEM platforms perform four core functions:

1. Log Collection and Aggregation

Your network generates millions of log events daily—firewall logs, server logs, application logs, authentication logs, cloud service logs. SIEM collects all this data from disparate sources into a centralized platform for analysis.

2. Real-Time Monitoring and Alerting

The SIEM continuously analyzes incoming logs for suspicious patterns, known attack signatures, and anomalous behavior. When it detects something concerning, it alerts your security team immediately.

3. Correlation and Analysis

This is where SIEM earns its keep. It correlates events across different systems to identify complex attack patterns that wouldn't be obvious looking at individual logs.

4. Compliance and Reporting

For organizations subject to regulations (PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO 27001), SIEM provides audit trails, compliance reports, and evidence that you're monitoring your environment as required.

The Splunk Pricing Trap

Splunk is the 800-pound gorilla of the SIEM market. They're also the poster child for predatory software licensing that would make Oracle proud.

Pricing Model: Data Ingestion

Splunk charges based on how much data you ingest per day. Their licensing tiers typically look like this:

• 5 GB/day: $15,000 - $25,000/year
• 50 GB/day: $75,000 - $150,000/year
• 100 GB/day: $150,000 - $250,000/year
• 500 GB/day: $500,000 - $750,000/year
• 1 TB/day: $1M+/year

The Hidden Problems

Problem 1: Artificial Scarcity — You're not paying for storage or compute resources. You're paying for software that costs Splunk virtually nothing to scale.

Problem 2: Log Inflation — Modern environments generate exponentially more logs. That AWS migration you did? Congratulations, you just doubled your Splunk costs.

Problem 3: The Overage Trap — Exceed your daily ingestion limit, and Splunk either throttles your ingestion (meaning you miss critical security events) or charges massive overage fees.

Problem 4: Feature Gating — Want Enterprise Security? That's an add-on. Need SOAR capabilities? Another add-on. Want decent retention? More money.

Meet Wazuh: The Open Source Alternative

Now let me introduce you to Wazuh, the open-source SIEM/XDR platform that delivers enterprise-grade security monitoring without the enterprise-grade extortion.

What Is Wazuh?

Wazuh is a free, open-source security monitoring platform that provides:

• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
• Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
• Threat intelligence integration
• Intrusion detection (IDS)
• File integrity monitoring (FIM)
• Vulnerability detection
• Compliance reporting (PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, etc.)

It's not a "lite" version of commercial SIEM. It's a comprehensive platform used by thousands of organizations globally, including Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.

The Real Cost Breakdown

Let's compare the total cost of ownership for a 500-employee organization generating approximately 100 GB of log data daily:

Splunk Enterprise Security

5-Year Total: $1,631,000

• Year 1: $323,000 (license, add-ons, implementation)
• Years 2-5: $327,000/year (renewals, support, storage)

ThinSky Managed Wazuh

5-Year Total: $305,000

• Year 1: $65,000 (managed license, implementation, infrastructure)
• Years 2-5: $60,000/year

Migration Success Stories

Case Study 1: Healthcare Provider

• Previous Cost: $185,000/year (Splunk)
• New Cost: $42,000/year (ThinSky Managed Wazuh)
• Annual Savings: $143,000 (77% reduction)
• Implementation: 3 weeks, zero downtime

Case Study 2: Financial Services Firm

• Previous Cost: $347,000/year (Splunk + QRadar)
• New Cost: $68,000/year
• Annual Savings: $279,000 (80% reduction)

Stop Overpaying for SIEM

The SIEM market has been dominated by vendors exploiting enterprise customer fear and inertia. "Nobody gets fired for choosing Splunk" has protected inflated pricing for years.

But the landscape has changed. Open-source security tools have matured. Managed services have eliminated the expertise barrier. The performance, features, and reliability of platforms like Wazuh now match or exceed commercial alternatives.

There is no technical reason to pay $200,000-$500,000 annually for SIEM capabilities you can get for $48,000.

The only question is: how much longer will you keep paying the Splunk tax?