Title: Discussion 13 — The 10x Trace Volume Problem
Course: AIINFRA 301: Production RAG & LLMOps — Observability and Evaluation > Section: Week 13 — Observability at Scale: LangSmith, OpenLLMetry, and MLflow

💬 Discussion 13 — The 10x Trace Volume Problem (20 pts)

Imagine your team's RAG application is succeeding — usage is expected to grow 10x over the next year. Right now you're comfortably inside LangSmith's free Developer tier (5,000 base traces/month), but that growth will push you well past it. In a post of at least 200 words, answer: How would per-trace LangSmith pricing versus a self-hosted MLflow or OpenLLMetry setup change your total cost of ownership (TCO) calculation at 10x volume? Be specific — reference the Plus tier's per-seat cost plus per-1,000-trace overage, the Enterprise self-hosting requirement, and what self-hosting MLflow or OpenLLMetry actually costs you instead (infrastructure, storage, and the engineering time to run it). Take a position: at what point, if any, would you switch tools or architectures, and why? Then respond to at least two classmates, engaging directly with their TCO assumptions — do you agree with where they'd draw the switching line? Would your answer change if their team had (or lacked) in-house DevOps capacity?