# Culpa vs Raindrop > Raindrop finds silent agent failures and helps fix them. Culpa prices every call and names the conversation behind the spend. Different questions. URL: https://getculpa.com/culpa-vs-raindrop Last reviewed: 2026-08-03 ## Answer Raindrop is agent observability that traces production runs, surfaces silent failures like loops and broken tools, and prices itself per event, where an event is one user message and the agent's reply. Culpa, a local-first LLM cost, margin, and forecast ledger, traces the money instead, and bills per tracked call rather than per conversation turn. ## Why this happens Both products watch agent runs, and they ask different questions of the same traffic. Raindrop asks whether the run was correct, so it looks for hallucinations, retries, broken tools and the failures that never raise an error. Culpa asks what the run cost and who it was for. The overlap is real, since a failing agent is often an expensive one, and it stops well short of substitution. A trace that shows you the retry loop doesn't tell you the loop cost $340 last month and belongs to one customer on a $99 plan. ## What this usually looks like - You can see a failing run and can't say what the failure cost. - Retries are visible per trace and never totalled into a monthly number. - Nobody can say which customer's agent runs are the expensive ones. - A reliability fix shipped and nobody priced what it saved. ## Common mistakes - Assuming a trace viewer answers a cost question. Why it hurts: Per-run cost is visible and the roll-up by feature, customer and month usually isn't. Do instead: Check whether your tool totals spend by customer, not just by run. - Fixing reliability without pricing the fix. Why it hurts: The cheapest failures get fixed first because they're the easiest to see. Do instead: Rank failures by measured cost as well as by frequency. The order usually changes. - Running both and reconciling neither against the invoice. Why it hurts: Two internally consistent tools can still both sit below the bill you actually pay. Do instead: Reconcile whatever you capture against the provider invoice for the same period. ## Self-check - Take last month's noisiest failing agent and put a dollar figure on it. - If that took more than a minute, the cost side is the gap. - Total your retry spend for the month and compare it against your total bill. - Rank your known failure modes by cost rather than by count. - Reconcile whatever you captured against the provider invoice for the same period. ## One retry loop, seen twice (illustrative) Raindrop's published capabilities, read from raindrop.ai on 2026-08-03, against what Culpa reports for the same incident. Both publish pricing and the units differ, so the plans are listed side by side rather than reduced to one comparison that would need an assumed traffic mix to mean anything. Raindrop: logs every production agent run with its messages, tool calls, retries and errors Raindrop: surfaces the silent failures, from hallucinations and loops to broken tools, into Slack Raindrop: runs an experiment against live traffic to confirm the regression is gone Culpa: names the single most expensive conversation and what it cost Raindrop plans: Startup $59 a month with a 14-day trial, Pro $399, Enterprise custom Raindrop's unit: one event is a user message plus the agent's reply, tool calls and sub-agents included Culpa: prices the same retries and rolls them up by feature, customer and month Culpa: forecasts the next month from your own history, as a median and a worst case Costed: 40,000 failed runs a month on Claude Haiku 4.5 at $1.00 per million input and $5.00 output Per attempt, 2,000 input and 300 output: (2 x $1.00) + (0.3 x $5.00) = $0.0020 + $0.0015 = $0.0035 Two wasted attempts per failure: 40,000 x 2 x $0.0035 = $280.00 a month of pure retry Raindrop tells you the loop happened and helps you kill it. Culpa tells you those wasted attempts cost $280 a month and which customer carried them. Teams running agents in production usually want both answers, and neither tool produces the other's. ## Cost figures Every figure carries its confidence and its source. No figure on this site is provider-reported. - $59 to $399 per month, Raindrop's published Startup and Pro plan prices, before per-event charges [provider-reported] Source: raindrop.ai, read 2026-08-03. Startup includes 1,000 events a month then $0.004 per event, Pro is $0.003 per event to 1M then $0.002. An event is defined there as a user message plus the agent's reply. - $280.00, modelled monthly cost of the wasted attempts in a three-try retry loop [calculated] Source: 40,000 failures x 2 wasted attempts x $0.0035 per attempt, using real Claude Haiku 4.5 rates from the price book, effective 2026-07-02. The failure volume and token counts are modelled. ## FAQ Q: Does Raindrop show cost? A: Its published plans list Tracing and User Tracking from the Startup tier, and developers quoting it on Raindrop's own site describe seeing token count and cost per run. The difference is the roll-up: attributing months of spend to a feature, a customer and a margin, and forecasting forward, is a different job from inspecting a trace. Q: Should I run both? A: Many agent teams should. Raindrop answers why a run failed and Culpa answers what your runs cost and who for. The two rankings, most broken and most expensive, are often not the same list. Q: Does Culpa need my prompts to attribute cost? A: No. Culpa runs on your own infrastructure, so your prompts and responses stay there, and metadata-only mode is a single toggle if you'd rather store no payloads at all. Culpa counts the calls to run your plan. ## Sources - Raindrop: https://www.raindrop.ai/ Run the free Cost Leak Scan: https://app.getculpa.com/scan?source=pseo&slug=culpa-vs-raindrop&cluster=competitor Machine-readable index of every guide: https://getculpa.com/api/pages Human-readable index of every guide: https://getculpa.com/guides Site overview: https://app.getculpa.com/llms.txt Privacy: Culpa runs on your infrastructure. Your prompts and responses never leave it. Culpa counts calls to run your plan, and it fails open, so if it ever breaks your app keeps running.