Favourite affordable log analysis platform?

Would love to hear about people's favourite, affordable log analysis platform!

At my current company we use GCP Logging - it's cheap, but ad-hoc log analysis is very awkward. i.e. you can filter to logs easily, but doing "group by/count" type things is painful, not something you can easily do ad-hoc. You basically have to export the logs to BigQuery, or create metrics from the logs (which helps going-forwards, but isn't good for analyzing past logs where you lack existing metrics). Overall, doesn't really fit our needs for flexible, ad-hoc log analysis.

At my past company, we used Sumo Logic. It was amazing - they have their own query language that's similar to SQL, with incredible text processing capabilities, so good at ad-hoc log analysis. However ... it's VERY expensive. My current company is a smaller startup, with a lot of logs, and it's simply not in our price range.

Would love to find something similar to Sumo Logic, but much cheaper.