Pricing last verified: April 2026. Plans and pricing may change — check the vendor site for current details.
Pricing Overview
Grafana Loki is free and open source under the AGPL v3 license for self-hosting. There's no license cost for the software itself — your cost is operational: running the multi-component Loki stack (distributor, ingester, querier, query-frontend, compactor, ruler) plus object storage for logs. For teams that want Loki's model without the operational overhead, Grafana Cloud provides managed Loki with a free tier plus vendor-quoted enterprise pricing, and Grafana Enterprise Logs is the self-hosted commercial edition with enterprise support.
The dual model is Loki's defining pricing advantage: you can run it entirely free at the license level if you have Kubernetes expertise, or pay Grafana Labs for a managed experience. Most organizations start with self-hosted Loki for cost savings, then graduate to Grafana Cloud or Enterprise Logs when operational complexity outgrows their in-house capacity. The operational cost of self-hosting typically runs $200-$2,000/month in infrastructure plus 0.5-2x of a platform engineer's time, depending on scale.
Plan Comparison
| Tier | Price | What's included |
|---|---|---|
| Loki OSS | Free (AGPL v3) | Full feature set; unlimited self-hosted scale; community support via Grafana Labs Slack and GitHub |
| Grafana Cloud (Free) | $0 | Managed Loki plus Grafana; ~50 GB logs/month included depending on plan |
| Grafana Cloud (Pro) | Usage-based | Higher volumes, longer retention, SLA-backed support; vendor-quoted |
| Grafana Enterprise Logs | Custom | Self-hosted commercial edition; SSO SAML, audit logs, vendor support; contact for pricing |
Loki OSS includes every feature the commercial editions have — multi-tenancy, LogQL, object-storage backends, and the full scalable architecture. What you lose is vendor support and some enterprise-specific features (role-based access beyond what Grafana provides, compliance certifications, SLA-backed incident response).
Grafana Cloud is the managed path. The free tier is genuinely useful for evaluation and small teams — roughly 50 GB of logs per month on most plan structures. Paid tiers scale with ingestion volume and retention. Grafana Enterprise Logs is aimed at organizations needing on-prem commercial software, typically with dedicated deployment support.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
Three cost drivers hit teams running self-hosted Loki:
- Object storage costs are the dominant variable expense — logs land in S3, GCS, or Azure Blob, and long retention stacks up. For heavy workloads (100+ GB/day ingestion with 90-day retention), storage can exceed $500/month.
- Cardinality explosions can break Loki operationally — if a developer adds a high-cardinality label (user ID, request ID) as a Loki label, the index grows unmanageably and query performance degrades. Mitigate with disciplined label design and the ingest-time validation rules Loki supports.
- Kubernetes operational cost is real — the multi-component architecture means 6+ Pods running continuously, plus cache tiers, plus ruler components for alerts. For teams without platform engineering depth, this operational cost often exceeds the equivalent cost of Grafana Cloud's managed tier.
Grafana Cloud annual billing offers meaningful discounts over monthly. Grafana Enterprise Logs contracts typically include deployment support and training.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
These are rough monthly estimates for typical usage patterns:
- Small team (5 engineers, small Kubernetes cluster): Self-hosted $50-$150/month object storage plus 10-25% engineer time. Grafana Cloud Free tier may suffice for evaluation.
- Mid-size team (20 engineers, production workloads): Self-hosted $300-$1,000/month infrastructure plus 0.5x engineer time. Grafana Cloud paid tier usually $200-$800/month for equivalent volumes.
- Large engineering org (100+ engineers, verbose logging): Self-hosted $1,500-$8,000/month infrastructure plus 1-2x platform-engineer time. Grafana Cloud at this volume typically requires an Enterprise contract.
- Multi-tenant SaaS vendors: Self-hosted is often the only option for tenant-isolated log storage at reasonable cost; budget platform-engineering team dedicated to running the stack.
A practical rule: self-host when you have Kubernetes expertise and ingestion exceeds 50 GB/day. Use Grafana Cloud when you want Loki's model without the operational burden. Use Grafana Enterprise Logs when you need self-hosted with vendor support — typically above 500 GB/day ingestion at an organization with existing Grafana Labs commercial relationships.
How Grafana Loki Pricing Compares
Loki's pricing model is unusual in log management — most commercial tools charge per GB ingested plus retention fees:
- Elasticsearch: Self-hosted free but operationally expensive; commercial Elastic Cloud starts around $95/month per deployment tier. For equivalent log volumes, Elasticsearch typically costs 5-10x more than Loki at scale.
- Splunk: Splunk Community Edition free (self-hosted, single-user); Splunk Enterprise is custom pricing, historically among the most expensive in observability. Splunk wins on query speed and SIEM features but costs meaningfully more.
- Datadog: Datadog Logs at $0.10-$0.30 per GB ingested plus per-host fees. Significantly more expensive than self-hosted Loki but much easier to operate.
- SigNoz: Self-hosted free like Loki; SigNoz Cloud at $0.30 per GB ingested covers logs, metrics, and traces together. Comparable cost shape to Loki plus its LGTM companions.
- Amazon CloudWatch: Pay-as-you-go from $0.01 to $5,120/month. CloudWatch Logs works well for AWS-native workloads but lacks Loki's Kubernetes-native ergonomics.
The honest summary: Loki is the cheapest competent log aggregation tool in 2026 if you have Kubernetes expertise. For teams lacking that expertise, Grafana Cloud's managed Loki or SigNoz Cloud are the middle-ground options that retain Loki's architecture without requiring you to run it.