Grafana pricing guide details
Pricing Overview
Grafana operates on a freemium pricing model that splits into three deployment options: the open-source self-hosted edition (completely free), Grafana Cloud (free and paid tiers), and Grafana Enterprise (custom pricing for large organizations). Grafana Cloud is where most teams land, and its free tier is genuinely generous — 10,000 billable metric series, 50 GB each of logs, traces, and profiles, and 3 active users at no cost. Once you outgrow those limits, the Pro tier starts at $19 per month and charges $8 per active Grafana user plus usage-based rates for additional data ingestion. We think this structure works well for small-to-mid teams exploring observability, but costs can escalate quickly at scale if you are not careful about data volumes.
Plan Comparison
Grafana Cloud has a Free tier and a self-serve Pro tier. Pro starts at $19 per month plus usage, with volume discounts; the platform fee includes the listed product allowances, and usage above those allowances is pay-as-you-go.
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| Feature | Free tier included | Pro tier |
|---|---|---|
| Metrics | 10k active series per month; 14 days retention | 10k active series per month included; 13 months retention, then pay as you go |
| Logs, Traces, Profiles | 50 GB ingested per month each; 14 days retention | 50 GB ingested per month included; 30 days retention, then pay as you go |
| Kubernetes Monitoring | 2,232 host hours and 37,944 container hours per month | The same host-hour and container-hour allowances are included, then pay as you go |
| Application Observability | 2,232 host hours | 2,232 host hours included, then pay as you go |
| Database Observability | 2,232 database host hours; telemetry usage counts toward free-tier allowances | 2,232 database host hours included, then pay as you go; telemetry is billed separately |
| Frontend Observability | 50k sessions per month | 50k sessions per month included, then pay as you go |
| Grafana Assistant | 3 active AI users per month, with 40M tokens per user and 25M system-initiated tokens per month | 3 active AI users per month included; additional active AI users start at $20 each and additional tokens start at $2 per 1M |
Free includes community support. Pro adds 8x5 email support and offers longer retention for metrics and for logs, traces, profiles, and k6 performance tests. Individual product usage is priced by its applicable unit, so buyers should use Grafana's calculator to estimate their expected consumption and effective rate.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
Grafana Cloud's usage-based pricing means your bill scales with data volume, not just user count. Teams that ingest high-cardinality metrics or verbose logs can see costs spike unexpectedly. We recommend setting up Grafana's built-in cost management tools from day one to monitor your observability spend. Self-hosting Grafana avoids license fees entirely, but you absorb the infrastructure and maintenance burden — which is non-trivial for the full LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir). Enterprise licensing is negotiated privately, so budget accordingly.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
Grafana Cloud pricing is based on plan and usage rather than a published per-user or per-team rate, so the pricing page does not support reliable monthly cost estimates by team size.
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| Plan | Published pricing and buying guidance |
|---|---|
| Free | Always $0, with limited usage across Grafana Cloud services. For example, the metrics allowance is 10k active series per month and the logs allowance is 50 GB ingested per month. |
| Pro | Self-serve from $19 per month plus usage, with volume discounts. The $19 monthly platform fee includes 10k active metric series per month or 50 GB ingested per month for logs, after which usage is charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. |
| Enterprise | Starts at a $25,000 annual spend commitment. Grafana directs buyers to contact it for this full-service offering; buyers should confirm the committed usage, applicable unit pricing, retention, support, and deployment requirements. |
A buyer cannot derive a team-size total from the published starting price: the evidence does not disclose a per-user price or a fixed amount for teams of any size. Confirm the relevant services, expected telemetry volume, retention period, and whether usage will exceed the included allowances before estimating spend.
How Grafana Pricing Compares
Grafana occupies a unique position among observability platforms because it offers a fully open-source self-hosted option alongside its cloud product. This gives teams an escape hatch that proprietary competitors simply do not provide.
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| Tool | Pricing Model | Starting Price | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grafana Cloud | Freemium + Usage-Based | $0 (free tier) | Teams wanting open-source flexibility with managed hosting |
| New Relic | Usage-Based | $0 (free tier), then $0.40/GB beyond 100 GB/month | Full-stack observability with usage-based pricing |
| Datadog | Usage-Based | $0 (free tier), then $15/host/mo (billed annually) | Large enterprises needing broad integrations and APM |
| Observe | Usage-Based | $0.49/GB logs | Log-heavy workloads prioritizing cost-efficient ingestion |
Grafana Cloud's free tier is the most feature-complete among these competitors, bundling metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and synthetic monitoring. New Relic and Datadog both offer free tiers but gate advanced features behind higher-priced plans. Observe targets a narrower use case with aggressive log pricing. We believe Grafana delivers the best value for teams under 10 engineers who want a full observability stack without vendor lock-in, while larger organizations should carefully model their data volumes before committing to any platform.