Honeycomb pricing guide details
Pricing last verified: April 2026. Plans and pricing may change — check the vendor site for current details.
Pricing Overview
Honeycomb offers Free, Pro, and Enterprise plans with event-volume and metrics-data-point allowances. The Free plan is free forever and includes up to 20M events and 100M metrics data points per month. Pro is for teams with a production application and is starting at $150 per month; it includes up to 750M events and 3.75B metrics data points per month, with monthly or annual subscriptions. The displayed Pro pricing also describes a starting allowance of 50M events and 250M time-series data points, with the stated plan maximums above.
Enterprise has variable event volume and metrics data points, with custom plans and volume discounts. Honeycomb says Enterprise plans start with a base allowance of 10 billion events per year and offers a tailored Enterprise quote through its team. Enterprise add-ons are available for frontend performance analysis, enterprise-grade alerting, and installation and enablement services.
Honeycomb also lists telemetry processing and fleet management starting at $0.10 / GB. The pricing page states that seats and querying are unlimited, but it does not provide a public Enterprise price or the detailed pricing mechanics for capacity beyond the displayed allowances. Buyers evaluating Enterprise should confirm the tailored quote, event capacity, any add-ons, and the applicable subscription terms.
Plan Comparison
| Plan | Price | Events/Month | Metrics Data Points/Month | Key features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free forever | Up to 20 million | Up to 100 million | 2 Triggers, Distributed Tracing, BubbleUp, OpenTelemetry Support, Honeycomb Metrics, Canvas AI Copilot, Honeycomb MCP, and Agent Timeline |
| Pro | Starting at $150 per month | Up to 750 million | Up to 3.75 billion | All Free features, 100 Triggers, 2 SLOs, SSO, and Honeycomb Support; monthly or annual subscription |
| Enterprise | Personalized quote | Variable | Variable | All Pro features, starting with 300 Triggers and 100 SLOs, plus Service Map, Query Data API, AWS PrivateLink, and support for Honeycomb Private Cloud |
The Free plan is positioned for testing and individual projects, while Pro is positioned for teams with a production application. Enterprise is for multi-team and large-scale applications; its plans start with a base allowance of 10 billion events per year, and Honeycomb invites buyers to request a tailored Enterprise quote. The supplied evidence does not disclose Enterprise pricing or its complete pricing terms, so buyers should confirm the required capacity, add-ons, and quote details with Honeycomb.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
Three cost drivers to watch:
- Event volume can spike unpredictably — a traffic surge, a retry storm, or a chatty new service can 10x your monthly events. Honeycomb's Telemetry Pipelines give you sampling and routing controls, but teams often don't configure them until after the first bill surprise.
- Span cardinality drives event count — each traced request generates multiple spans (parent + children). A single incoming HTTP request might create 20-50 spans across microservices. Default sampling is conservative, but teams that bump it to 100% for debugging can blow through their quota.
- LLM Observability counts toward event volume — prompts, completions, and token-count events all flow through the same billing dimension. High-throughput AI workloads can consume events quickly compared to traditional tracing.
Enterprise contracts often include negotiated volume discounts and reserved commitments, but require forecasting actual event volume accurately. Annual billing vs monthly is available on request. Honeycomb offers startup and non-profit discounts case-by-case.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
Honeycomb’s published pricing is based on plan and telemetry volume rather than engineering-team size, so the supplied evidence does not support monthly estimates by team size.
- Free: Free forever, with up to 20 million events and 100 million metrics data points per month.
- Pro: Starting at $150 per month, with up to 750 million events and 3.75 billion metrics data points per month. Honeycomb offers monthly or annual subscriptions.
- Enterprise: Variable event volume and metrics data points. Enterprise plans start with a base allowance of 10 billion events per year; Honeycomb offers personalized Enterprise quotes.
For purchasing, confirm the required event and metrics-data-point allowance, subscription term, and whether an Enterprise quote is needed for the expected volume or add-ons.
How Honeycomb Pricing Compares
Honeycomb's event-based billing is unusual — most competitors price per host or per ingestion GB:
- Datadog: Free tier plus paid plans starting at $0.75 per host per month (usage-based add-ons extra). Per-host billing is more predictable but often more expensive than Honeycomb at low telemetry volumes. Datadog also separates APM, logs, and errors into different SKUs, stacking costs.
- New Relic: Free tier plus paid plans starting at $19 per month per host. The most expensive entry point among the three; New Relic's "usage above free tier" pricing can work out cheaper than Honeycomb for teams with many small hosts and moderate telemetry.
- Observe: Starts at $0.49 per GB for logs with additional tiers at $0.00, $0.01, and $0.59. Observe and Honeycomb are architectural peers with different pricing shapes — volume-based vs event-based.
- Amazon CloudWatch: Free tier, then per-unit usage billing from $0.50 per GB of metric ingestion. CloudWatch handles infrastructure monitoring cheaply but has no high-cardinality event query equivalent to BubbleUp.
The honest summary: Honeycomb is cheapest for teams that fit within the Free tier and for high-cardinality ad-hoc investigation workflows. It's not the cheapest choice for infrastructure-monitoring-only workloads or for teams with predictable high-volume telemetry where per-host pricing amortizes cleanly.