OpenTelemetry pricing guide details
Pricing Overview
OpenTelemetry is 100% free and open source under the CNCF. There are no paid tiers, no per-seat licenses, and no usage fees for the framework itself. You can instrument your applications, deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector, and export traces, metrics, and logs without paying anything to the project.
The real cost of running OpenTelemetry comes from three areas: the observability backend you send data to, the infrastructure required to run Collectors at scale, and the engineering time to instrument and maintain your telemetry pipeline. A team sending data to Jaeger and Prometheus on self-hosted infrastructure pays only for compute and storage. A team routing data to Datadog or New Relic pays the vendor's per-host or per-GB rates. OpenTelemetry gives you the flexibility to choose.
Plan Comparison
Since OpenTelemetry is the instrumentation layer, your total observability cost depends on which backend receives the data. Here is how common backend options compare:
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| Backend Option | Type | Starting Cost | Traces | Metrics | Logs | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jaeger + Prometheus | Self-hosted OSS | $0 (infra only) | Yes | Yes | No (add Loki) | Teams with DevOps capacity |
| Grafana Cloud | Managed OSS | $0 free tier | 50 GB/mo free | 10K series free | 50 GB/mo free | Small teams, startups |
| Grafana Cloud Pro | Managed | $19/mo + usage | Included | Included | Included | Growing teams needing retention |
| New Relic | Commercial | $0 free tier | 100 GB/mo free | Included | Included | Teams wanting all-in-one |
| New Relic (paid) | Commercial | $10/mo first full platform user, then $99/user | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Mid-size engineering orgs |
| Datadog | Commercial | $15/mo per host | — | $0.05/metric | $0.10/GB | Enterprise with APM needs |
| Elastic Observability | Commercial | $99/mo | Yes | Yes | Yes | Security + observability combo |
| Observe | Commercial | $0.49/GB (logs) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Data lake approach |
The OpenTelemetry Collector acts as a vendor-neutral router. You can start with a free backend like Jaeger and migrate to a commercial platform later without changing your application code. This portability is the core value proposition.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
Collector infrastructure -- Running the OTel Collector requires compute resources. A single Collector instance handles moderate traffic on a 2-vCPU VM ($30-60/mo on AWS). High-throughput environments need multiple Collector instances behind a load balancer, adding infrastructure cost.
Engineering time -- Initial instrumentation takes 2-5 days per service for manual spans. Auto-instrumentation reduces this to hours but provides less granular data. Ongoing maintenance for SDK upgrades and pipeline tuning requires dedicated time.
Storage backends -- Self-hosted backends like Jaeger need persistent storage.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
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| Team Size | Services | Monthly Data Volume | Self-Hosted Cost | Managed Backend Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Startup (3-5 devs) | 5-10 | 10-50 GB | $50-150/mo | $0-29/mo (free tiers) |
| Mid-size (15-30 devs) | 20-50 | 100-500 GB | $300-800/mo | $500-2,000/mo |
| Enterprise (100+ devs) | 100+ | 1-10 TB | — | — |
Startup teams can run entirely on free tiers. Grafana Cloud's free tier covers 50 GB of traces and logs per month. New Relic offers 100 GB/mo free. For most startups, the cost is effectively $0 beyond existing cloud infrastructure.
Mid-size teams face a build-vs-buy decision. Self-hosting Jaeger + Prometheus + Grafana costs $300-800/mo in compute and storage but requires a dedicated engineer for maintenance. Managed backends like Grafana Cloud Pro or New Relic cost more in licensing but eliminate operational overhead.
Enterprise teams generating terabytes of telemetry see the largest cost differences. Self-hosted infrastructure costs less but requires a dedicated observability platform team of 2-3 engineers.
How OpenTelemetry Pricing Compares
Unlike vendor-specific instrumentation from Datadog, New Relic, or Elastic, OpenTelemetry separates the data collection layer from the analysis layer. This changes the cost equation fundamentally.
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| Factor | OpenTelemetry + Backend | Vendor-Specific (e.g., Datadog) |
|---|---|---|
| Instrumentation cost | $0 | $0 (bundled) |
| Vendor lock-in | None | High |
| Backend switching cost | Configuration change | Full re-instrumentation |
| Collector overhead | Self-managed | Managed by vendor |
| Per-host agent fee | $0 | $15-23/mo per host |
| Total cost (50 hosts) | — | — |
OpenTelemetry consistently saves 30-60% compared to fully commercial alternatives at scale because the instrumentation layer carries no per-host fee. The tradeoff is operational complexity -- you manage the Collector pipeline and choose your own backend. For teams with DevOps expertise, this tradeoff strongly favors OpenTelemetry. For teams that prefer a turnkey solution, pairing OpenTelemetry with a managed backend like Grafana Cloud or New Relic offers a middle ground between cost and convenience.