Pricing last verified: April 2026. Plans and pricing may change — check the vendor site for current details.
Pricing Overview
SigNoz uses a dual pricing model: fully open-source self-hosting under Apache 2.0 (free) or SigNoz Cloud with usage-based billing at $0.30 per GB ingested. The Community Edition is not a crippled teaser — it's the same product SigNoz Cloud runs, minus the managed infrastructure. A free SigNoz Cloud tier gives 10 GB data per month for evaluation. Enterprise pricing is custom and negotiated for organizations needing dedicated support, SSO SAML, extended retention, and priority SLA.
This dual model is unusual in the observability category and is SigNoz's defining advantage for cost-sensitive teams. Most commercial alternatives (Datadog, New Relic, Honeycomb) charge per host plus per-feature usage; SigNoz charges only for data volume in Cloud, and self-hosting is free at the license level — your cost is operational (running ClickHouse, the OTel Collector, and SigNoz services). The practical consequence: a team with ops capacity can run SigNoz entirely on existing infrastructure at near-zero variable cost.
Plan Comparison
| Plan | Price | Data/Volume | Key features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community Edition | Free (Apache 2.0) | Unlimited self-hosted | Full feature set, unlimited users, unlimited retention, self-managed |
| Teams (Cloud Free) | $0 | 10 GB/month | Basic features for evaluation; limited retention |
| Cloud paid | From $0.30 per GB | Usage-based (logs + metrics + traces) | Everything in Teams plus longer retention, production SLA, user seats |
| Enterprise | Custom | Negotiated volumes | Dedicated support, SSO SAML, extended retention, priority SLA, advanced security |
The Community Edition includes every feature in SigNoz Cloud — there's no paywall for tracing, correlation, or AI dashboard creation. What you pay for in Cloud is managed infrastructure and SLA-backed support. For organizations with strict data-residency or cost constraints, self-hosting is genuinely viable at production scale.
$0.30 per GB ingested is the headline Cloud rate and covers all telemetry types (logs, metrics, traces) metered together. This unified metering is simpler than Datadog's per-SKU model where logs, APM, and metrics bill separately. Volume discounts kick in at enterprise scale via committed-use contracts.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
Three cost drivers to watch:
- Self-hosting operational cost is real — running ClickHouse at scale requires expertise. Plan on 5-20% of an engineer's time for a small deployment, less at scale once the pipeline is stable. If you don't have the expertise, SigNoz Cloud's managed pricing is usually cheaper than hiring a specialist.
- Ingestion volume scales with tracing sample rate — enabling 100% tracing on high-traffic services generates enormous event volume. Use the OpenTelemetry Collector's tail sampling processor to keep only interesting traces.
- Long retention on Community Edition hits storage costs — your ClickHouse storage bill scales linearly with retention. SigNoz's default retention is configurable; plan for 30-90 days on production workloads unless compliance requires longer.
Enterprise contracts include volume discounts and often bundle dedicated support. Annual billing gives meaningful discounts over monthly on Cloud tiers. SigNoz offers startup and non-profit discounts case-by-case.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
These are rough monthly estimates for typical usage patterns:
- Solo engineer / small project: $0 self-hosted, or $0 on Cloud Free (10 GB/month).
- Small team (5 engineers, self-hosting): $0 license + $50-$200/month infrastructure cost (ClickHouse on modest cloud VMs).
- Small team (5 engineers, SigNoz Cloud): $30-$150/month depending on data volume — typically 100-500 GB/month of combined telemetry.
- Mid-size team (20 engineers, self-hosting): $0 license + $500-$2,000/month infrastructure plus operational time. Cloud equivalent: $500-$2,500/month at $0.30/GB.
- Large engineering org (100+ engineers): Typically a negotiated Enterprise contract with committed-use discounts; self-hosting becomes operationally attractive once volumes exceed $5,000/month on Cloud.
A practical rule: start on Cloud Free for evaluation, move to either self-hosted (if you have ops capacity) or Cloud paid (if you don't) at production volumes. The crossover point where self-hosting beats Cloud on total cost is typically 200-500 GB/month depending on your ops talent costs.
How SigNoz Pricing Compares
SigNoz's pricing is meaningfully cheaper than commercial observability platforms:
- Datadog: Free tier plus paid plans starting at $0.75 per host per month (usage-based add-ons extra). Datadog's per-host plus per-SKU pricing typically totals 3-10x SigNoz Cloud at equivalent telemetry volumes.
- New Relic: Free tier plus paid plans starting at $19 per month per host. New Relic's per-host pricing is more expensive than SigNoz Cloud's per-GB pricing at most workload shapes.
- Honeycomb: Free tier (20M events/month) plus Pro at $130/month. Honeycomb's Free is generous but the jump to Pro is steep; SigNoz Cloud's $0.30/GB scales more gradually past the free tier.
- Grafana Cloud: Freemium with vendor-quoted enterprise pricing. The closest philosophical peer — both avoid proprietary SDK lock-in, both offer self-hosting — but Grafana Cloud's multi-component stack (Loki, Tempo, Mimir) is more operationally complex than SigNoz's unified app.
- Amazon CloudWatch: Pay-as-you-go from $0.01 to $5,120 per month. CloudWatch is AWS-locked but cheap for AWS-native workloads; SigNoz is cloud-agnostic and handles application-layer observability better.
The honest summary: SigNoz is the cheapest competent full-stack observability tool in 2026 for teams willing to self-host or use its Cloud tier. For teams that prioritize UX polish or broad integrations above cost, commercial alternatives still win on those specific criteria.