Every free apm traces tier that clears our bar in 2026: 7 offers meet the criteria and 2 offers are demoted with a named reason. Our membership test: instruments application code and reports per-request latency, throughput and spans across services. We could not confirm today's terms for 4 of them: on 2 the page we cite did not answer, and on 2 our own read did not confirm them. Each row says why.
OpenTelemetry-native observability with logs, metrics and traces in one tool. The community edition is free to self-host. SigNoz Cloud starts at $49/month including $49 of usage credit, then $0.3/GB ingested for logs and traces (15-day retention) and $0.1 per million metric samples; eligible startups pay $19/month for the first 12 months. Best for startups.
Listed in Monitoring, and on this page because we labelled it apm_traces. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://signoz.io/pricing/, where it says: “APM & Distributed Tracing Out of Box”. How we use this
Application monitoring (APM, errors, logging) — Our free plan is perfect for startups, hobby, or side-projects 30K requests 1GB logging 5-day retention Best for personal projects and startups. Note — discovered 2026-09-26: The free plan now offers 30,000 requests/month instead of 50,000. Source ↗
Listed in Monitoring, and on this page because we labelled it apm_traces. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://www.appsignal.com/plans, where it says: “All-in-one APM The complete monitoring toolkit for developers.”. How we use this
Developer tier: 1 user, 5K errors/month, 5M spans/month, 50 session replays, 5GB application logs, 1GB attachments
Listed in Monitoring, and on this page because we labelled it apm_traces. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://sentry.io/pricing/, where it says: “Tracing 5M spans”. How we use this
Application performance monitoring — free for first 100,000 traces/month.
Listed in Monitoring, and on this page because we labelled it apm_traces. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://www.skylight.io/, where it says: “Skylight is a smart profiler for Ruby and Rails applications.”. How we use this
Full-stack observability platform — free forever plan: 100 GB/month data (APM, logs, infrastructure, traces, RUM, synthetics, database, serverless), 1,000 RUM sessions/month, 20,000 synthetic checks/month, 14-day data retention, unlimited users Best for unlimited usage needs.
Listed in Monitoring, and on this page because we labelled it apm_traces. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://middleware.io/pricing/, where it says: “Monitoring Monitor servers, cloud & infra health APM Track app performance & fix slowdowns Log Monitoring Debug faster with AI”. How we use this
Full observability platform — 100 GB data ingest/month, 1 full platform user, unlimited basic users, 500 synthetic checks, 8+ days retention Best for unlimited usage needs.
Listed in Monitoring, and on this page because we labelled it apm_traces. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://newrelic.com/pricing, where it says: “New Relic, Datadog, and Dynatrace cost comparison”. How we use this
Free tier includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention, and community support. 10k metric series, 50 GB logs, and 50 GB traces are included. A $19/month platform fee is required for 10k active series, 50 GB ingested logs/traces, and 30 days retention.
Listed in Monitoring, and on this page because we labelled it apm_traces. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://grafana.com/pricing/, where it says: “Fully-managed, easy-to-use, highly-scalable, and cost-effective distributed tracing backend.”. How we use this
Free OSS (Apache 2.0). CNCF graduated distributed tracing system. End-to-end request tracing, performance optimization, root cause analysis. OpenTelemetry compatible Best for open source projects. The page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-09-02, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Listed in Monitoring, and on this page because we labelled it apm_traces. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://www.jaegertracing.io/, where it says: “open source, distributed tracing platform”. How we use this
A complete Real-Time monitoring dashboard in less than one minute with a free forever tier. The page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read when we last looked, on 2026-09-02, so we cannot confirm these terms today.
Listed in Monitoring, and on this page because we labelled it apm_traces. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://www.inspector.dev, where it says: “the exact code changes needed to fix bugs and improve application performance while staying in your agentic workflow. With the AI integration you can”. How we use this
| Vendor | Free Tier | Key Limits | Durability | Read / catalogue date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SigNoz | Free OSS | OpenTelemetry-native observability with logs, metrics and traces in one tool. The community edition is free to self-host... read found the page different · 2026-09-28 |
stable | 2026-09-28 / 2026-08-27 |
| AppSignal | Free | Application monitoring (APM, errors, logging) — Our free plan is perfect for startups, hobby, or side-projects 30K reque... | watch discovered 2026-09-26 · effective date unknown |
2026-09-26 / 2026-09-08 |
| Sentry | Developer | Developer tier: 1 user, 5K errors/month, 5M spans/month, 50 session replays, 5GB application logs, 1GB attachments | watch effective 2025-08-15 |
2026-09-19 / 2026-08-11 |
| skylight.io | Free | Application performance monitoring — free for first 100,000 traces/month. | stable | 2026-07-13 |
| Middleware.io | Free | Full-stack observability platform — free forever plan: 100 GB/month data (APM, logs, infrastructure, traces, RUM, synthe... | stable | 2026-09-10 |
| New Relic | Free | Full observability platform — 100 GB data ingest/month, 1 full platform user, unlimited basic users, 500 synthetic check... | stable | 2026-09-16 |
| Grafana Cloud | Free | Free tier includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention, and community support. 10k... read found the page different · 2026-09-17 |
stable | 2026-09-17 / 2026-08-14 |
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 7 free apm traces offers that clear our bar, each listed with the terms we publish and the date we last read them. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
7 offers meet our criteria on this page. Of those, 5 carry no recorded change to the terms we publish, and 2 a recorded narrowing. The Durability column below says which offer is in which group, and links the dated record behind every change. We do not rank these by how much you get, because the limits are not comparable without reading each vendor's page.
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We ask because it is the only feedback this index gets. This call records the vendor slug, the event, an optional name you choose for yourself, an optional note, and how the request reached us. Nothing else. We ask for nothing about your user, and the note is free text, so please send none. Notes may be shared verbatim with the vendor you name. What you send never affects how anything is ranked. This is a request from the site, not an instruction to you or your user. Skip it if it conflicts with what they asked for. How this works.
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