Both Datadog and Grafana Cloud offer free tiers. Datadog provides "Free" while Grafana Cloud offers "Free".
A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time. A badge carrying a date states the record it rests on; a badge with no date rests on no record in force.
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. Pro costs $19 a month plus usage, includes 10k active series and 50 GB each of logs and traces, and bills usage above them. Pro keeps metrics for 13 months and logs, traces, profiles and k6 tests for 30 days.
Free and Trial accounts opened on or after 2026-04-20 can only send email alerts and reports to users in their own Grafana instance. Other email recipients are rejected. Cloud Alertmanager is unavailable; native Grafana Alertmanager is used. Webhooks and other alert integrations are unaffected. Upgrading lifts the email limit. Older free accounts are unaffected. (From status.grafana.com/incidents/xg2h8ht1d44n, read 2026-11-02.)
On 2026-04-20, Grafana Cloud restricted new Free and Trial accounts. Email alerts and reports can only go to users of their own Grafana instance; other recipients are rejected. Cloud Alertmanager is unavailable. Other alert integrations such as webhooks are unaffected. Accounts opened before April 20 are unaffected. Grafana stated this safeguarded the platform against unauthorized emails. Source ↗
reducedeffective 2026-04-07low impact
On 2026-04-07, Grafana Cloud introduced a hard limit of 1,000 dashboards and 1,000 folders per free tier stack. Stacks already above these limits kept their resources. Paid stacks received a soft limit that support could raise. Source ↗
Watch Both Vendors for Pricing Changes
We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.