Which error tracking, application monitoring and observability services still have a genuinely free tier in 2026. 25+ compared — Datadog, Grafana Cloud, New Relic, Better Stack, Sentry, Checkly, SigNoz, HyperDX, Elastic — free data ingest, retention and APM limits, and what monitoring costs at 10/50/100/500 hosts.
Free Tiers for Error Tracking, Monitoring & Observability 2026
Published 2026-04-03 · Reviewed 2026-08-27, corrections outstanding · Data verified from our index of 1,547 developer tools · 25+ monitoring services compared
Quick verdict:Grafana Cloud offers the best overall free tier for monitoring — 10,000 metrics series, 50GB logs, 50GB traces, and 14-day retention with full dashboarding and alerting. New Relic has the most generous unified platform ingest at 100GB/month with full APM, but limits you to 1 full platform user. Axiom leads on raw ingest volume at 500GB/month free. Better Stack is the best combined uptime + logging starter. For self-hosted: SigNoz is the modern all-in-one alternative; Prometheus + Grafana is the most battle-tested.
The observability cost trap: Monitoring is the #1 developer spending complaint. Datadog bills can go from $0 to $10,000+/month because pricing compounds across per-host fees, separate product charges (APM, logs, synthetics are each billed independently), and cardinality penalties. At 100 hosts with APM and logs, Datadog costs ~$5,500/mo while Grafana Cloud Pro runs ~$300-800/mo. The worst trap: Datadog’s free tier retains metrics for only 1 day — you literally cannot investigate yesterday’s incident.
Free tier: 5 hosts, 1-day metric retention, 500MB logs (1-day retention), 2 alert monitors. The most feature-rich platform but the most restrictive free tier. The 1-day retention makes the free tier practically useless for anything beyond real-time dashboards — you can't investigate yesterday's incident or spot weekly trends. APM, Synthetics, and SIEM are all paid add-ons.
Free tier: 10,000 metric series (Prometheus), 50GB logs (Loki), 50GB traces (Tempo), 14-day retention, 3 users, unlimited dashboards, alerting included. By far the most generous free tier in full-stack observability. Built on open-source Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo — so your queries and dashboards are portable. 3-user limit is the main constraint for teams.
Free tier: 100GB/month data ingest across all telemetry types, 1 full platform user + unlimited basic users (read-only dashboards). 8-day metric retention in NRDB, 30-day log retention. Full APM, infrastructure, and browser monitoring included. The catch: the 1 full user limit means only one person can create dashboards, set up alerts, or query data — a bottleneck for any team larger than one.
Free tier: 500GB/month ingest with 30-day retention. Unlimited users. Supports logs, metrics, and traces. Modern query language (APL) with a fast columnar engine. The most generous raw ingest allowance on this list. Good for startups that generate a lot of telemetry data and need longer retention.
Free tier: 500MB/day logs (7-day retention), 5 hosts for infrastructure monitoring (30-min metric retention), basic alerting. Offers both logs and infrastructure in one platform. The 30-minute metric retention is extremely short — only useful for live monitoring.
Free tier: Unlimited (self-hosted, AGPL-licensed). Elasticsearch for search and analytics, Kibana for visualization, Elastic APM for application performance monitoring, Filebeat/Logstash for log ingestion. The most feature-complete open-source observability stack. Supports logs, metrics, traces, and APM in a single platform. Cloud (Elastic Cloud) has a 14-day free trial, then ~$95/mo for the cheapest tier. The self-hosted cost is pure infrastructure. Downside: resource-hungry — Elasticsearch needs significant RAM (16GB+ recommended for production).
Free tier: 1 host, 1-day data retention, full-stack observability including APM, logs, and infrastructure. Modern OpenTelemetry-native platform. The single host limit makes it suitable only for development or very small projects.
Free tier: 1GB log ingest, 3-day retention, 10 uptime monitors (3-min checks), status pages. Combines logging with uptime monitoring. Clean UI. The log retention is short but the combined logging + uptime monitoring makes it a good starter choice for teams that want uptime + logs in one platform without setup complexity.
Error Tracking & APM
Specialized tools for catching application errors, performance issues, and user-facing problems.
Free tier (Developer): 5,000 errors/month, 50 session replays, 5M spans/month, 5 GB logs, 1 user. 30 days retention — the 90-day lookback is the Team plan. Supports 30+ platforms. Source map support, breadcrumbs, and issue grouping included. The de facto standard for error tracking. Self-hosted option available for unlimited scale.
Free tier: 5,000 events/month, 30-day retention, 1 user. Error monitoring with automatic grouping, deploy tracking, and real-time alerts. Strong REST API and 40+ platform integrations. Deploy tracking links errors to specific releases. The 1-user limit and lower event count vs Sentry makes it a secondary choice for most teams.
Free tier: 7,500 events/month, 7-day retention, 1 project, 1 user. Error monitoring with stability scoring, release health tracking, and breadcrumbs. Particularly strong for mobile apps (iOS/Android). Performance monitoring included on free tier (basic). The single-project limit is the main constraint.
Free tier: 5 browser checks (Playwright-based), 10 API checks, 1-min check interval from 20+ global locations. Monitoring-as-code: define checks in JavaScript/TypeScript, version in git, deploy via CLI. Integrates with Vercel, GitHub Actions, and Terraform. The only free synthetic monitoring tool with full Playwright browser automation — test real user flows, not just pings.
Key takeaway: UptimeRobot dominates on monitor count (50 free). Checkly is the best choice for synthetic browser testing (Playwright-based, monitoring-as-code). Hyperping has the fastest simple check interval (1 min). Better Stack combines uptime with logging for a two-in-one free tier. For most small projects, UptimeRobot's 50 monitors at 5-min intervals is more than enough.
Incident Management
Tools for on-call scheduling, incident response, and status communication.
Free tier: 5 users, unlimited integrations, on-call scheduling, email/SMS/push notifications, escalation policies. The industry standard for on-call management. Free tier is genuinely usable for small teams. No phone call alerts on free tier (email + push only for escalations).
Free tier: 5 users, Slack-native incident management, on-call scheduling, post-mortems, status pages. Modern UX built around Slack workflows. Strong for teams already centered on Slack for communication.
Cron & Job Monitoring
Dead simple monitoring for scheduled tasks, cron jobs, and background workers — alert when a job doesn't check in on time.
Key takeaway: Healthchecks.io is the clear winner — 20 free checks, 3 team members, 20+ integrations, and BSD-licensed self-hosted option. Cronitor and Dead Man's Snitch are more limited but have slicker UIs.
Self-Hosted / Open Source
Zero vendor lock-in, unlimited scale, but you own the infrastructure and operations.
Prometheus + Grafana MOST MATURE
Cost: Free (infrastructure costs only). The industry-standard metrics pipeline. Prometheus scrapes and stores time-series metrics; Grafana visualizes them. Default 15-day retention (configurable). PromQL is the most widely supported query language in monitoring. Add Alertmanager for alerting. Operates at massive scale (millions of time series). Downside: no built-in log management — pair with Loki or ELK.
Cost: Free (infrastructure costs only). CNCF-graduated distributed tracing platform. OpenTelemetry native. Supports multiple storage backends (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Kafka). Essential for microservice architectures. Pair with Prometheus for metrics and Loki for logs to build a full observability stack.
Cost: Free self-hosted (open-source, Apache 2.0 or AGPL depending on features). Single binary with metrics, logs, and traces powered by ClickHouse and OpenTelemetry. The closest open-source equivalent to Datadog — single pane of glass with correlated metrics/logs/traces, APM dashboards, and alerting. OpenTelemetry-native (no vendor SDK). Cloud tier starts at $199/mo. Best for teams wanting a Datadog-like experience without Datadog pricing.
HyperDX
Cost: Free self-hosted (open-source, MIT). Unified platform for logs, metrics, traces, and session replays. Correlates frontend session replays with backend traces — unique capability among open-source tools. OpenTelemetry-native. Built on ClickHouse. Cloud free tier available (limited). Best for full-stack debugging where you need to see exactly what the user did and how the backend responded.
Cost: Free self-hosted (unlimited). Cloud free tier: 5 nodes, 14-day retention. Real-time infrastructure monitoring with zero-config auto-discovery of 800+ integrations. Per-second granularity out of the box. Extremely lightweight agent (~1% CPU). Best for real-time infrastructure visibility without complex setup.
The self-hosted trade-off: Self-hosted monitoring eliminates per-host and per-GB costs but introduces operational burden. You need to run, scale, and maintain the monitoring infrastructure itself — which is ironic when monitoring is supposed to tell you when things break. SigNoz is the easiest all-in-one to self-host (single Docker Compose). Prometheus + Grafana is the most battle-tested but requires assembling multiple components. Elastic is the most feature-complete but resource-hungry. If you're a small team, start with Grafana Cloud free tier and self-host only when you outgrow it.
The Observability Cost Trap
Monitoring is the #1 developer spending complaint. Here's what it actually costs when you outgrow the free tier — at 10, 50, 100, and 500 host scale.
Annual Cost by Scale (Infrastructure + APM + Logs)
Scale
Datadog
Grafana Cloud
New Relic
Better Stack
Self-Hosted (Prometheus/SigNoz)
10 hosts
~$3,720/yr ($31/host/mo)
$0 (free tier)
$0 (within 100GB)
~$348/yr ($29/mo)
$0 (infra only)
50 hosts + APM + logs
~$27,000/yr
~$600-2,400/yr
~$2,400-4,800/yr
~$3,000-6,000/yr
$600-1,800/yr (infra)
100 hosts full stack
~$66,000/yr
~$3,600-9,600/yr
~$6,000-12,000/yr
~$7,200-12,000/yr
$2,400-6,000/yr (infra)
500 hosts enterprise
~$330,000/yr
~$24,000-60,000/yr
~$36,000-72,000/yr
~$36,000-60,000/yr
$12,000-30,000/yr (infra)
100GB/day logs (any scale)
~$61,200/yr (ingest + index)
~$18,000/yr
~$21,600/yr
~$14,400/yr
$1,200-3,600/yr (storage)
Why Datadog costs explode: Datadog uses per-host pricing ($15-31/host/mo for Infrastructure, $31-40/host/mo for APM) that scales linearly. But the real trap is that every feature is a separate add-on: APM, Log Management, Synthetics, SIEM, Database Monitoring, and Continuous Profiler are each priced independently. At 50 hosts with APM + logs, you're paying for 3 separate products. At 500 hosts, that's $330K+/year — more than many companies spend on the infrastructure being monitored. Grafana Cloud, New Relic, and Better Stack include APM and logs in base pricing. Self-hosted eliminates per-host costs entirely.
The cardinality trap: Beyond per-host pricing, Datadog charges $0.05/custom metric for high-cardinality metrics. A single Kubernetes cluster with 200 pods can generate 50,000+ custom metrics = $2,500/mo in cardinality charges alone. New Relic and Grafana Cloud don't charge per-metric on their free tiers. If you use custom tags heavily, cardinality fees can exceed your base monitoring bill.
The 1-day retention trap: Datadog's free tier retains metrics for only 1 day. This means you literally cannot: look at last week's CPU trends, compare this Monday to last Monday, investigate an incident that happened yesterday afternoon, or do any capacity planning. Most serious monitoring requires at least 7-14 days of retention. Grafana Cloud offers 14 days free; New Relic offers 8 days for metrics and 30 days for logs; Axiom offers 30 days.
Best for Each Use Case
Recommendations by Use Case
Full-stack observability on a budget → Grafana Cloud
Most generous free tier across metrics + logs + traces. 10K series, 50GB logs, 50GB traces, 14-day retention. Open-source core means your dashboards and queries are portable.
Maximum free data ingest → New Relic
100GB/month across all telemetry types. Full APM, infrastructure, and browser monitoring. Trade-off: only 1 full platform user, so one person owns all configuration.
Simple uptime monitoring → UptimeRobot
50 monitors at 5-min intervals. Dead simple setup. Email + webhook alerts. Free status page. Handles HTTP, keyword, ping, and port checks.
Error tracking for small teams → Sentry
5K errors/month on Developer tier. 90-day retention. 30+ platform SDKs. Source maps, breadcrumbs, and session replay. Self-hosted option for unlimited scale.
Unlimited scale, zero per-host or per-GB costs, and full data ownership. Add Loki for logs. Requires infrastructure expertise. The CNCF-blessed observability stack.
Best for startups (cost + features) → Grafana Cloud or Axiom
Grafana Cloud gives metrics + logs + traces free with 14-day retention. Axiom gives 500GB/month ingest with 30-day retention. Both avoid per-host pricing traps. Start with one, migrate to self-hosted when you reach scale.
Best for serverless (Lambda/Edge) → New Relic or Axiom
Serverless functions generate bursty, high-volume telemetry that per-host pricing can't handle. New Relic's 100GB ingest with no host counting, or Axiom's 500GB with unlimited users, fit serverless architectures where "hosts" are ephemeral. Datadog charges per-function invocation for serverless — avoid.
Best for enterprise (compliance, SLA) → Datadog or New Relic
When compliance (SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP) and vendor SLAs matter more than cost, Datadog and New Relic lead. Datadog has the broadest feature set. New Relic has better cost predictability. Both offer enterprise support and dedicated infrastructure.
Best synthetic monitoring → Checkly
Playwright-based browser checks, monitoring-as-code in TypeScript, 20+ global locations, 1-min intervals. Test real user flows, not just endpoint pings. Version your monitoring in git alongside your application code.
Incident management starter → PagerDuty or incident.io
Both offer 5 free users with on-call scheduling. PagerDuty for traditional pager workflows; incident.io for Slack-native incident response.
Cron job monitoring → Healthchecks.io
20 free monitors with configurable grace periods. 20+ notification integrations. BSD-licensed self-hosted option. The de facto standard for dead man's switch monitoring.
Hidden Costs and Gotchas
Datadog's 1-day metric retention
The free tier retains metrics for just 24 hours. This makes it unsuitable for trend analysis, capacity planning, weekly comparisons, or investigating incidents from the day before. You'll be forced to upgrade to Pro ($15/host/mo) almost immediately for any serious use.
New Relic's 1 full user limit
Only 1 team member can create dashboards, configure alerts, or write NRQL queries. Everyone else gets basic (read-only) access. This creates a single point of failure — if that person leaves, you need to transfer full user access. At $99/user/mo for additional full users, adding a second costs more than some entire monitoring solutions.
Per-host pricing that scales linearly
Datadog ($15-31/host/mo) and Sematext charge per host. Auto-scaling infrastructure means your monitoring bill fluctuates with your cloud bill. A Black Friday traffic spike that scales you to 200 hosts also scales your Datadog bill to $6,000+/mo — and that's just infrastructure monitoring, before APM or logs.
Log indexing charges separate from ingest
Datadog charges for log ingestion ($0.10/GB) AND log indexing ($1.70/million events) separately. You can ingest logs for search without indexing, but queries are slower and you lose many features. At 100GB/day of logs, just ingest costs $300/mo — adding indexing can triple it.
Alert channel limitations
Many free tiers limit alert delivery to email only. No Slack, PagerDuty, or phone call alerts without upgrading. UptimeRobot supports webhooks on free, which is a workaround. Grafana Cloud includes all notification channels on free tier — another reason it leads.
Datadog custom metric cardinality charges
Custom metrics cost $0.05/metric/month. With Kubernetes labels, container IDs, and dynamic tags, a modest cluster can generate 50,000+ custom metrics without you noticing. That's $2,500/mo in surprise cardinality charges — often discovered only on the first bill. Use metric aggregation rules and allowlists to prevent runaway cardinality.
Better Stack's 3-day log retention
The free tier retains logs for only 3 days. For incident investigation that spans a week or more (common in production), you'll need to upgrade. The combined uptime + logging is convenient but the retention limit forces upgrades faster than standalone logging tools.
Self-hosted operational burden
Running Prometheus + Grafana + Loki at scale requires dedicated infrastructure: persistent storage, backup procedures, high-availability setup, and regular upgrades. The irony of self-hosted monitoring: when your monitoring infrastructure itself breaks, you have no monitoring to tell you. Budget 0.5-1 FTE for a production self-hosted monitoring stack above 50 hosts.
Data egress and API rate limits
Exporting data from monitoring platforms is often rate-limited or restricted on free tiers. New Relic limits NRQL query rate. Datadog's free API has lower rate limits. This makes it hard to migrate away or build custom integrations — classic vendor lock-in by design.
Pricing Change Timeline
Recent monitoring and observability pricing changes tracked in our index.
Date
Provider
Change
Impact
discovered Sep 9, 2026 · effective date unknown
SigNoz
The free tier is now described as 'Get Started - Free' and starts at $49/month including $49 of usage, rather than being a purely free OSS option. The startup program now offers $19/month for the first 12 months with $19 of telemetry usage. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Sep 9, 2026 · effective date unknown
Grafana
The free tier now includes 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces, 50GB profiles, 50k frontend sessions, and 500VUh of k6 testing for 3 users. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 7, 2026 · effective date unknown
Better Stack Logs
The free tier now offers 3 GB logs retained for 3 days, 3 GB traces retained for 3 days, 30 GB metrics, and 3 GB web events retained for 3 days. It also includes 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page, Slack & e-mail alerts, 100,000 exceptions per month, and 5,000 session replays. Source ↗
LOW
discovered Sep 5, 2026 · effective date unknown
Proton Pass
Retracted — this record was our error (2026-09-05). The free tier now has limits on vaults (0 vaults) and secure sharing (0 others). The free tier also includes password health alerts and dark web monitoring. Retracted 2026-09-05: Proton Pass's free tier was not reduced to 0 vaults. proton.me/pass/pricing, fetched 2026-09-05, renders that row as "Organize stored items in vaults 0 vaults 0 vaults undefined vaults (per user account) 0 vaults" and the next as "Securely share vaults 0 others 0 others undefined others (per user account)". Every plan column reads 0 or the literal string "undefined", including the paid Pass Plus, Unlimited and Family columns — so 0 is what an unresolved client-side counter renders, not a limit Proton publishes. The literal "undefined" in the same row is the proof. The same page's free column states "Unlimited logins, notes and credit cards" and "Unlimited devices" in prose that did render, which is what our stored description already carried. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 3, 2026 · effective date unknown
LastPass
The free tier now has dark web monitoring and is limited to 1 device type. Source ↗
LOW
discovered Sep 2, 2026 · effective date unknown
BetterStack
The free tier now includes 10 monitors & heartbeats, 1 status page, 100,000 exceptions per month, 5,000 session replays, 3 GB logs retained for 3 days, 30 GB metrics, and 3 GB web events retained for 3 days. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 2, 2026 · effective date unknown
StatusCake
The free tier now includes server monitoring (3 tests) and SMS credits, but the test intervals for uptime monitoring are 5 minutes, and the page speed monitor is limited to 1. The free tier also includes alerts through integrations. Source ↗
LOW
discovered Sep 2, 2026 · effective date unknown
Grafana Cloud
The free tier now includes access to all Grafana Cloud services with limited usage, 14-day retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, & k6 performance tests, and community support. The free tier includes 10k metric series, 50 GB logs, and 50 GB traces. A $19/month platform fee is now required for 10k active series, 50 GB ingested logs/traces, and 30 days retention. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Sep 2, 2026 · effective date unknown
Postman
The free tier now includes 50 AI credits and has limitations on API monitoring requests (1,000 requests/month). Team collaboration features are no longer removed and require a Team plan ($19/user/month). Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
Sematext
Retracted — this record was our error (2026-09-07). The free tier now has a 1-day retention instead of 7, and is priced per host. Retracted 2026-09-07: this record compared two different products on sematext.com/pricing. The stored terms describe the Logs Basic plan, and the page's Logs Basic card still reads "Retention 7 days" and "Daily Volume 500 MB/day" — both stored figures unchanged. The "Retention 1 day" and per-host price this record reports are the Infra Monitoring Basic card, a different product on the same page. The page's FAQ reads "Each Monitoring App is independent and each App can have a different plan, including the free plan." Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
Middleware.io
Retracted — this record was our error (2026-09-09). The free tier now offers a 14-day free trial with unlimited data ingestion, instead of a 'free forever' plan with specific limits. Previously 100 GB/month data, 1,000 RUM sessions/month, 20,000 synthetic checks/month, and 14-day data retention. Retracted 2026-09-09: middleware.io/pricing/, the page this record cites, opens its plan ladder with "Free Forever. $0. Free access to all features with monthly limits." and lists "Up to 100GB Data. Up to 1k RUM Sessions. Up to 20k Synthetic Checks. 10 Browser Test Runs. Unlimited Users." Those are the terms this record withheld, figure for figure. The sentence this record read - "We provide 14 days free trial with unlimited data ingestion" - is an answer about trial retention further down the same page, and it is still there today beside the free plan. The page did not change; the reading did. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
Tomorrow.io Weather API
The free tier now includes access to 60+ data layers, historical data, and various APIs (Weather Forecast, Historical Weather, Weather Maps, Weather Monitoring). Source ↗
HIGH
Data Source
How we track this data: the tables on this page were compiled by hand from vendor pricing pages. They do not come from the catalogue behind our search and MCP tools. Paid tier cost estimates use publicly available list prices as of 2026-04-03. Actual costs vary with usage, commitment discounts, and enterprise negotiations. Check data freshness.
A source check reads each cited page for that service's name and a price; the figures in the tables above are from our own records.
AppSignal — We read that on 2026-09-09 from appsignal.com/plans, and our check recorded: the page names AppSignal as "appsignal" and states "$279"
Better Stack Logs — We read that on 2026-09-07 from betterstack.com/logs/pricing, and our check recorded: the page writes "betterstack", the domain we cite Better Stack Logs from, and states "$0"
Healthchecks.io — We read that on 2026-09-07 from healthchecks.io/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Healthchecks.io as "healthchecks io" and states "$0"
Hyperping — We read that on 2026-09-10 from hyperping.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Hyperping as "hyperping" and states "$0"
incident.io — We read that on 2026-09-09 from incident.io/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names incident.io as "incident io" and states "$ 19"
Jaeger — the page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read
Middleware.io — We read that on 2026-09-10 from middleware.io/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Middleware.io as "middleware" and states "$0"
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 59 Monitoring services in our catalogue, each with the free tier terms and the date we last verified them. This page compares them on free tier limits, what each charges past them, and lock-in risk; the table above carries the figures side by side. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
Which monitoring free tier is most generous?
Free tier generosity varies by use case. Some providers offer more storage, others more compute or API calls. Our comparison table above shows exact limits side-by-side so you can evaluate based on what matters most for your workload.
How do monitoring free tiers compare on limits?
Each provider structures free tier limits differently — some cap storage, others cap requests or compute hours. Our comparison table provides exact numbers for each provider. Check the growth cost analysis section to understand what you'll pay when you exceed free tier limits.