Grafana Cloud pricing and usage describes how Grafana Labs bills for Grafana Cloud, its hosted service for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, dashboards, incident response, testing and related observability products. In Grafana Labs’ words, “You pay for the telemetry you send, the products you turn on, and the people who use them”, and there is “no single meter across the platform”.[2] Each product bills on its own unit. Each plan includes a base amount of usage per product, and usage beyond it is billed.[2]
Paid Grafana Cloud use is governed by the Master Services Agreement (MSA) and any Order Form. The MSA licence is for “Customer’s own internal business purposes”.[13] AI features are also subject to Supplemental Terms, under which Grafana Labs “will not use Customer Data to train models”.[15]
Editions
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Grafana Cloud Free | “Always $0” | All services with usage limits; 14 days retention; community support[1] |
| Grafana Cloud Pro | “From $19 / month + usage” | Free-tier allowances, then pay as you go; 13 months metrics retention, 30 days for logs, traces, profiles and k6; 8x5 email support[1] |
| Grafana Cloud Enterprise | “Starts at $25,000 / year spend commit” | Premium support, custom retention, deployment in public cloud, federal cloud or bring your own cloud[1] |
Free accounts are limited to one stack and cannot create or delete individual services. Paid month-to-month accounts can create up to three stacks by default. Contracted accounts follow their agreed terms.[10] New accounts get a 14-day unlimited trial. “Trial usage is never billed”, and the account then moves to the Free plan.[11] Catalog proof: Free accounts get one stack and paid month-to-month accounts up to three; Grafana Cloud trial usage is never billed.
Metrics
| Product | Unit | Free and Pro allowance per month | Pro list price (from) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metrics | Billable series | 10k active series | USD 6.50 per 1k series |
| Logs | GB processed, GB written, GB retained | 50 GB | USD 0.050 process, 0.400 write, 0.100 retain per GB |
| Traces, Profiles | Same GB dimensions | 50 GB each | USD 0.05, 0.40, 0.10 per GB |
| Visualization | Monthly active user (Grafana Cloud) | 3 active users | USD 8 per active user; USD 55 with Enterprise plugins |
| IRM | Active IRM user | 3 | USD 20 per active IRM user |
| Application Observability | Host hour | 2,232 host hours | USD 0.025 per host hour |
| Kubernetes Monitoring | Host hour, Container hour | 2,232 host hours, 37,944 container hours | USD 0.01 per host hour, 0.0007 per container hour |
| Database Observability | Host hour | 2,232 host hours | USD 0.07 per host hour |
| Frontend Observability | Frontend Observability session | 50k sessions | USD 0.75 per 1k sessions |
| Synthetics | Synthetic test execution | 100k API, 10k browser | USD 5 per 10k API, USD 50 per 10k browser |
| Performance Testing (k6) | Virtual user hour (VUH) | 500 VUH | USD 0.15 per VUH |
| Grafana Assistant | Active AI user | 3 active AI users | USD 20 per active AI user |
All figures are from the pricing page.[1] The documentation lists the same units of measure.[2] Catalog SKUs: Grafana Cloud Pro platform fee, Grafana Cloud Metrics (Pro), Grafana Cloud Logs (Pro), Grafana Cloud Visualization (Pro), Grafana Cloud IRM (Pro), Grafana Cloud k6 Performance Testing (Pro).
Counting / floors
Metrics. Billing uses two components, active series and data points per minute (DPM), “Both are measured at the 95th percentile over the billing period”, and the customer is “billed on whichever is higher”.[3] An active series is one that “has received new data points within the previous 20 minutes”.[3] Pro includes 1 DPM per active series, which is a 60-second scrape interval. The Prometheus default of 15 seconds produces 4 DPM per series and raises the bill.[3] The invoice documentation gives the formula as usage = max(active_series, total_dpm/1). The 95th percentile forgives roughly the top 36 hours of each month, so a reduction late in the month does little for that month’s bill.[11] Catalog proof: Metrics usage is the higher of active series and DPM at the 95th percentile; A series is active if it received data in the previous 20 minutes; Pro includes 1 DPM per active series.
Logs, traces and profiles. Logs are billed on four dimensions. GB processed are measured “before any Adaptive Telemetry optimization”. GB written are measured after it, with a 50 GB free allotment. GB retained are charged beyond the minimum retention, and GB queried beyond a fair-use ratio.[4] Logs can be queried “up to 100 times your written logs volume each month at no extra charge”. Paid accounts have a minimum retention of 30 days, and each additional 30-day increment is charged per GB.[4] Traces are billed on data “processed, written, and retained”.[14] Catalog proof: Logs bill on GB processed, written, retained and queried above fair use; Paid log retention minimum is 30 days; longer retention is billed per 30-day increment.
Users. Visualization bills “the number of unique active users in a calendar month, counted once per month across every stack in your account”. Someone who never signs in during the month is not billed, and “Service accounts aren’t billable active users”.[5] If the optional Enterprise data source plugin is enabled, its cost “applies to all active users for the calendar month, not just the users who use that data source”.[5] Catalog proof: Grafana Cloud users are billed only if they sign in during the month, once across stacks; Enterprise data source plugin cost applies to all active users.
IRM. An active IRM user is anyone on an on-call schedule or escalation chain, or anyone who changes an alert group, sends or receives a page, or edits an incident in the month. “Being listed in a schedule or escalation chain makes a user active for the month even if they never respond to an alert.”[6] Catalog proof: Being on an IRM schedule makes a user billable.
Host hours. “A host hour is one host being active for one hour.” Monthly host hours are active hosts multiplied by hours active.[7] A host is an operating system instance for Application Observability, a Kubernetes node for Kubernetes Monitoring and a database instance for Database Observability. “A container isn’t a host under Application Observability”, and a Pod is not a host under Kubernetes Monitoring.[7] Telemetry from these products is billed in addition, at standard rates.[7] Catalog proof: Host hours meter active time, and containers or pods are not hosts.
Virtual user hours. k6 load tests are billed as (maximum VUs x execution minutes) / 60. Execution time is the actual run time rounded up to the minute, with a minimum of 1 VUH per test. Browser VUs are “billed at 10x the standard rate”.[8] New subscriptions use the Fractional VUH v2 model. It discounts high-VUH tests per tier and gives a 25% adjustment for locally executed tests that stream results to Grafana Cloud. Some older subscriptions use Fractional VUH v1 or Full VUH.[8] Catalog proof: VUH uses actual run time with a 1 VUH minimum and 10x for browser VUs.
Volume discounts and contracts
Volume discounts (2026-07-01). “As of July 1, 2026, every Grafana Cloud Pro customer on the latest plan earns volume discounts based on how much you consume.”[9] The discounts are automatic and calculated per product, and they use marginal tiers. They typically begin around USD 500 a month of spend per product. “Volume tiers reset each billing period”.[9] Grafana Labs’ worked example brings 500,000 metric series from USD 6.50 to an effective USD 5.77 per 1,000 series.[9] Discounts do not apply to AI tokens.[1] Catalog proof: Volume discounts apply automatically per product from 2026-07-01.
Committed contracts. On the Flexible Spend Commit contract type (also called Prepaid Spend Commit), the customer draws down its commitment “against any generally available products at the rates on the pricing page”, and new products bill against the same commitment without a contract amendment. On other contract types, or once the commitment is used up, non-committed usage is paid monthly.[2] Under the MSA, fees are non-cancelable and owed for the whole Subscription Term. Usage above Order Form quantities may be invoiced at list price “without benefit of any otherwise applicable discount”.[13] Catalog proof: MSA fees are non-cancelable and owed for the whole Subscription Term; Excess Usage is invoiced at list price without discount and may be audited.
Virtualization & partitioning
Grafana Cloud does not license processors or hosts as such. Where hosts matter, Grafana Labs bills for time and not for the peak count. “Short-lived and autoscaled hosts cost only the time they exist.”[7] Because host identification depends on collector configuration, “a misconfigured collector can both under-report and over-report your bill”.[7]
Cloud / BYOL
Grafana Cloud can be bought through AWS, Azure or Google Cloud marketplaces, with invoices then issued by the cloud provider.[11] Enterprise contracts can deploy in “Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, or Bring Your Own Cloud”.[1] The Grafana Cloud SLA targets “99.5% of requests succeed within a given monthly billing period” for generally available services. Service credits run from 10% to 100% of the affected service’s monthly cost and must be claimed by ticket within ten days.[12] Catalog proof: Grafana Cloud SLA targets 99.5% with service credits.
Programs
Grafana Cloud Free, Grafana Cloud 14-day trial, Grafana Cloud Pro, Grafana Cloud Enterprise, Flexible Spend Commit and Grafana Cloud volume discounts.
Out of scope
- Self-managed Grafana Enterprise, covered in Grafana Enterprise licensing.
- Token-level details of Grafana Assistant, Investigations and Agent Observability beyond the units listed above.[1]
- Negotiated Enterprise rates.