# Grafana Cloud Pricing Explained (2026): What Teams Pay

> Grafana Cloud pricing broken down: free tier limits, Pro rates for metrics, logs and traces, how active series and DPM are billed, and worked cost examples.

Source: https://last9.io/blog/grafana-cloud-pricing/

Grafana Cloud pricing has two parts: a $19 monthly platform fee on the Pro plan, plus usage billed per signal. Metrics cost $6.50 per 1,000 active series, logs and traces cost $0.05 per GB processed plus $0.40 per GB written, and extra dashboard users cost $8 each. The number that decides most bills is active series, and two settings multiply it: label cardinality and scrape interval.

This breakdown uses the rates published on Grafana's pricing page and billing documentation as of September 2026. The worked examples below show how those rates turn into a monthly bill, and where teams usually get surprised.

## What does the Grafana Cloud free tier include?

The free tier is a real, permanent plan, not a trial. Per Grafana's pricing page, each month it includes:

- **Metrics:** 10,000 active series, 14-day retention
- **Logs, traces and profiles:** 50 GB ingested each, 14-day retention
- **Visualization:** 3 active users
- **Frontend Observability:** 50,000 sessions
- **k6 performance testing:** 500 virtual user hours
- **Incident response (IRM):** 3 active users
- **Grafana Assistant (AI):** 3 active AI users

For a single service or a homelab, 10,000 series goes a long way. A small Kubernetes cluster with `node-exporter`, `kube-state-metrics` and a few instrumented apps can pass that limit within days, so treat the free tier as a way to evaluate the product, not a production budget.

## How much does Grafana Cloud Pro cost?

Grafana Cloud Pro starts at a $19 monthly platform fee. That fee includes the same allowances as the free tier (10,000 series, 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles, 3 users), and usage above those limits is billed pay-as-you-go.

| Signal                                   | Pro list price                                  | Included before billing                  | Default retention |
| ---------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------- | ----------------- |
| Metrics                                  | $6.50 per 1,000 active series                   | 10,000 series                            | 13 months         |
| Logs                                     | $0.05/GB processed + $0.40/GB written           | 50 GB                                    | 30 days           |
| Traces                                   | $0.05/GB processed + $0.40/GB written           | 50 GB                                    | 30 days           |
| Profiles                                 | $0.05/GB processed + $0.40/GB written           | 50 GB                                    | 30 days           |
| Extra retention (logs, traces, profiles) | $0.10/GB per additional 30 days                 | n/a                                      | n/a               |
| Visualization users                      | $8 per active user                              | 3 users                                  | n/a               |
| IRM (incident response) users            | $20 per active user                             | 3 users                                  | n/a               |
| Frontend Observability                   | $0.75 per 1,000 sessions                        | 50,000 sessions                          | n/a               |
| Application Observability                | $0.025 per host hour                            | 2,232 host hours                         | n/a               |
| Kubernetes Monitoring                    | $0.01 per host hour, $0.0007 per container hour | 2,232 host hours, 37,944 container hours | n/a               |
| Grafana Assistant                        | $20 per active AI user + $2 per 1M extra tokens | 3 AI users                               | n/a               |

_Source: Grafana Cloud pricing page and billing documentation, September 2026. List prices; Grafana applies automatic volume discounts on metrics at scale._

Two lines in that table cause most of the variance between teams: metrics, because active series grow with every label you add, and logs, because verbose applications write far more than anyone budgets for.

## How does Grafana Cloud bill metrics?

Grafana Cloud bills metrics on two measurements, active series and data points per minute (DPM), and charges whichever is higher. Grafana's documentation defines an active series as "a time series that has received new data points within the previous 20 minutes." Pro includes 1 DPM per active series, which is one sample every 60 seconds.

The billing formula from Grafana's docs works out to:

```text
billable_series = max(active_series, total_dpm / included_dpm)
```

Grafana then bills on the 95th percentile of that number across the month. The docs describe this as forgiving "roughly the top 36 hours in a 720 hour month," so a short spike during an incident does not set your whole month's price.

### Why does scrape interval matter so much?

Scrape interval changes DPM directly. At a 60-second interval, each series produces 1 data point per minute, the resolution Pro includes. At 15 seconds that rises to 4 per minute. Billing switches to total DPM once the average goes above 1, so the same set of series is billed as if you had four times as many.

Grafana's own worked example makes the point: 50,000 series scraped every 60 seconds bill as 50,000, while the same series scraped every 30 seconds generate 100,000 DPM and double the bill. Before moving to Grafana Cloud, check the `scrape_interval` in every Prometheus, Agent or Alloy config you run.

### How does cardinality drive the metrics bill?

The [Prometheus data model](https://prometheus.io/docs/concepts/data_model/) defines every time series by its metric name plus its labels, and changing any label value creates a new series. Adding one label with many possible values multiplies the series count, and the bill scales with it linearly.

A concrete example: a request-latency metric with 1,000 series today gains a `pod` label covering 50 pods. That becomes 50,000 series. At Pro list price, the extra 49,000 series add about $318 per month, for one metric. Our guide on [what high cardinality is and why it hurts](https://last9.io/guides/high-cardinality/what-is-high-cardinality/) covers how this compounds across a whole service.

## How does Grafana Cloud bill logs, traces and profiles?

Logs, traces and profiles share one billing model with three parts. Per Grafana's billing documentation:

- **Processed:** $0.05 per GB when Grafana Cloud receives and optimizes the data, charged before any Adaptive Telemetry filtering.
- **Written:** $0.40 per GB stored, after the free 50 GB allotment.
- **Retained:** 30 days on paid plans by default, then $0.10 per GB for each additional 30-day increment.

The processed charge is small but easy to miss: you pay it on everything you send, including data you later drop. The written charge is where filtering pays off, since only the data that survives filtering gets billed at $0.40 per GB.

Grafana also includes a query fair use policy for logs: each month you can query up to 100 times your written logs volume at no extra charge. That covers normal dashboard and alerting use for most teams.

## What does Grafana Cloud cost for a real team?

Here is a worked example at Pro list prices, for a mid-size team. The assumptions are stated so you can swap in your own numbers.

**Assumptions:** 150,000 active series scraped every 60 seconds, 300 GB of logs and 100 GB of traces written per month, default 30-day retention, and 10 people who use dashboards.

| Line item           | Calculation                        | Monthly cost |
| ------------------- | ---------------------------------- | ------------ |
| Platform fee        | Flat                               | $19          |
| Metrics             | (150,000 − 10,000) ÷ 1,000 × $6.50 | $910         |
| Logs processed      | 300 GB × $0.05                     | $15          |
| Logs written        | (300 − 50) GB × $0.40              | $100         |
| Traces processed    | 100 GB × $0.05                     | $5           |
| Traces written      | (100 − 50) GB × $0.40              | $20          |
| Visualization users | (10 − 3) × $8                      | $56          |
| **Total**           |                                    | **$1,125**   |

Now change one setting. If the same 150,000 series are scraped every 15 seconds, billable usage becomes 600,000 series. Metrics rise from $910 to $3,835, and the monthly total goes from $1,125 to about $4,050, with no change to what the team monitors.

Retention works the same way. Keeping the 300 GB of logs for 90 days instead of 30 adds two extra 30-day increments, roughly 300 × $0.10 × 2 = $60 per month once the extra data has built up.

## When does Grafana Cloud Enterprise make sense?

Grafana Cloud Enterprise starts at a $25,000 annual minimum commit, which works out to about $2,083 per month. In exchange you get custom pricing across all signals, metrics "as low as $3 / 1k series" according to Grafana's pricing page, and deployment options including Federal Cloud and Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), where Grafana runs the stack in a cloud account you own.

A practical rule: if Pro usage is steady above roughly $2,000 per month, or legal and procurement need contract terms, data residency or a dedicated account, it is worth getting an Enterprise quote. Below that, Pro's pay-as-you-go model is usually simpler.

## How do you reduce your Grafana Cloud bill?

Most savings come from the same four places, in roughly this order of impact.

**Set scrape intervals deliberately.** Moving from 15 seconds to 60 seconds on metrics that do not need second-level resolution cuts DPM by 4x. Keep shorter intervals only for the handful of metrics that drive fast alerts.

**Drop or aggregate high-cardinality labels.** Labels like `pod`, `container_id`, `user_id` or full URL paths are the usual culprits. Grafana's Adaptive Metrics feature recommends aggregations for unused labels, and Grafana Labs states it can reduce metrics volume by up to 80%. You can also drop labels yourself with `metric_relabel_configs` before data leaves your cluster.

**Filter logs before they are written.** Debug logs, health-check lines and duplicate access logs are cheap to drop and expensive to store. We cover how in [reducing log data costs without losing important signals](https://last9.io/blog/how-to-reduce-log-data-costs-without-losing-important-signals/).

**Match retention to how you query.** If nobody looks at logs older than two weeks, paying for 90 days is wasted spend. Keep long retention for audit logs only, where compliance requires it.

## Grafana Cloud vs self-hosted Grafana: which is cheaper?

The Grafana dashboard project and the LGTM backend stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) are open source under AGPLv3, so self-hosting has no license fee. The cost moves to infrastructure and people instead: object storage, compute for ingesters and queriers, upgrades, and someone on call when Mimir compaction falls behind at 2 a.m.

For small and mid-size teams, Grafana Cloud is usually cheaper once engineer time is counted. Self-hosting starts to pay off at large, stable volumes with a platform team that already runs stateful systems. Our [Prometheus and Grafana guide](https://last9.io/blog/prometheus-and-grafana/) covers what running the open-source pieces yourself involves.

## How does Last9 differ from a meter per signal?

Grafana Cloud meters each signal on its own: active series, GB of logs and traces, users, host hours, and AI users. Last9 is one licence, and the infrastructure runs on your own cloud bill at your negotiated rates. There is no meter per active series or per GB.

Labels like `customer_id` or `tenant` stay on the metric, with no charge per label or metric name. Last9 keeps high-cardinality labels with no sampling, allows 20M series per metric per day by default, and answers the same PromQL. Your Grafana dashboards and alerts import into Last9's embedded Grafana.

Our [Control Plane](https://last9.io/control-plane/) drops, remaps, redacts, forwards, and aggregates metrics, logs, and traces at ingest, and previews every rule against live data before you save it. The [Last9 vs Grafana comparison](https://last9.io/compare/grafana/) covers AI, deployment and APM side by side.

Grafana Cloud is a strong choice when your volumes are predictable and your team already knows the LGTM stack. Last9 is the better fit when cardinality keeps growing and you need cost control at ingestion instead of cleanup after the bill arrives. For a broader look at the options, see our roundup of [Grafana alternatives](https://last9.io/blog/best-grafana-alternatives-open-source-commercial/).

## Budget for series, not hosts

Grafana Cloud's pricing is transparent and published, which is more than many vendors offer. The problem is that the unit you pay for, active series, is set by engineering choices rather than by team size or host count. Two decisions made casually in a config file, a new label and a shorter scrape interval, can quadruple the metrics line without anyone noticing until the invoice.

Before committing, count your current active series with `prometheus_tsdb_head_series`, check the scrape interval on every job, and run the numbers from the tables above. If cardinality is what keeps breaking the budget, [Last9](https://last9.io/) handles high-cardinality metrics natively and lets you shape telemetry before it is stored.

## FAQ

### Is Grafana Cloud free?

Grafana Cloud has a free tier with 10,000 active metric series, 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles, 3 active visualization users and 14 days of retention per month. It is enough for a side project or a small service. Anything beyond those limits needs the Pro plan, which starts at a $19 monthly platform fee plus usage.

### How much does Grafana Cloud Pro cost per month?

Grafana Cloud Pro starts at $19 per month, which includes the free-tier allowances. Usage above that is billed per unit: $6.50 per 1,000 active metric series, $0.05 per GB processed plus $0.40 per GB written for logs, traces and profiles, and $8 per additional active visualization user. A mid-size team with 150,000 series and 400 GB of logs and traces pays roughly $1,100 per month at list rates.

### What counts as an active series in Grafana Cloud?

Grafana Cloud defines an active series as a time series that has received new data points within the previous 20 minutes. Every unique combination of metric name and label values is its own series, so adding a high-cardinality label such as a pod or user ID multiplies the number of active series and the bill with it.

### Does scrape interval affect Grafana Cloud metrics cost?

Yes. Grafana Cloud Pro includes 1 data point per minute (DPM) per active series, which matches a 60-second scrape interval. If your average DPM is higher, Grafana bills on total DPM instead of active series, so a 15-second scrape interval (4 DPM) can make the same metrics cost about four times as much.

### How does Grafana Cloud bill logs and traces?

Grafana Cloud bills logs, traces and profiles on three components: $0.05 per GB processed, $0.40 per GB written after the free 50 GB allotment, and $0.10 per GB for each additional 30-day retention increment beyond the default 30 days on paid plans. Queries up to 100 times the written log volume each month are included under a fair use policy.

### When does Grafana Cloud Enterprise make sense?

Grafana Cloud Enterprise starts at a $25,000 annual minimum commit and adds custom pricing, volume discounts (metrics as low as $3 per 1,000 series, per Grafana's pricing page) and deployment options such as Bring Your Own Cloud. It usually makes sense once Pro usage is steady above roughly $2,000 per month and procurement needs contract terms.