New Relic
Observability billed on two axes: gigabytes ingested and people watching.
- Development
- Analytics
- Security
- from $0.40/mo
New Relic is an observability platform covering application performance monitoring, infrastructure, logs, browser and mobile monitoring, and synthetics. It bills on data ingested plus the number of full platform users, which makes it unusually cheap to start and unusually easy to misforecast, since the two axes move independently.
New Relic: the short answer
Every line below is drawn from facts verified on 9 August 2026.
- What it is
- Observability billed on two axes: gigabytes ingested and people watching
- Best for
- Teams wanting a genuinely usable free observability tier
- Starts at
- Free with 100 GB/month ingest and one full platform user; then $0.40/GB
- Free option
- Free plan available, no trial
- Biggest strength
- Perpetual free tier with 100 GB/month and a full platform user
- Biggest drawback
- Pro full platform users are $349 each, or $418.80 monthly
- Closest alternative
- Datadog - Broader product surface and better integrations, priced per host
- True annual cost
- from $1188 a year at the cheapest paid tier
New Relic at a glance
| Best for | Teams wanting a genuinely usable free observability tier, Organisations with many viewers and few deep investigators, Applications where APM and tracing are the primary need |
|---|---|
| Category | Development, Analytics, Security |
| Starting price | Free with 100 GB/month ingest and one full platform user; then $0.40/GB |
| Free plan | Yes |
| Free trial | No trial offered |
| Pricing model | usage based |
| Company | New Relic, Inc. |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founders | Lew Cirne |
| Platforms | Web, iOS, Android |
| Public API | Yes |
| Browser extension | No |
| Mobile apps | iOS + Android |
| Self-hosting | No |
| Affiliate programme | No |
| Data source | Vendor pricing page and public records |
| Last checked | August 2026 |
New Relic pricing
Prices below were read from the vendor's own pricing page on 9 August 2026. Pricing model: usage based. No free trial is offered.
| Plan | Price | Billing | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | per month | Perpetual. 100 GB ingest/month, one full platform user, unlimited basic users |
| Standard | $99 | per month | per additional full platform user - First full platform user $10. Maximum 5. Core users $49 each |
| Pro | $349 | per month | per full platform user - Annual commitment. $418.80 on monthly pay as you go. Unlimited users |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Negotiated | Adds FedRAMP Moderate and HIPAA eligibility |
| Data ingest | $0.40 | per usage | Per GB beyond the free 100 GB. Data Plus is $0.60/GB. EU hosting adds $0.05/GB |
What New Relic actually costs over a year
A monthly price is not the same thing as a monthly contract. These are the plans above multiplied out to twelve months, per seat or unit where the plan is charged that way.
| Plan | Monthly | Over 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Standardper additional full platform user | $99 | $1188 |
| Proper full platform user | $349 | $4188 |
Which New Relic plan should you buy?
| Your situation | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You run one application and one engineer investigates issues | Free | Perpetually free with 100 GB of monthly ingest and one full platform user. Often enough indefinitely. |
| You have up to five engineers needing full access | Standard | First full platform user $10, additional ones $99, capped at five. That cap is a hard stop, not a suggestion. |
| You have six or more engineers needing full access | Pro | $349 per user on annual commitment, or $418.80 monthly. The jump from Standard is abrupt and typically triples the bill. |
| You need FedRAMP or HIPAA eligibility | Enterprise | Quote only, and a compliance purchase rather than a capability one. |
| You ingest a lot of data | Model both axes | $0.40 per GB beyond the free 100 GB, or $0.60 for Data Plus, with $0.05 more for EU hosting. Data and users move independently. |
| Everyone in your team needs full access | Consider Grafana Cloud instead | No per-user charges at all, which is the structural difference. |
Verdict by who you are
Small team monitoring one applicationYes
The most generous free tier in observability, and genuinely perpetual rather than a trial.
Organisation with many viewers and few investigatorsYes
Basic users are free and core users $49, so only real debuggers cost real money.
Engineering team where everyone debugsNo
Six full platform users on Pro is roughly $25,000 a year in seats before any data. Grafana Cloud charges nothing per user.
Team approaching six engineersCompare first
Plan the Standard-to-Pro step deliberately; it arrives as a cliff at the sixth seat.
Should you buy New Relic?
Buy New Relic if…
- Teams wanting a genuinely usable free observability tier
- Organisations with many viewers and few deep investigators
- Applications where APM and tracing are the primary need
Do not buy New Relic if…
- Teams where everyone needs full platform access
- Very high log volumes on a fixed budget
- Organisations wanting one simple per-host price
Key features
- Application performance monitoring with distributed tracing
- Infrastructure and Kubernetes monitoring
- Log management queryable alongside traces
- Browser and mobile real-user monitoring
- Synthetic checks from global locations
- Errors Inbox for grouping and triaging failures
- NRQL, a query language across all telemetry
- Three user tiers so viewers cost nothing
Integrations
- Kubernetes, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud
- Terraform and Ansible
- Slack and PagerDuty
- OpenTelemetry
- New Relic API and over 500 quickstart integrations
New Relic screenshots
Captured by us in August 2026 at 1440px, unedited. Interfaces change, so these show the product as it looked on the date we verified this profile. Vendors localise pricing by visitor region, so a pricing screenshot may display a different currency to the USD figures recorded above.
Our assessment
New Relic's free tier is the most generous in observability and not a gimmick: 100 GB of ingest a month and one full platform user, perpetually. For a small team monitoring a modest application, that can be the whole answer. The user model is also thoughtful, since basic users cost nothing and most people looking at a dashboard never need to debug. Where it turns expensive is Pro, where full platform users are $349 each on annual commitment and $418.80 monthly. Five engineers who all need real access is over $20,000 a year before a byte of data is counted. Model both axes, your gigabytes and your genuinely full users, because the interaction between them is where budgets fail.
What works in New Relic
- Perpetual free tier with 100 GB/month and a full platform user
- Basic and core user tiers keep viewer costs down
- NRQL queries across metrics, logs and traces together
- Usage-based billing rather than per-host licensing
What doesn't
- Pro full platform users are $349 each, or $418.80 monthly
- Standard caps you at 5 full platform users
- Two independent billing axes make forecasting hard
- Data Plus and EU hosting add per-gigabyte surcharges
EveryAny Decision Score
Scored by dimension rather than averaged into one number, because the trade-offs are the useful part. 3 of these 8 dimensions are calculated from verified facts by published formula; the rest are editorial judgement, labelled as such. How each score is calculated.
- Cost position0.7/10
derivedentry tier at $99 a month against a category median of $15 across 14 comparable tools
- Portability5/10
derivedpublic API
- Subscription flexibility6/10
derivedfree plan, usage based, monthly billing
- Feature depth8/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- Ease of learning6/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- Collaboration7/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- AI capability7/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
- Professional adoption8/10
editorialeditorial judgement, reviewed at last check
What leaving New Relic would cost
moderate lock-in
Calculated as 10 minus a portability score of 5, built from four signals (self-hosting, a public API, open-source licensing and a documented export path) . New Relic scores on: public API. Formula.
New Relic competitors and alternatives
| Alternative | Why you might pick it instead |
|---|---|
| Datadog | Broader product surface and better integrations, priced per host. |
| Grafana Cloud | Open-source foundation, cheaper at scale, more assembly required. |
| Better Stack | Far simpler and cheaper for uptime and log basics. |
Datadog
Development
Observability that sees everything, including your budget.
Grafana Cloud
Development
Managed hosting for the open-source observability stack you already know.
Two axes, and you must model both
New Relic bills on data ingested and provisioned full platform users. They move independently, which is why teams underestimate it.
Data. 100 GB a month is free, forever. Beyond that:
- Original data option: $0.40 per GB
- Data Plus, with longer retention and advanced governance: $0.60 per GB
- Storing data in the EU data centre: an extra $0.05 per GB per month
- Synthetics checks beyond your edition’s allowance: $0.005 per check
Users. Three types, and only the top one is expensive:
| User type | Cost |
|---|---|
| Basic | Free on all editions |
| Core | $49 per user |
| Full platform (Standard) | $10 first user, $99 each additional, maximum 5 |
| Full platform (Pro) | $349 per user annual, $418.80 monthly pay as you go |
That $349 figure is the one to plan around. A team of six engineers who all need full access is roughly $25,000 a year in seats alone, and the data bill sits on top.
The free tier is genuinely usable
Worth saying plainly, because free observability tiers are usually a demo. New Relic’s is perpetual and includes 100 GB of monthly ingest, one full platform user and unlimited basic users, with access to the full platform capabilities for that one user.
For a small team running one application, that is often enough indefinitely. You will hit the ceiling on users before data: the moment a second engineer needs to debug rather than look, you are on a paid edition.
Standard’s five-user cap is the trap
Standard looks cheap. The first full platform user is $10, additional ones $99, and core users $49. But Standard is limited to five full platform users, and there is no sixth seat at any price.
So the growth path is not gradual. You go from $99 per additional user on Standard to $349 per user on Pro, all at once, when your sixth engineer needs access. Anticipate that step rather than discovering it, because it typically triples the bill.
Against Datadog and Grafana
Datadog has a broader product surface and better integration coverage, prices largely per host, and is generally the more expensive but more complete choice. Grafana Cloud is cheaper at high volume and built on open-source components you could run yourself, at the cost of more assembly.
New Relic sits between them: one integrated platform, usage-based rather than host-based, with a free tier that beats both. Whether it stays cheaper depends entirely on how many of your engineers need to be full platform users, which is a question about your team rather than the software.
New Relic questions, answered
- Is New Relic worth it?
- New Relic's free tier is the most generous in observability and not a gimmick: 100 GB of ingest a month and one full platform user, perpetually.
- How much does New Relic cost?
- Free with 100 GB/month ingest and one full platform user; then $0.40/GB. The cheapest paid tier we recorded works out at $99 a month, or $1188 over a year. Verified against the vendor's pricing page.
- Does New Relic have a free plan or free trial?
- New Relic has a free plan. No free trial is offered.
- What is the best New Relic alternative?
- It depends on the job. Datadog: Broader product surface and better integrations, priced per host. Grafana Cloud: Open-source foundation, cheaper at scale, more assembly required. Better Stack: Far simpler and cheaper for uptime and log basics.
- Can I self-host New Relic?
- No. New Relic is a hosted service only, so your data lives on the vendor's infrastructure.
Provenance and freshness
When each fact was last checked
- Pricing ·
- Plans ·
- Free trial
- Features
- Platforms
- Integrations
- Affiliate programme
- Company details
What has changed
-
August 2026
- User tiers and data ingest rates verified, including the five-user cap on Standard
- Added plan picker and verdicts
Sources & verification
Facts on this page were read from the sources below on the dates shown. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, we record it as not disclosed rather than estimating it.
- New Relic pricing - checked 9 August 2026
Spotted something out of date? Email [email protected] and we will re-check it. Corrections are logged on the page.
