New Relic pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
New Relic (newrelic.com) is a monitoring tool. Usage-based: 100 GB/month of data ingest free, then $0.40/GB, plus per-user fees for core ($49) and full platform users.. Free plan: Free: 100 GB/month ingest, 1 full platform user, unlimited basic users, 500 synthetic checks.
What New Relic costs
- 50k errors: $108/mo (Standard: first full platform user $10 + 2 core users x $49 (core users get Errors Inbox; basic users can't) = $108; 0.5 GB fits in the 100 GB free ingest. Free plan has 1 full user and no core users.)
- APM, 2 hosts: $208/mo (APM UI needs full platform users: Standard $10 first user + 2 x $99 = $208; 10 GB of traces fits in the 100 GB free ingest. No per-host fee.)
- 50 GB logs: free (Free plan: 50 GB fits in the 100 GB free ingest, default retention is longer than 14 days, and unlimited basic users can search/view logs = $0.)
Plan compared: Standard (pay-as-you-go). Every price is for the same small SaaS app (2 hosts, 10 million requests and spans, 50,000 errors and 50 GB of logs a month, 3 developers) on the cheapest self-serve plan that fully covers that job, billed monthly, including overage and per-user fees. Free plans count when they cover the whole scenario and allow commercial use.
New Relic price hikes
- New Relic ended free core users; they now cost $49/user · Dec 2025
The Free plan went from unlimited basic and core users to unlimited basic users only, and core users on Standard went from $0 to $49/user. Core users are the cheapest type with Errors Inbox access. - New Relic raised data ingest from $0.35 to $0.40 per GB · Oct 2025
Original data ingest beyond the 100 GB free tier rose from $0.35/GB to $0.40/GB (+14.3%); Data Plus from $0.55/GB to $0.60/GB. The 50k-errors reference scenario stays inside the free 100 GB, so it is unaffected. - New Relic raised data ingest from $0.30 to $0.35 per GB · Oct 2024
Data ingest beyond the 100 GB free allowance went from $0.30/GB to $0.35/GB (+16.7%); Data Plus from $0.50/GB to $0.55/GB. The reference scenario is unaffected.
Cheaper alternatives to New Relic
At 50,000 errors a month, New Relic costs $108/mo. 4 monitoring tools cost less:
- Better Stack: free (Free plan (errors); pay-as-you-go Logs & Traces, US region (apm, logs))
- Grafana Cloud: free (Free)
- Sentry: $29/mo (Team)
- Datadog: $30/mo (Error Tracking, month-to-month (first 50K errors))
New Relic alternatives: 4 cheaper monitoring tools compared, at every size.
Every change we logged
- Dec 2025 · Free tier cut: The Free plan went from unlimited basic and core users to unlimited basic users only, and core users on Standard went from $0 to $49/user. Core users are the cheapest type with Errors Inbox access.
- Oct 2025 · Price increase: Original data ingest beyond the 100 GB free tier rose from $0.35/GB to $0.40/GB (+14.3%); Data Plus from $0.55/GB to $0.60/GB. The 50k-errors reference scenario stays inside the free 100 GB, so it is unaffected.
- Oct 2024 · Price increase: Data ingest beyond the 100 GB free allowance went from $0.30/GB to $0.35/GB (+16.7%); Data Plus from $0.50/GB to $0.55/GB. The reference scenario is unaffected.
Sources
Pricing page: newrelic.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Current prices come from newrelic.com/pricing and user-type docs (Oct 2026). Change dates come from PricingSaaS snapshot diffs, which bracket them to a quarter. The ingest rises do not touch the 50k-errors reference (under the 100 GB free tier), and the 2025 $0 history point assumes free core users.