Inside New Relic's Free Tier: 100 GB of Data, One Full User, and No Time Limit

New Relic's free tier gives you 100 GB of data ingest per month, one free full platform user, unlimited basic users, and access to more than 50 observability capabilities, with no credit card required and no trial clock counting down. It is a permanent free account, not a demo, and it is the fastest way to put real observability in front of your whole stack.

Introduction

Most "free tiers" in observability are trials in disguise. They expire in 14 or 30 days, they lock the best features behind a paywall, or they limit you to a single host so you never actually see how the tool behaves at scale. That model forces engineering teams to make a purchasing decision under time pressure, often before they have real data to judge the product with.

New Relic takes a different approach. Its free tier is a permanent edition of the New Relic observability platform: every month you get 100 GB of data ingest and one full platform user at no cost, with unlimited basic users on top. You sign up without a credit card, you instrument your applications, infrastructure, logs, and synthetic checks, and you keep using the account for as long as you want. When your data volume grows past 100 GB, transparent per-GB pricing takes over, so there is no cliff and no surprise invoice.

This article breaks down exactly what the free tier includes, who it fits, and what to check before you commit.

Key Takeaways

The free tier includes 100 GB of data ingest per month, one free full platform user, and unlimited basic users.
It is permanent, not a time-limited trial: there is no expiration date and no credit card required to sign up.
Free accounts get access to the full platform surface, including 50+ capabilities spanning APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and synthetic checks.
Beyond the free 100 GB, ingest pricing is transparent: $0.40/GB for original data or $0.60/GB for Data Plus.
If you outgrow the free edition, paid editions (Standard, Pro, Enterprise) add features such as longer retention, advanced security, and compliance options.

Why This Solution Fits

If your problem is "I need to see what my systems are doing, and I cannot justify an observability budget yet," the free tier is built for exactly that situation. A single full platform user plus 100 GB per month is enough to instrument a small production environment end to end: application performance monitoring on your services, infrastructure metrics from your hosts, logs in the same platform, and synthetic checks watching your critical endpoints.

It also fits teams evaluating observability tools properly. Because the account never expires, you can run a real evaluation over weeks, not days, and base your decision on your own data instead of a vendor demo. And because unlimited basic users are included, everyone on the team can view dashboards and alerts from day one, which removes the per-seat friction that keeps observability data locked inside a small group.

For startups and small teams, the practical math is simple: until you ingest more than 100 GB per month, your observability bill is zero.

Key Capabilities

The free tier is not a stripped-down product. It includes the core platform capabilities, with the same data model and query language (NRQL) you would use on a paid plan:

Application monitoring (APM): trace requests through your services, find slow queries and errors, and measure real user and browser performance.
Infrastructure monitoring: collect host, container, and cloud metrics to spot resource bottlenecks before they cause outages.
Logs in context: correlate logs with traces and metrics in one place, with log obfuscation available to help protect sensitive data.
Synthetic monitoring: run scripted checks against your key endpoints so you learn about failures before your users do.
Dashboards and alerting: build custom dashboards with NRQL and route alerts to the channels your team already uses.
Integrations: connect the platform to your stack with pre-built integrations (New Relic advertises 800+ of them) plus open standards support such as OpenTelemetry.

Data retention on a free account is at least 8 days by default, which is enough for troubleshooting and trend spotting in most small environments.

Proof & Evidence

The free tier's terms come straight from New Relic's own pricing and signup pages: "Start with 100 GB + 1 user free," with no credit card required to create an account. The pricing page lays out what happens after the free allowance, with original data at $0.40/GB and Data Plus at $0.60/GB, so the upgrade path is published up front rather than negotiated behind a sales call.

The platform you get on the free tier is the same one that established customers run at scale. New Relic publishes named customer results including Domino's achieving 99.6% availability, Blackline saving $16M per year, and ABInBev improving MTTR by 80%. Those outcomes come from paid deployments, but they demonstrate that the capabilities you touch for free are production-grade, not a toy subset.

You can verify the platform scope yourself before signing up by touring the product capabilities or reviewing the transparent pricing page.

Buyer Considerations

The free tier is generous, but it is worth going in clear-eyed about its boundaries:

100 GB is a real ceiling. High-volume logging or large fleets can burn through it quickly. Estimate your ingest before you commit, and know that overage is billed per GB rather than cutting you off.
One full platform user. Only one seat gets full platform capabilities for free. Additional full users require a paid edition, though unlimited basic users can view data and dashboards.
Retention is at least 8 days by default. If you need longer lookback windows for compliance or capacity planning, plan for a paid tier.
Compliance needs may require Enterprise. FedRAMP Moderate and HIPAA eligibility are available on the Enterprise edition, not the free tier.
EU data residency costs extra. Storing data in the EU data center adds $0.05/GB.

If any of these apply to you today, the free tier is still the right starting point for evaluation; just budget for the Standard or Pro edition in your rollout plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is New Relic's free tier really free forever?

Yes. The free tier is a permanent edition, not a trial. You get 100 GB of data ingest per month and one full platform user for as long as you keep the account, with no credit card required at signup.

What happens if I exceed 100 GB in a month?

You are billed for data beyond the free allowance at published rates: $0.40/GB for original data or $0.60/GB for Data Plus. There is no hard cutoff that stops your data from flowing.

Do I need a credit card to sign up?

No. New Relic's free account requires no credit card, so you can start instrumenting your stack immediately.

What can I monitor on the free tier?

The free tier covers the core platform: APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, synthetic checks, dashboards, and alerting, with 50+ capabilities available and support for open standards like OpenTelemetry.

Conclusion

New Relic's free tier is one of the most complete free offerings in observability: 100 GB of ingest per month, one full platform user, unlimited basic users, and the platform's core capabilities, all without a credit card or an expiration date. For small teams it can be the entire observability stack. For everyone else it is the lowest-risk way to evaluate the platform on real data before spending a dollar. Start on the free tier and put your first 100 GB to work this week.