Troubleshoot your stack, not your monitoring bill

Today, we launched completely new pricing for all of New Relic, including a perpetually free tier. We did it for one reason—to make observability simpler for you and your teams.

Whether you’re using New Relic, an open-source option, another vendor’s solution, or some combination of tools, pricing always creates the same three pain points:

• The hidden cost of “sampling”: The cost of tooling puts you in a position to limit instrumentation to only a small subset of systems. You have to extrapolate service health and business performance using incomplete data. Worse, many of you spend precious engineering cycles changing what you’re instrumenting, all to keep costs in line.
• Too many tools and cost vectors: It’s confusing to calculate and track different costs for monitoring capabilities throughout your stack—running hosts, compute units, page views, events, retention, spans, invocations, and logs, among others.
• “Host” is not a good measure: The traditional concept of paying for monitoring per host has not aged well. This is particularly true of modern architectures that abstract the underlying infrastructure from applications, use automated orchestration tools like Kubernetes to dynamically assign containers to hosts, or allow you to run code via serverless technologies.

To eliminate these burdens, we’ve simplified our pricing:

• Each month, ingest 100 GB free, and then pay only US$0.35 per GB ingested after that for all your telemetry data. Funnel all of your events, metrics, traces, and logs into our platform at a very low price and no longer worry about sampling. You can also add an unlimited number of basic users for free to query your data and create custom dashboards.
• One price per user/month for our New Relic observability platform, which includes application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, digital experience monitoring (browser, mobile, and synthetics), logs in context, serverless monitoring, and more—as an all-in-one solution. No more per-tool costs or host-based pricing. Our new standard plan is US$99 per user and includes one free full platform user. You can upgrade or downgrade users as needed, but you’ll always have access to the entire platform.

Pennies per GB? Really?

Yes, really.

We’re able to deliver this low price because of our multi-tenant data platform that offers petabyte-scale ingest, storage, and query for all types of operational data. 

But we didn’t do this for cheap data.

We did it so you can stop worrying about what data to collect or live without. We did it so you can get instant access to every capability you need to monitor your entire stack and collect all your metrics, events, logs, and traces from any source. And, ultimately, we did it to remove barriers to true observability so you can instrument everything—without penalty.

A perpetually free tier for the entire platform? What’s the catch?

No catch. Now, when you sign up for a new account, you get full platform access up to a generous limit each month, for free, forever.

The concept of a free trial has always bothered me. They’re not very useful when you want to test things out in your own environment, at your own pace.

In most cases, once you sign up for your trial, the clock starts ticking. And then competing priorities arise. You suddenly don’t have time to get that integration set up or the agent installed, or you haven’t properly configured the data you’re collecting, or your teammates haven’t had time to vet the UI… and before you know it, the trial is over.

That’s why we’re now offering a perpetually free tier, including generous limits for those of you who want to get busy instrumenting. No gates between products. No bait and switch.

When you sign up for a new account with New Relic, you get:

• 100 GB of free data ingest from any source every month.
• Unlimited basic users that have the ability to run queries and create and view custom dashboards.
• One free standard user. This includes full access to every capability within New Relic: APM, infrastructure monitoring, digital experience monitoring, logs, serverless monitoring, and more.

Flexible pay-as-you-go and commit pricing options

Whether you’re buying a slice of pizza or dev tooling, pricing needs to be easy to comprehend, aligned to the value that you receive, and scalable along with your consumption of that value.

In that spirit, you can access all of New Relic beyond the free-tier limits with a monthly, pay-as-you-go option or with volume discounts when you commit to an annual usage amount. It’s very similar to how you might already pay for cloud platforms and services. Here’s how it works:

1. All new accounts start with a perpetually free tier. You can add data sources, invite teammates, and use the entire platform.
2. As you exceed the free limits, you’ll be prompted to add your credit card, and you’ll only be charged for what you use above the free limit each month.
3. If you’re looking for volume discounts, more predictability, or are already on an annual subscription with New Relic, you can choose the annual pool of funds option.

Unlike other commit pricing options in the industry, the annual pool of funds approach gives you more flexibility to accommodate seasonal spikes and dips in usage. That flexibility comes from having an annual commitment pool with roll-overs between months rather than a monthly commitment amount with a use-it-or-lose-it limitation or monthly overage bills.

We’re excited about our new simplified pricing and hope it helps you focus on what’s most important for you—your software and your customers.