Prometheus Pricing 2026
Complete pricing guide with plans, hidden costs, and cost analysis
Prometheus has a free plan. Paid plans start at $19/month (Grafana Cloud Pro) and go up to $2500/month.
Prometheus costs Free to $2.5K per month as of May 2026, with 6 plans available including a free tier. Plans: Self-Hosted (Open Source) (free), Grafana Cloud Free (free), Grafana Cloud Pro at $19/month, AWS Managed Service for Prometheus at $90/month, and Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus at $60/month. Enterprise pricing is available on request. The median contract is $20,000/year based on 3 verified purchases.
Use the interactive pricing calculator to estimate your exact cost based on team size and requirements.
- Free tier: Yes
Prometheus offers 6 pricing tiers: Self-Hosted (Open Source), Grafana Cloud Free, Grafana Cloud Pro, AWS Managed Service for Prometheus, Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus, Enterprise / Custom (Chronosphere, Sysdig, etc.). A free plan is available. Paid plans include Grafana Cloud Pro at $19/month + usage, AWS Managed Service for Prometheus at $90/month (usage-based, ~1B samples), Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus at $60/month (usage-based, ~1B samples). The Grafana Cloud Free plan is small teams and hobbyists evaluating managed prometheus with basic needs.
Compared to other observability software, Prometheus is positioned at the mid-market price point.
- Median contract: $20,000/yr from 3 purchases
- 4 documented hidden costs beyond list price
How much does Prometheus cost?
Prometheus Pricing Overview
Prometheus has 6 pricing plans, including a free tier. Paid plans range from $0 to $2,500/month. The Self-Hosted (Open Source) plan is free and is best for teams with devops/sre expertise who want full control and can manage infrastructure overhead. The Grafana Cloud Free plan is free and is best for small teams and hobbyists evaluating managed prometheus with basic needs. The Grafana Cloud Pro plan costs $19/month, best for growing teams that want a managed prometheus-compatible backend with predictable base cost and pay-as-you-grow overage. The AWS Managed Service for Prometheus plan costs $90/month, best for aws-native teams running kubernetes workloads on eks who want prometheus without managing the backend. The Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus plan costs $60/month, best for gcp and gke users wanting a cost-effective managed prometheus with no storage fees. The Enterprise / Custom (Chronosphere, Sysdig, etc.) plan requires contacting sales for a custom quote and is designed for large enterprises with millions of active series, compliance requirements, or needing dedicated sla-backed observability.
The median Prometheus customer pays $20,000/year based on 3 verified purchases.
There are at least 4 documented hidden costs beyond Prometheus's list price, including implementation, training, and add-on fees.
This pricing was last verified in April 24, 2026 from 5 independent sources.
Prometheus is the leading open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit, originally built at SoundCloud in 2012 and now a graduated Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project alongside Kubernetes. It has become the de facto standard for metrics collection in cloud-native environments, with native integrations across Kubernetes, Docker, and virtually every major infrastructure platform.
At its core, Prometheus is free to self-host — you download it, configure scrape targets, and it pulls metrics from your services using a pull-based model. The PromQL query language gives powerful time-series analysis, and the built-in Alertmanager handles routing, deduplication, and notification delivery. But production-grade self-hosting requires additional tooling (Thanos, Mimir, or Cortex for long-term storage), dedicated infrastructure, and ongoing SRE expertise.
For teams that want Prometheus semantics without the operational burden, all three major cloud providers now offer managed Prometheus services: AWS Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) at $0.09 per million samples, Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus at $0.06 per million samples (no storage charges), and Grafana Cloud with a generous free tier of 10,000 active series and a Pro plan starting at $19/month. Enterprise options like Chronosphere and Sysdig add cardinality management, multi-tenancy, and SLA-backed support for large-scale deployments.
The right choice depends on your cloud provider, scale, and operational maturity. Small teams and startups typically start with Grafana Cloud Free; mid-size cloud-native teams use AWS AMP or Google Cloud Managed Prometheus; and self-hosting remains the most cost-efficient option only when you have dedicated SRE capacity to manage it.
How Prometheus Pricing Compares
Compare Prometheus pricing against top alternatives in Observability.
All Prometheus Plans & Pricing
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-Hosted (Open Source) infrastructure: Self-managed servers requiredsupport: Community only | Free | Free | Teams with DevOps/SRE expertise who want full control and can manage infrastructure overhead |
| Grafana Cloud Free active_series: 10000retention_days: 14 | Free | Free | Small teams and hobbyists evaluating managed Prometheus with basic needs |
| Grafana Cloud Pro active_series_included: 10000overage_per_1000_series: 8 | $19 /month + usage | Custom | Growing teams that want a managed Prometheus-compatible backend with predictable base cost and pay-as-you-grow overage |
| AWS Managed Service for Prometheus ingestion_rate_tier1: First 2 billion samples/monthprice_per_10M_samples: 0.9 | $90 /month (usage-based, ~1B samples) | Custom | AWS-native teams running Kubernetes workloads on EKS who want Prometheus without managing the backend |
| Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus price_per_million_samples: 0.06tier1_threshold: 50 billion samples/month | $60 /month (usage-based, ~1B samples) | Custom | GCP and GKE users wanting a cost-effective managed Prometheus with no storage fees |
| Enterprise / Custom (Chronosphere, Sysdig, etc.) | Contact Sales | Contact Sales | Large enterprises with millions of active series, compliance requirements, or needing dedicated SLA-backed observability |
View all features by plan
Self-Hosted (Open Source)
- Open source (Apache 2.0)
- Full PromQL query language
- Pull-based metrics collection
- Alert manager included
- Unlimited metrics retention (storage-bound)
- No vendor lock-in
- Active CNCF community
Grafana Cloud Free
- 10,000 active metric series included
- 14-day metrics retention
- 3 users included
- 50 GB logs
- 50,000 traces
- Hosted Grafana dashboards
Grafana Cloud Pro
- 10,000 active series included (then $8/1,000 series)
- Longer retention periods
- Unlimited users
- Priority support
- Usage-based overage billing
- Grafana dashboards + alerting
AWS Managed Service for Prometheus
- Fully managed Prometheus-compatible service
- Pay-per-use ingestion, storage, and query
- $0.90 per 10M samples ingested (first 2B)
- Tiered pricing at higher volumes
- AWS Free Tier available
- Integrates with EKS, ECS, EC2
- PromQL query support
Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus
- Fully managed, GKE-native Prometheus
- $0.06 per million samples ingested (first 50B)
- No storage charges
- Free for GKE Autopilot system metrics
- 60% price reduction announced
- Global query scope across projects
- PromQL compatible
Enterprise / Custom (Chronosphere, Sysdig, etc.)
- Prometheus-compatible ingestion at scale
- Advanced cardinality management
- Multi-tenancy
- SLA-backed uptime
- Dedicated support and onboarding
- Custom retention and storage policies
Compare Prometheus vs Alternatives
Before committing to Prometheus, compare pricing with these 3 alternatives in the same category.
What Companies Actually Pay for Prometheus
The median Prometheus buyer pays $20,000/year based on 3 verified purchase transactions.
Prometheus Year 1 Total Cost by Company Size
Real deployment costs including licenses, implementation, training, and admin — not just the sticker price.
A 10-person startup self-hosting Prometheus on a single t3.xlarge EC2 instance with EBS storage, monitoring 10 services with ~50M samples/month. No long-term storage, 15-day local retention.
A mid-size engineering team running 3x r5.large EC2 instances with Thanos for long-term S3 storage, monitoring a Kubernetes cluster with ~500M samples/month and 90-day retention.
A small team monitoring a few microservices using Grafana Cloud's hosted Prometheus with up to 10,000 active series and 14-day retention. No infrastructure to manage.
An AWS-native team running EKS with ~1 billion metric samples/month, using AMP for fully managed Prometheus with no infrastructure overhead and PromQL querying via Grafana.
A GCP team running 5 GKE clusters generating ~5 billion samples/month across all services. Google charges $0.06 per million samples with no storage fees, plus read API costs.
A large enterprise with 50+ services, millions of active series, multi-tenancy requirements, and compliance needs. Typically includes dedicated support, cardinality management, and custom SLA.
Single Prometheus instance on a t3.xlarge equivalent, scraping 105k samples every 10 seconds, no HA or redundancy. Infrastructure cost only — excludes engineering labor.
Self-hosted Prometheus with a junior engineer at 25% time for maintenance and operations. Represents realistic TCO for a startup running their own monitoring stack.
Equivalent monitoring to a 105k-samples/10s self-hosted setup using AWS Managed Service for Prometheus starting at $90/month. Actual costs scale with metric volume and query load.
How Prometheus Pricing Compares
| Software | Starting Price | Top Price |
|---|---|---|
| Prometheus | Free | $2500/month |
| Chronosphere | Custom | Custom |
| Datadog | Free | $41/host/month |
| Grafana Cloud | Free | $55/month |
| Pingdom | $10/month | $250/month |
| SigNoz | Free | $4000/month |
Detailed pricing comparisons:
How to Negotiate Prometheus Pricing
Prometheus contracts are negotiable. These 5 tactics are sourced from real buyer experiences and procurement specialists.
Before moving to AWS Managed Service for Prometheus or Grafana Cloud, benchmark your metric volume at 60-75 second scrape intervals rather than the default 15-30 seconds. This directly reduces data points per minute and can cut managed Prometheus bills by 50-80%. One engineer reduced AWS costs from Datadog-equivalent to reasonable levels simply by changing interval from 15s to 75s.
Reddit r/ExperiencedDevs and r/grafanaFor teams with existing engineering capacity, self-hosting Prometheus on a t3.xlarge-equivalent instance runs ~$150/month vs $1,500+/month for equivalent managed capacity. Run a build vs buy analysis: if your team can dedicate ~25% of one junior engineer ($20k/year), self-hosting almost always wins at moderate scale.
HN community and Reddit r/googlecloudUse Prometheus relabeling rules to drop high-cardinality metrics you do not query before they are stored or sent to managed services. Filtering junk data at the edge directly reduces billing for cloud-managed Prometheus and prevents the most common cause of cost overruns.
Reddit r/devopsFor early-stage projects, Grafana Cloud's free tier provides Prometheus-compatible metric ingestion and dashboards at $0. Upgrading to Grafana Cloud Pro at $19/month is cheaper than AWS or GCP managed Prometheus for modest workloads and avoids infrastructure management entirely.
Reddit r/dotnet and r/sreVictoriaMetrics is Prometheus-compatible and horizontally scalable by default. Teams hitting Prometheus scaling limits (needing Thanos or Cortex) often find VictoriaMetrics cheaper to operate without the additional component complexity.
Reddit r/kubernetesPrometheus Pricing FAQ
01 How much does Prometheus cost?
Prometheus itself is free and open source (Apache 2.0 license). However, running it in production has real costs. Self-hosted infrastructure runs $100–$800/month for compute and storage, not counting engineering labor. Managed services range from free tiers (Grafana Cloud Free: 10k series, no charge) to usage-based pricing — AWS Managed Service for Prometheus charges $0.90 per 10 million samples, and Google Cloud charges $0.06 per million samples. A medium-sized Kubernetes environment typically pays $00–$300/month on a managed service or $200–$800/month self-hosted when including infrastructure.
02 Is Prometheus free?
Yes, the core Prometheus software is completely free and open source, maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). You can download and run it on your own infrastructure at no license cost. However, 'free software' is not the same as 'free to run' — you still pay for servers, storage, and engineering time. Managed Prometheus services from AWS, Google Cloud, and Grafana charge for ingestion, storage, and queries, though they include free tiers to get started.
03 What are the hidden costs of running Prometheus?
The biggest hidden cost of self-hosted Prometheus is engineering labor — maintaining, scaling, and troubleshooting requires 10–20 hours/month of SRE time. Infrastructure costs include compute ($100–$700/month for VM clusters), block storage for the TSDB, and long-term storage solutions (Thanos, Mimir, Cortex) that add ~20% overhead. For managed services, the hidden cost is cardinality explosion: Kubernetes deployments can generate millions of active time series, and per-sample or per-series billing can spike unexpectedly. AWS AMP also charges separately for PromQL query processing, which is easy to miss in initial estimates.
04 Which managed Prometheus service is the cheapest?
For pure ingestion cost, Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus is the most cost-effective at $0.06 per million samples with no storage charges — roughly 33% cheaper than AWS AMP ($0.09 per million samples). Grafana Cloud Free is the cheapest for small workloads (10,000 active series at no charge). For teams already on AWS, the AMP free tier and tight EKS integration often justify the slightly higher per-sample cost. VictoriaMetrics Cloud and Chronosphere offer competitive pricing at scale but require custom quotes.
05 How does AWS Managed Service for Prometheus pricing work?
AWS Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) uses three billing dimensions: metric ingestion ($0.90 per 10 million samples for the first 2 billion samples/month, with tiered discounts at higher volumes), metric storage (charged per GB-month stored), and query processing (PromQL Query Samples Processed, billed per billion). There are no minimum fees or upfront commitments, and a free tier is available in supported regions. A typical medium Kubernetes cluster ingesting ~000M samples/month might pay $45–$90/month in ingestion fees alone before storage and query costs.
06 Can I use Prometheus for free on Grafana Cloud?
Yes. Grafana Cloud's Free tier includes 10,000 active Prometheus metric series, 14-day retention, and 3 users at no charge. This covers many small projects, development environments, and proof-of-concept deployments. When you exceed 10,000 active series or need longer retention, the Pro plan starts at $19/month as a platform fee, plus $8 per additional 1,000 active series. The main limitation of the free tier is the 14-day retention window, which may be insufficient for trend analysis or capacity planning.
07 Is Prometheus completely free to use?
Prometheus (Self-Hosted Open Source) is free software with no licensing costs. You pay only for the infrastructure to run it — typically $100–200/month for a modest server. Grafana Cloud also offers a free tier with Prometheus-compatible metric storage and dashboards at no cost. The real hidden cost for self-hosted is engineering time, which community estimates put at $20,000/year for a quarter-time junior engineer.
08 When does self-hosting Prometheus make more sense than managed services?
Self-hosting makes sense when you have engineering capacity and are running at moderate-to-large scale where the 5-10x cost difference over managed services becomes significant. The Self-Hosted (Open Source) tier is $0 in software costs. Managed services like Grafana Cloud Pro ($19/month), Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus (~$60/month), or AWS Managed Service for Prometheus (~$90/month) make sense for small teams prioritizing operational simplicity over cost optimization.
09 Does Prometheus scale horizontally?
Prometheus does not scale horizontally by default — it runs as a single stateful server. Teams needing high availability or handling massive metric volumes must add Thanos, Cortex, or switch to a compatible alternative like VictoriaMetrics. This adds infrastructure complexity and cost on top of the base Prometheus deployment.
10 What is the difference between self-hosted Prometheus and cloud managed options?
The Self-Hosted (Open Source) tier is $0 in licensing but requires infrastructure ($150+/month) and engineering time ($20,000+/year). Grafana Cloud Pro starts at $19/month with managed hosting. Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus runs approximately $60/month and AWS Managed Service for Prometheus approximately $90/month for modest workloads. Enterprise solutions from Chronosphere, Sysdig, and similar vendors are custom-priced. The managed options eliminate operational overhead but cost 5-10x more than self-hosting at scale.
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