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All Prometheus Plans & Pricing

Prices unverified — last checked Jul 8, 2026

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Open source (self-hosted)

  • Free, open-source monitoring system (Apache 2.0)
  • Download and run it yourself
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Prometheus costs Free to Free per month as of November 2026 including a free tier. Plan: Open source (self-hosted) (free). The median contract is $20,000/year based on 3 community cost mentions.

Use the interactive pricing calculator to estimate your exact cost based on team size and requirements.

  • Free tier: Yes

Prometheus offers 1 pricing tiers: Open source (self-hosted). The Open source (self-hosted) plan is teams that run their own monitoring.

Compared to other observability software, Prometheus is positioned at the budget-friendly price point.

  • Median contract: $20,000/yr from 3 purchases Thin data
  • 8 documented hidden costs beyond list price
Last verified: | Sources: 5 pricing pages and reviews

How much does Prometheus cost?

Prometheus is free to use. Plans include Open source (self-hosted) (free).

Prometheus Pricing Overview

Prometheus has 1 pricing plans, including a free tier. Paid plans range from $0 to $0/month. The Open source (self-hosted) plan is free and is best for teams that run their own monitoring.

The median Prometheus customer pays $20,000/year based on 3 community cost mentions.

There are at least 8 documented hidden costs beyond Prometheus's list price, including implementation, training, and add-on fees.

This pricing was last verified in July 8, 2026 from 5 independent sources.

Try Prometheus Free

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.

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.

Grafana Cloud Compare → Pingdom $10-$250/mo Compare → SigNoz $0-$4000.0/mo Compare →

Compare Prometheus vs Alternatives

Before committing to Prometheus, compare pricing with these 3 alternatives in the same category.

VSGrafana Cloud
Custom

Hosted Prometheus-compatible metrics

Full comparison
VSPingdom
From $10/mo

Small businesses and developers monitoring a single website or application

Full comparison
VSSigNoz
Free

Teams wanting managed observability without infrastructure overhead

Full comparison

All Prometheus alternatives & migration guides

What Companies Actually Pay for Prometheus

The median Prometheus buyer pays $20,000/year based on 3 community cost mentions.

What companies actually pay $20,000/yr Median across 3 community cost mentions Thin data
Review scores
Third-party review aggregates, as of Jul 2026
Top pricing complaints
High cardinality metrics cause memory exhaustion on a single instanceNo built-in dashboarding requires additional tooling (Grafana)Not horizontally scalable without additional infrastructure (Thanos, Cortex)Significant engineering overhead to operate and maintain self-hosted stack
Source: Community cost mentions (Reddit, Hacker News) — aggregated from 3 distinct user reports. Indicative only — not contract-grade data.

Prometheus Cost by Company Size

Example costs for teams of different sizes. Each figure is labelled with the period it covers.

Self-Hosted Small Team (10 services) $0 per month

$0/month for the software; you pay only for the EC2 and EBS infrastructure

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.

Self-Hosted Production (High Availability) $0 per month

$0/month for the software; costs come from EC2, S3 storage and engineering time

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.

Grafana Cloud Free Tier $0 per month

$0/month

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.

Enterprise Scale (Chronosphere / Sysdig) Custom pricing, quoted by the vendor

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.

Small Team: Self-Hosted Infrastructure Only $1,800 per year

$1,800/year ($150/month)

Single Prometheus instance on a t3.xlarge equivalent, scraping 105k samples every 10 seconds, no HA or redundancy. Infrastructure cost only — excludes engineering labor.

Small Team Self-Hosted (Single Instance) $150 per month

$150/month ($1,800/year) for compute

A small team running Prometheus on a t3.xlarge AWS instance with 105k samples/10s scrape interval, no redundancy. Includes compute only — no storage or query cost overhead.

How Prometheus Pricing Compares

Software Starting Price Top Price
Prometheus Custom Custom
Baselime (Cloudflare) Custom Custom
Chronosphere Custom Custom
Coralogix Observability $0.06/GB $1.5/GB
Datadog Free $41/month
Grafana Cloud Free $2083.33/month

Detailed pricing comparisons:

Browse all Observability pricing →

8 Prometheus Hidden Costs Beyond the List Price

Beyond the listed price, Prometheus has at least 8 documented hidden costs that can significantly increase total cost of ownership.

Watch for 8 hidden costs
  • Engineering Operational Overhead (Self-Hosted) $20,000-$60,000/year in engineering time (source dated Mar 2025)
    high 2 sources
    Reddit “How much would it cost you to host and manage prometheus yourself? A hell of a lot more than $500 a month.”
    Reddit “Open source observability tools like Prometheus and Grafana need a lot of developer effort to set up and make them work perfectly.”
  • Managed Service Cost Shock from Scrape Interval Misconfiguration 4-5x cost increase vs expected
    critical 2 sources
    Reddit “I didn't realize that by setting the interval of how often it sends metrics to 15 seconds across 100 servers that I would in fact not be saving the company any money, but infact costing them about as much as data dog lol.”
    Reddit “Grafana metric pricing is based on `number of active timeseries * DPM (data point per metric per minute)`.”
  • Managed Prometheus Expensive at Scale 5-10x cost vs self-hosted at scale
    high 3 sources
    Reddit “GCP Prometheus managed service is stupid expensive.”
    Reddit “AWS Managed Prometheus could be an option. However, watch pricing carefully as this can get expensive if you start tracking too many metrics series.”
    Hacker News “This pricing man.... We have a small Prometheus running on t3.xlarge instance. Yes we don't have a redundancy or anything fancy, but it's fine, we can live without it. It does 105k samples scrapes every 10 seconds. If I plug these numbers in I get...”
  • Horizontal Scaling Requires Additional Infrastructure 10-30% of license costs
    medium 1 source
    Reddit “Prom is not horizontally scalable, so you would need to use a third component for scaling (like Thanos, Cortex) if you want to scale further.”
  • Infrastructure & Server Costs for Self-Hosting $150-$500/month
    medium 1 source
    Hacker News “We have a small Prometheus running on t3.xlarge instance. Yes we don't have a redundancy or anything fancy, but it's fine, we can live without it. It does 105k samples scrapes every 10 seconds. If I plug these numbers in I get... $1.”
  • High Cardinality Scalability Costs (Thanos/Cortex/VictoriaMetrics) 5-20% of license costs
    high 2 sources
    Hacker News “I'm really struggling to understand the marketing from Honeycomb. They have a lot of reputable and smart staff, seemingly making conflicting public statements. For example, in this post, the author describes how expensive cardinality is for TSDB...”
    Hacker News “The open source stack has gotten genuinely viable: Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics for metrics, Grafana for viz, and OpenTelemetry as the collection layer means you're not locked into anyone's agent.”
  • Grafana or Dashboarding Tool Required $19-$80/month
    medium 2 sources
    Hacker News “Prometheus/node exporter for metrics, grafana for panels.”
    Reddit “Pretty much everyone had stitched together Prometheus, Grafana, Kubernetes scheduling policies, and a bunch of homegrown scripts, and they were spending as much time maintaining all of it as actually using it.”
  • Migration Cost from Managed Observability Platforms 5-15% of license costs
    medium 2 sources
    Hacker News “The actual hard part of leaving DD isn't technical, it's organizational. DD becomes load-bearing for on-call runbooks, alert routing, and team muscle memory. Migration is less 'swap the backend' and more 'retrain your incident response.'”
    Reddit “We are now slowly moving from datadog to self-hosted prometheus and loki.”
Tip

Ask your Prometheus sales rep about these costs upfront. Getting them in writing before signing can save you from surprise charges later.

Full hidden costs breakdown →

Intelligence sourced from 2 independent sources
Reddit User discussions Hacker News Tech community
Key claims include inline source attribution. Data verified against multiple independent sources. 25 source citations total.

Prometheus Contract Terms

Prometheus contracts do not auto-renew. Changes require advance notice. These terms are sourced from verified buyer experiences.

Contract Terms
Auto-Renewal No
Minimum Commitment None for self-hosted; managed services (AWS AMP, GCP) are pay-as-you-go
Mid-Term Downgrade Allowed
Payment Terms Pay-as-you-go for cloud managed services; no payment for self-hosted
Price Escalation No published schedule for self-hosted; cloud managed service pricing subject to provider changes
Note

Self-hosted Prometheus has no lock-in; managed services can be terminated at any time

How to Negotiate Prometheus Pricing

Prometheus contracts are negotiable. These 9 tactics are sourced from real buyer experiences and procurement specialists.

Negotiation Playbook 9 tactics
Optimize Scrape Intervals Before Committing to Managed Services high success

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/grafana
Self-Host vs Managed TCO Analysis high success

For 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/googlecloud
Drop Unnecessary Metrics at Scrape Time high success

Use 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/devops
Start with Grafana Cloud Free Tier high success

For 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/sre
Compare Total Cost of Ownership Including Engineering Time high success

When evaluating self-hosted vs managed, factor in full engineering cost. A junior engineer at 25% time costs ~$20,000/year. At that cost, many managed services become price-competitive or cheaper when you factor in SLA guarantees and reduced operational burden.

Reddit (r/googlecloud)
Start with Self-Hosted, Migrate to Managed at Scale high success

Many teams start with free self-hosted Prometheus and migrate to managed services only when cardinality or operational burden justifies the cost. This defers managed service costs until scale warrants it.

HN community
Use VictoriaMetrics as a Drop-In Replacement for Scale medium success

VictoriaMetrics 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/kubernetes
Negotiate Managed Service Contracts Aggressively medium success

For teams considering Grafana Cloud or cloud-managed Prometheus services, aggressive negotiation on contract terms can yield significant savings. One SRE reported getting 'very aggressive' pricing on a comparable monitoring contract that made self-hosting economically unviable by comparison.

Reddit (r/sre)
Use VictoriaMetrics as a Cost-Effective Self-Hosted Alternative medium success

VictoriaMetrics offers Prometheus-compatible storage with better scalability characteristics, potentially reducing infrastructure costs for high-cardinality workloads without requiring a full managed service.

HN (r/47085504)
High success Medium Low / difficult

Full negotiation guide →

Prometheus Pricing FAQ

01 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.

02 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 for VM clusters, block storage for the TSDB, and long-term storage solutions (Thanos, Mimir, Cortex) that add further 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.

03 How does AWS Managed Service for Prometheus pricing work?

AWS Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) is usage-based and has three billing dimensions: metric ingestion (tiered, with discounts at higher volumes), metric storage (charged per GB-month stored), and query processing (PromQL Query Samples Processed). There are no upfront commitments, and a free tier is available in supported regions. A workload of roughly 1 billion samples per month is priced at about $90/month, before storage and query costs are considered.

04 Is Prometheus completely free to use?

Prometheus (Self-Hosted Open Source) is free software at $0/month, with no licensing costs. You pay only for the infrastructure to run it. Grafana Cloud Free also offers Prometheus-compatible metric storage and dashboards at $0/month. The real hidden cost for self-hosted is engineering time, which buyers report at a median of $20,000/year.

05 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.

06 What are the limitations of free self-hosted Prometheus?

Self-hosted Prometheus has no vendor support (community only), is not horizontally scalable without additional tools like Thanos or VictoriaMetrics, has no built-in dashboarding (requires Grafana), and local TSDB storage is limited by your disk capacity. High cardinality metrics can cause memory exhaustion on a single instance.

07 Can self-hosted Prometheus handle high cardinality metrics?

A single Prometheus instance struggles with high cardinality metrics, which can cause memory exhaustion. For high cardinality workloads, teams typically add Thanos, Cortex, or migrate to VictoriaMetrics for horizontal scaling. This adds operational complexity and infrastructure cost.

08 How does Prometheus compare in cost to Datadog or New Relic?

Self-hosted Prometheus can be significantly cheaper than Datadog at scale, but the savings narrow when engineering overhead is included. One community member reported aggressively negotiating a Datadog contract to the point where self-hosting Prometheus was no longer worth the operational overhead. Startups with small teams (<50 engineers) often find Prometheus setup requires dedicated engineering effort that diverts from core product work.

Is this pricing incorrect? — we'll verify and update it.