Yes, Better Stack has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes access to 10 monitors and heartbeats, Track 100,000 exceptions per month, and Use 5,000 session replays. FreeTier.co estimates the free tier at about $9.00/mo.

About

Better Stack is an observability and incident response platform that helps teams monitor infrastructure, trace requests, manage logs, track errors, and communicate outages from a single product suite.

It combines AI-assisted root cause analysis with practical operational tools so engineering teams can detect issues faster, investigate them with richer context, and coordinate responses without switching between multiple systems.

  • AI SRE for agentic root cause analysis and incident assistance
  • Uptime monitoring, heartbeats, and transaction checks
  • Log management, tracing, infrastructure monitoring, and error tracking
  • Incident management, on-call workflows, and status pages
  • Real user monitoring and a time series data warehouse

Free Tier Value

49
FTV score
Est. value$9.00 / month
Credit cardNot stated
Feature parity78%

This free tier is genuinely usable for small teams: it includes 10 monitors/heartbeats, one status page, alerts, and meaningful observability quotas, so it lands well above a token freebie. The closest paid baseline is the $34/month Responder plan, and the free allowance covers a large share of that practical value, though it remains capped and the page does not indicate that a credit card is unnecessary.

What's included in the free tier

Verified

  • Access to 10 monitors and heartbeats.
  • Receive Slack and e-mail alerts.
  • Track 100,000 exceptions per month.
  • Use 5,000 session replays.
  • Store 3 GB of logs for 3 days.
  • Use 30 GB of metrics.
  • Store 3 GB of web events for 3 days.
  • Store 3 GB of traces for 3 days.
  • Include one status page.

Paid plans

Responder

$34 / seat / mo
license
1 responder license
phone call alerts
unlimited
SMS alerts
unlimited
  • Access to Uptime with incident management, on-call, monitoring and status pages
  • Unlimited phone call alerts
  • Unlimited SMS alerts
  • Incident management workflows
  • Monitoring and status pages

AI SRE chat

Usage-based
$5 per million tokens
tokens
$5 per million tokens
  • Slack-native AI SRE agent
  • Agentic root cause analysis
  • Create dashboards with AI
  • Connect Datadog & Grafana
  • Create GitHub pull requests

Channel-based & Thread-based workflows

$9 / seat / mo
responder license
1
incident workflow type
channel/thread-based
  • Slack & MS Teams incident workflows
  • /incident command
  • AI post-mortems
  • Manage on-call schedules
  • Advanced incident workflows

Additional public status page

$15 / mo
status page
1 additional public page
  • Additional public status page
  • Custom sub-domain
  • Private status pages
  • Embeddable image badge
  • REST API

Custom CSS & JavaScript

$15 / unit / mo
page
1
  • Custom CSS
  • Custom JavaScript
  • Customizable design
  • REST API
  • Terraform provider

Password authentication

$50 / unit / mo
page
1
  • Password authentication for status pages
  • Private status pages
  • Customizable access controls

Pricing extracted from Better Stack's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.

Common questions

Is Better Stack free forever?

Yes. Better Stack has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.

What happens when you exceed Better Stack's free tier?

You move to a paid plan. Better Stack's cheapest paid plan is Channel-based & Thread-based workflows at $9 / seat / month.

What is Better Stack's free tier worth?

Better Stack's free tier is worth about $9.00 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 49/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.