Yes, Datadog has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes 1-day metric retention for Infrastructure Free tier, up to 5 hosts monitored in Infrastructure Free tier, and Usage below 1 million monthly flag configuration requests included at no cost for Feature Flags.
About
Datadog is a cloud monitoring and security platform that collects metrics, traces, logs, events, and other telemetry from infrastructure, applications, databases, containers, serverless workloads, and user sessions. It supports products such as Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Log Management, Network Monitoring, RUM, Synthetic Monitoring, Cloud SIEM, Cloud Security, and related workflow and collaboration features.
The platform is used to correlate observability and security data across a stack, with pricing and feature sets that vary by product. The pricing page shows a free Infrastructure plan with up to 5 hosts and 1-day metric retention, plus many paid products with product-specific limits, retention windows, and usage-based billing.
- Infrastructure free plan with up to 5 hosts
- 1-day metric retention on free infrastructure
- Metrics, traces, logs, and events correlation
- APM, logs, RUM, synthetics, and security products
- Usage-based pricing across hosts, committers, and events
- 15-month retention on several paid tiers
Free Tier Value
This free tier has real ongoing value because it includes a small but usable slice of Datadog’s core platform: up to 5 hosts, plus limited retention and a couple of product-specific allowances. Using the cheapest published host-based price of about $15 per host/month, that works out to roughly $4/month of practical value, or about 25% of the entry paid tier; a credit card is required and the offer remains capped, which keeps the score well below a full paid plan.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- 1-day metric retention for Infrastructure Free tier.
- Up to 5 hosts monitored in Infrastructure Free tier.
- Free Datadog Cost Visibility limited to Datadog costs only.
- Usage below 1 million monthly flag configuration requests included at no cost for Feature Flags.
See Datadog pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Pro
- host
- per host
- billing
- monthly
- Infrastructure monitoring for hosts
- Metrics and dashboards
- Alerts and visualization
- Core Datadog platform access
Enterprise
- pricing
- custom
- Advanced enterprise controls
- Custom deployment and support options
- Expanded security and governance capabilities
Pricing extracted from Datadog's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Datadog free forever?
Yes. Datadog has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
What happens when you exceed Datadog's free tier?
You move to a paid plan. Datadog's cheapest paid plan is Pro at $15 / unit / month.
What is Datadog's free tier worth?
Datadog's free tier is worth about $4.00 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 40/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
