Yes, Grafana Cloud has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes 14 days retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and k6 performance tests. FreeTier.co estimates the free tier at about $8.00/mo, and no credit card is required to sign up.
About
Grafana Cloud is a managed observability platform that combines metrics, logs, traces, profiles, k6 performance tests, dashboards, and alerting in a single hosted service. It supports OpenTelemetry and includes application observability, Kubernetes monitoring, synthetic monitoring, incident response, and AI-assisted onboarding and investigation workflows.
The free tier is intended for personal projects, early-stage startups, and evaluation use. The pricing page states that the free plan is always available at $0 and includes usage limits, community support, and 14 days of retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and k6 performance tests.
- Always-available $0 free plan
- Usage limits on all services
- 14-day data retention
- Metrics, logs, traces, profiles
- k6 performance test retention
- OpenTelemetry-native observability
- Community support included
Free Tier Value
This free tier is genuinely usable because it includes the full Grafana Cloud service stack, AI features, and community support, but it is capped and keeps retention to 14 days. The cheapest paid plan starts at $19/month plus usage; the free tier looks like roughly 40% of that practical entry price, so about $8/month is a fair buyer-side estimate.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- Access to all Grafana Cloud services, with usage limits.
- Adaptive Telemetry, AI Assistant, and much more.
- Community support.
- 14 days retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and k6 performance tests.
- No credit card required.
- No charges ever.
See Grafana Cloud pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Pro
- Unlimited access to all Grafana Cloud services above the free tier
- Adaptive Telemetry
- AI Assistant
- 8x5 email support
- 13 months retention for metrics
- 30 days retention for logs, traces, profiles, and k6 performance tests
Enterprise
- Premium support
- Custom retention
- Deployment flexibility: Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, or Bring Your Own Cloud
Pricing extracted from Grafana Cloud's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Grafana Cloud free forever?
Yes. Grafana Cloud has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
Does Grafana Cloud require a credit card?
No. You can start on Grafana Cloud's free tier without entering card details.
What happens when you exceed Grafana Cloud's free tier?
You move to a paid plan. Grafana Cloud's cheapest paid plan is Pro at $19 / month.
What is Grafana Cloud's free tier worth?
Grafana Cloud's free tier is worth about $8.00 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 58/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
