Tool profile
Monitoring and visualization platform for metrics, logs, traces, and operational dashboards.
Kubernetes SRE views on Prometheus metrics
Grafana Cloud packages dashboards, Mimir/Prometheus metrics, Loki logs, Tempo traces, k6 testing, Frontend Observability, IRM, and more behind modular pricing pages.
grafana.com/pricing (March 2026) shows a Free tier at $0 for exploration. Pro plans across products cite about $19/month as a platform fee that includes some free usage, then pay-as-you-go rates—for Grafana Cloud Metrics the public card lists roughly $6.50 per 1,000 active series with a note that it can go as low as ~$3 per 1,000 at higher commitment. Logs pricing examples include ~$0.05/GB to process ingest, ~$0.40/GB for writes, ~$0.10/GB-day to retain on the fetched grid. Traces and k6 show analogous per-GB or per-session style meters. Enterprise tracks reference minimum ~$25,000/year spend commits on the same pricing hub family.
Exact bundles shift by product—open Metrics, Logs, Traces, and Frontend tabs separately before quoting.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Grafana Cloud is modular enough that the right budget model starts by choosing which pillars you actually need. The danger is treating the $19 Pro platform fee like an all-in price when every observability pillar has its own usage meter on top.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Apache Kafka
Free planEvent streaming and event-driven architectures
Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput pipelines, pub/sub, and stream-processing ecosystems.
Choose Kafka when replayable event streams and ecosystem breadth matter more than the lightest possible operational footprint.
Pricing snapshot
Grafana Cloud pricing is modular by observability pillar. The platform offers a Free tier, Pro starting at $19 per month plus usage, and Enterprise starting at a $25,000 annual spend commitment. On the current price list, Metrics is $6.50 per 1,000 series on Pro after the included tier, Application Observability is $0.025 per host hour, Infrastructure Monitoring is $0.01 per host hour, and the logs, traces, and profiles bundle lists 50 GB included then $0.50 per GB ingested.
Arcjet
Free planApplication runtime security
Runtime security toolkit for modern applications and AI systems that helps teams enforce quotas, block bots, prevent prompt abuse, and ship app-level protections in code.
Closer to application-runtime security and abuse-prevention tooling than to classic perimeter appliances.
