Prometheus Pricing in 2026
Plans, hidden costs, and alternatives compared
Is Prometheus worth the price?
Prometheus is 100% free and open source (Apache 2.0).
Zero licensing costs ever. The real costs are operational: storage, compute for the server, and engineering time to manage retention, federation, and high availability.
Most teams eventually pay for managed Prometheus (Grafana Cloud, Amazon Managed Prometheus, or Thanos for long-term storage).
Pricing Plans
Free
Free
Open source
- Time series DB
- PromQL
- Alerting
- Service discovery
Hidden Costs & Gotchas
Storage costs grow linearly with metric cardinality and retention period
No built-in long-term storage -- need Thanos, Cortex, or managed solution
No native high availability -- requires manual federation or Thanos
Grafana Cloud managed Prometheus costs $6.50/1K active series (Pro) or $3/1K (Enterprise)
Amazon Managed Prometheus
$0.03 per 10M metric samples ingested, $0.003 per 10M samples queried
Engineering time to manage and tune TSDB, alerting rules, and scrape configs
Which Plan Do You Need?
DevOps teams with Kubernetes infrastructure
Organizations wanting vendor-independent monitoring
Teams comfortable with self-hosted infrastructure
Companies building custom observability stacks
Our Recommendation
startup
Perfect choice at zero cost. Pair with Grafana OSS for visualization. Storage is the main expense -- start with 15-day retention.
enterprise
Consider Grafana Cloud or Amazon Managed Prometheus to eliminate ops overhead. Thanos adds long-term storage and HA to self-hosted Prometheus.
How Prometheus Compares to Competitors
Datadog costs $15-$23/host/month for infrastructure monitoring. Victoria Metrics is also free OSS with better storage efficiency and easier clustering. Thanos extends Prometheus with HA and long-term storage at zero licensing cost.
