Prometheus Pricing 2026
Plans, hidden costs, and alternatives compared
Cite this data: Toolradar, Prometheus pricing verified Sep 2026, toolradar.com/tools/prometheus/pricing
Prometheus is free.
Verified Sep 2026 from the official pricing page.
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
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
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
6 of 6 direct competitors offer a free plan.
Prometheus Pricing FAQ
How much does Prometheus cost?
Prometheus is free to use. No subscription or one-time fee is required for the core product.
Does Prometheus have a free plan?
Yes. Prometheus offers a free plan called "Free". It includes: Time series DB, PromQL, Alerting.
What are alternatives to Prometheus?
Alternatives to Prometheus include Datadog, Grafana, Nagios, Zabbix. Datadog starts at $18/user/month; Grafana starts at $19/month; Nagios starts at $1995/month.
Prometheus alternatives
Direct competitors. Starting prices match the table above.
Sources
- Official Prometheus pricing — prometheus.io (verified Sep 2026)
- Cite this data: Toolradar, Prometheus pricing verified Sep 2026, toolradar.com/tools/prometheus/pricing
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