Pricing and Account Tiers
Pricing and Account Tiers
This domain covers how New Relic charges, what each user type can do, and which levers control spend.
Core rules
- Current pricing has two dimensions: users (per seat per month) and data ingest (per GB). All telemetry, including APM events, infrastructure samples, logs, and synthetic results, counts toward ingest.
- The free tier includes 100 GB per month of ingest and one full platform user, enough to run a small environment indefinitely.
- Editions are Standard and Pro; Pro adds capabilities such as extended data retention and advanced security features. Data Plus is an add-on for longer retention and higher ingest allowances.
- User types: basic users are free and limited to viewing and commenting; core users cover common observability work; full platform users are the paid seats needed for administration and advanced features.
- Legacy/original pricing charged per product by volume, with APM, Browser, Infrastructure, and Synthetics billed separately; the current model is account-wide ingest, so a gigabyte of logs and a gigabyte of APM events are priced the same way.
- Retention differs by data type, and longer retention is a paid lever, not a free setting.
Worked example
A team of eight views dashboards daily, but only two engineers create alert policies and manage integrations. Buying eight full platform seats wastes budget on six people who only read charts; two full seats plus six basic users keeps administration possible, and ingest, not seats, becomes the variable to watch.
Traps
- Assuming each product is billed separately under current pricing.
- Believing the free tier is time-limited rather than a monthly ingest allowance.
- Overlooking the usual ingest drivers: verbose debug logging, high-cardinality custom attributes, and redundant metric streams.
- Expecting long retention on every data type at no extra cost.