Observability cost calculator
Compare your Datadog or New Relic bill with a self-hosted open-source stack (VictoriaMetrics, VictoriaLogs, OpenTelemetry and Grafana) on a public cloud, including the engineering time to run it. You get a range, not a promise. Every price and assumption is listed at the bottom of the page.
Estimate
- Current bill
- – per month
- Self-hosted stack
- – per month – per year. Compute, storage and engineering time.
- Estimated saving
- – per month – per year.
Breakdown
Not included: the one-off migration effort, RUM, synthetics, security products, and any discount you have negotiated.
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Assumptions and sources (checked 2026-10-23)
List prices come from the public pricing pages below. Where a vendor does not publish a number, or where I had to estimate usage, the row says so. Low and high values are combined so that the saving range is the widest plausible one.
| Item | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Datadog Infrastructure Pro | USD 15–18 per host per month (annual / on demand) | Datadog pricing |
| Datadog custom metrics | 100 per host included; USD 1–5 per 100 above that. Datadog does not publish this rate ("specified in your current contract"), so USD 5 is the widely cited list figure and USD 1 an assumed negotiated rate. | Datadog custom metrics billing |
| Datadog logs | USD 0.10 per GB ingested, plus USD 1.70–2.55 per million events indexed with 15-day retention (annual / on demand). Longer retention is not published and costs more. | Datadog pricing |
| Datadog APM | USD 31–36 per host per month (annual / on demand) | Datadog pricing |
| New Relic data ingest | 100 GB per month free, then USD 0.40–0.60 per GB (original / Data Plus) | New Relic pricing |
| New Relic full platform users | Standard: USD 10 for the first user and USD 99 per additional user, up to 5 users. Pro: USD 349.00–418.80 per user per month (annual / pay as you go). The low case uses Standard for up to 5 users and Pro annual above that; the high case uses Pro pay as you go. | New Relic pricing |
| Compute node | AWS m7i.xlarge (4 vCPU, 16 GiB), USD 0.2415 per hour on demand, eu-central-1 Frankfurt | AWS EC2 on-demand pricing |
| Storage | EBS gp3 USD 0.0952 per GB-month; S3 Standard USD 0.0245 per GB-month (Frankfurt) | AWS EBS pricing |
| Exchange rate | 1 EUR = 1.1193 USD (ECB reference rate, 2026-10-23) | ECB euro reference rates |
| Item | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Datadog log events | About 1 KB per event; 50–100% of ingested logs also indexed | My estimate |
| New Relic data volume | 5–15 GB per host per month, 5–20 GB per APM host, custom series at 1 point per minute and 60–120 bytes per point | My estimate |
| New Relic users | One full platform user per 15 hosts, at least 2 | My estimate |
| Series per node | 1,000–3,000 series per Kubernetes node (node exporter, cAdvisor, kube-state-metrics), scraped every 30 s | My estimate |
| Metrics sizing | 0.75–1.5 million active series per 4 vCPU / 16 GiB node with 50% RAM and CPU spare; 0.5–1 bytes per sample on disk; 90–395 days retention | My estimate · VictoriaMetrics capacity planning |
| Logs sizing | 5–10x compression; 100–300 GB per day per node; your retention | My estimate · VictoriaLogs documentation |
| Traces sizing | 5–20 GB of spans per APM host per month in object storage; 25–50 APM hosts per node | My estimate |
| Availability | 1–2 copies of metrics and logs; 20% free disk; 1–2 nodes for Grafana, the OpenTelemetry gateway and alerting; agents use 3–6% of a node per host | My estimate |
| Infrastructure overhead | +10–25% for cross-zone traffic, snapshots and load balancers | My estimate |
| Engineering time | 6–16 h per month plus 0.04–0.1 h per host, at EUR 60–95 per hour (EU freelance platform engineer rates) | My estimate |
Sources
- Datadog pricing · 2026-10-23
- Datadog custom metrics billing · 2026-10-23
- New Relic pricing · 2026-10-23
- AWS EC2 on-demand pricing · 2026-10-23
- AWS EBS pricing · 2026-10-23
- AWS S3 pricing · 2026-10-23
- ECB euro reference rates · 2026-10-23
- VictoriaMetrics capacity planning · 2026-10-23
- VictoriaLogs documentation · 2026-10-23