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There's a free plan; paid tiers are quoted.
Prometheus costs $0 for its listed Open Source plan, licensed under Apache 2.0. The pricing information lists no monthly or annual billing, seat cap, or usage cap, and no paid plans or add-ons. That makes the software price straightforward, not the total cost of running it: Prometheus servers use local storage, so teams need to account for their own operating setup. Hosting, storage, support, and service-level pricing are not published here.
01Every plan, line by line
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Built for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Source | — | $0 | Teams needing open-source monitoring |
02What the plan grid doesn't tell you
Infrastructure not included
The Open Source software is free; independent Prometheus servers use local storage. Infrastructure costs are separate, and no hosting estimate is published.
Storage responsibility
The plan details publish no storage allowance or retention limit. Local storage makes capacity planning part of your deployment.
No other plan listed
Only Open Source is listed. No managed plan, support fee, or service-level price is provided in the published pricing information.
Limits are unpublished
No seat or usage limits are published. That is not a stated guarantee of unlimited capacity or performance.
03Which plan should you buy?
| If you are… | Get | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Teams wanting free monitoring | Open Source | The listed plan costs $0 and is Apache 2.0 licensed; no seat or usage limits are published. |
| PromQL alerting teams | Open Source | It includes PromQL queries and alerting rules; Alertmanager handles notifications and silencing. |
| Cloud-native service operators | Open Source | Prometheus is designed to discover and monitor cloud-native services, but its servers rely on local storage. |
04Is Prometheus worth the money?
Prometheus is worth considering if you want metrics collection, PromQL queries, and alerting without a software subscription: the listed Open Source plan is $0 and Apache 2.0 licensed. The trade-off is operational, not a plan upgrade: independent servers use local storage, and the published pricing information gives no hosting, support, or service-level prices. We would treat it as a strong free base—not a zero-cost monitoring stack—until your deployment and storage costs are known.
Prometheus pricing FAQ
What is Prometheus used for?
Prometheus collects, stores, and queries metrics for monitoring, alerts, dashboards, and other uses. Its dimensional data model identifies time series by metric name and key-value pairs, while PromQL supports querying and transforming them. It can discover and monitor services in cloud-native environments.
How much does AWS cost per month?
Prometheus pricing is $0 for the listed Open Source software, but this information does not include an AWS monthly estimate. Prometheus servers use local storage; any AWS infrastructure bill depends on a deployment that is not priced here. We can't give a reliable monthly figure from the published pricing details.
Is Prometheus the same as Grafana?
Prometheus is the metrics system described here: it collects, stores, and queries time series and supports alerting. The published material does not describe Grafana's features or pricing, so it does not support a full product-by-product comparison. Check Grafana's current product and pricing details before choosing between them.
What is Prometheus vs Splunk?
The published information describes Prometheus as open-source software for collecting, storing, and querying metrics, with PromQL and alerting rules. It includes no Splunk features or prices, so we can't make a sourced product-by-product comparison or assess total cost against Splunk from these details alone.