# Grafana Cloud

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/observability/grafana-cloud/

Hosted Grafana, Loki, Mimir and Tempo with a small platform fee, usage billing and unusually long metrics retention.

## Who it suits

Metrics-heavy monitoring where 13 months of retention matters — that window is an order of magnitude beyond what the error trackers and most telemetry platforms keep.

Consider something else if Logs and traces get 30 days rather than 13 months, so the headline retention figure does not describe most of what you send it.

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://grafana.com/pricing/), read 2026-09-06)
- Entry paid plan: $19/month platform fee for Pro, which includes 10,000 active series before usage billing starts. ([source](https://grafana.com/pricing/), read 2026-09-06)
- Pricing model: A $19 platform fee plus metered usage, with volume discounts applied automatically rather than negotiated. The enterprise tier starts at a $25,000 annual spend commitment. ([source](https://grafana.com/pricing/), read 2026-09-06)

### Observability

- Retention window: 13 months for metrics and 30 days for logs, traces, profiles and k6 tests on Pro. The free tier is 14 days for everything. ([source](https://grafana.com/pricing/), read 2026-09-06)
- Self-hostable: Supported ([source](https://grafana.com/pricing/), read 2026-09-06)
- Ingest price per GB: From $0.050 per GB processed, falling to $0.046 above 10,000 GB and $0.044 above 25,000 with automatic volume discounts. ([source](https://grafana.com/pricing/), read 2026-09-06)

## Compared with

- [Grafana Cloud vs SigNoz](https://inetgeek.com/compare/signoz-vs-grafana-cloud/)
- [Grafana Cloud vs OpenObserve](https://inetgeek.com/compare/grafana-cloud-vs-openobserve/)
- [Grafana Cloud vs Axiom](https://inetgeek.com/compare/axiom-vs-grafana-cloud/)
- [Grafana Cloud vs Datadog](https://inetgeek.com/compare/datadog-vs-grafana-cloud/)