Server Monitoring Cost Calculator

Compare Datadog, New Relic, Netdata and Hyperping on public list prices, by host count.

At 10 hosts on annual billing, the cheapest of the four is Hyperping at $34 a month. Hyperping comes to $34, Netdata $40, Datadog $150 and New Relic $549. Those are host monitoring costs only. Logs, traces and custom metrics are not in any of these numbers.

Cost breakdown at 10 hosts

How this is calculated

Every figure comes from public list pricing checked in July 2026. No negotiated rate, no startup credit, no volume discount. Here is every assumption in the model.

• Hyperping: I take the cheapest plan whose included agents cover your host count, then add per agent overage. Free covers 1 agent at $0. Essentials is $24 a month on annual billing ($29 monthly) with 5 agents. Pro is $74 ($89) with 20 agents. Business is $249 ($299) with 100 agents. Extra agents are $2 a month on Essentials and Pro, $1.50 on Business. Agent count is the only variable used to pick the plan, so if you also need more monitors, seats or metric history, your real plan may sit a tier higher.
• Datadog Infrastructure Pro: $15 per host per month on annual billing, $18 per host per month on demand. This covers hosts only. Custom metrics past the included allotment, containers past the included ratio, APM hosts, indexed spans, log ingest and log retention are all billed on top and are not modelled here.
• New Relic: an estimate, and the least precise number on this page. I model 1 full platform user at $549 per month list, plus $0.35 per GB of data ingest above the free 100 GB per month, assuming 2 GB of host metrics ingest per host per month. At 10 hosts that is 20 GB, so nothing is billable on ingest. Both inputs are editable above because real ingest depends entirely on what you send. New Relic also sells several user tiers, so your seat price may be lower than $549.
• Netdata Business: $4 per node per month on annual billing. Netdata Community is free and self hosted, and is not in this comparison because it has no vendor bill to compare.
• Annual totals are the monthly figure times 12. The comparison against Hyperping is an annual difference.

What this calculator does not model: log ingest and retention, custom metrics, APM hosts, indexed spans, synthetic check volume, container and serverless pricing, data transfer, support tiers, or any commitment discount. On Datadog and New Relic those lines routinely cost more than the host line, so treat the numbers here as a floor rather than a quote.

How server monitoring pricing actually behaves

Datadog scales linearly, so the bill tracks your fleet exactly

At $15 per host per month, 10 hosts is $150 and 100 hosts is $1,500. There is no bundling, which makes the bill easy to forecast and expensive to grow into. The surprises on a Datadog invoice come from the lines this calculator ignores, especially custom metrics and indexed spans.

New Relic is a seat cost first and a host cost second

A full platform user costs the same whether you monitor 3 servers or 300. That makes New Relic look punishing at small host counts and reasonable at large ones. The break comes from ingest, not hosts: at 2 GB per host per month you cross the free 100 GB at 50 hosts, and only then does host count start moving the bill.

Hyperping steps rather than scales

Because agents come bundled into the plan, the cost per host drops sharply just after each plan boundary and climbs back as you fill the plan with overage agents. At 5 hosts on Essentials you pay $4.80 per host. At 20 hosts on the same plan you pay $2.70. The step pattern is why the cheapest plan for your host count is not always the one you would guess from the pricing page.

Netdata is flat and cheap until you count the work

$4 per node is the lowest per host rate of the four. The Community edition is free. What you take on is running your own parents, storage and retention, and wiring alerting and status communication yourself. That labour does not show up in any pricing table.

What you get on the Hyperping row

So the Hyperping column is not a black box, here is exactly what the agent collects every 30 seconds:

• CPU time per state (user, system, iowait) as a percentage of wall clock, 1, 5 and 15 minute load averages, logical core count and a per core breakdown
• Memory used, available and total in bytes, plus utilization percentage
• Filesystem used and free space per real mount point, with device, mountpoint and filesystem type
• Disk I/O read and write bytes per block device
• Network bytes in and out per interface, with TX and RX rates derived in the dashboard
• Host metadata: hostname, machine ID, OS, kernel, architecture, CPU model, boot time and agent version

The agent installs with one command, embeds an OpenTelemetry collector and uses metric names that match the OpenTelemetry hostmetrics receiver conventions. It sits around 50 MB of RSS and queues to disk at /var/lib/hyperping/queue so a network outage does not lose data. Full list in the metrics collected docs.

Not collected, so you do not find out later: per process CPU and memory, per container and per pod metrics, swap and paging, packet errors and dropped packet counters. Windows hosts are not supported yet.