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 $349. Those are host monitoring costs only. Logs, traces and custom metrics are not in any of these numbers.

Essentials wins here on agent price alone. Pro and Business also raise monitor limits, seats and metric history (14 and 30 days against 7), so check the plan limits before you settle on the cheapest row.

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 pick the plan with the lowest total at your host count, base price plus 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, and they are sold on every paid plan, which is why a smaller plan plus overage often wins on price. 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. Datadog also has a free tier for up to 5 hosts with 1 day of metric retention, which I leave out of the model because 1 day of history is a trial window rather than a production setup.
• New Relic: an estimate, and the least precise number on this page. The first full platform user is free forever, so of the 2 seats you set I bill 1 at $349 per month on an annual pool commitment. On top of that I add $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. I default to two full platform users because the free seat only covers one person: set it to 1 and New Relic comes out at $0 here, which is the honest answer for a solo developer under 100 GB. New Relic also sells cheaper core user seats, so your effective seat price may be lower.
• 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

The first full platform user is free forever, and every seat after that costs the same whether you monitor 3 servers or 300. That makes New Relic look free for a solo developer, punishing for a small team, and reasonable at large host counts. The break comes from ingest, not hosts: at 2 GB per host per month you reach the free 100 GB at 50 hosts and start paying past it, and only then does host count move the bill.

Hyperping bundles first, then charges per agent

A plan covers a block of agents, and every host past that block is a flat $2 a month ($1.50 on Business). So the cost per host keeps falling as the fleet grows. At 5 hosts on Essentials you pay $4.80 per host. At 20 hosts on the same plan you pay $2.70. That is also why the cheapest total for your host count is not always the plan you would guess from the pricing page: a smaller plan plus overage agents often beats the plan that includes every agent, at the cost of lower monitor, seat and history limits.

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.

Frequently asked questions

On public list prices in 2026, Datadog Infrastructure Pro is $15 per host per month on annual billing and $18 on demand. Netdata Business is $4 per node per month on annual billing. Hyperping bundles agents into the plan, which works out to about $3.40 per host at 10 hosts on Essentials. New Relic gives away the first full platform user, then charges $549 per month per seat at list ($349 on an annual pool commitment) plus $0.35 per GB of ingest above a free 100 GB, so its per host cost falls as the fleet grows.

New Relic charges for full platform user seats rather than hosts. The first seat is free forever, so a solo developer can pay nothing. The second full platform user is $549 per month at list, or $349 on an annual pool commitment, and that price is the same whether you monitor 3 servers or 300. Ingest is free to 100 GB per month, and at 2 GB of host metrics per host per month you reach that free tier at 50 hosts, so below that the bill is almost entirely seats.

No. It compares infrastructure and host monitoring only, because that is the one line item all four vendors price per host. Log ingest and retention, custom metrics, APM hosts, indexed spans, RUM and synthetic volume are excluded. On Datadog and New Relic those lines often cost more than the host line, so the totals here are a floor rather than a quote.

Free includes 1 server agent with 2 days of metric history and no server alerting. Essentials is $24 a month on annual billing with 5 agents and 7 days of history. Pro is $74 with 20 agents and 14 days. Business is $249 with 100 agents and 30 days. Extra agents are $2 a month on Essentials and Pro, and $1.50 on Business, so a smaller plan plus overage agents is sometimes the cheapest total.

Netdata Business at $4 per node has the lowest headline per host rate, and Netdata Community is free. On annual billing Hyperping works out cheaper at most host counts because agents come bundled into the plan. The real difference is scope: Netdata gives per second metrics and per process detail, while Hyperping bundles uptime checks, on-call schedules and status pages into the same price.

Linux with systemd and macOS with launchd, on both amd64 and arm64. Windows is not supported yet. Datadog, New Relic and Netdata all ship Windows agents, which is worth checking before you compare on price alone.