Analytics and monitoring decision
Grafana Cloud
A single engineer can assemble a useful self-hosted stack (Prometheus+Loki+Tempo+Grafana) for observability, but Grafana Cloud’s managed scaling, compliance certifications, adaptive telemetry cost-optimization, and enterprise support are hard to fully replicate.
Visit website↗$19/mo
$228/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$200/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 11 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Grafana Cloud alternatives, with the arithmetic →
Code Grafana Cloud publishes itself
Not a way out of the subscription - these are the vendor’s own repositories. Worth a look for how they build, and for anything you would have to integrate with.
- grafana/grafana★76,138 GitHub starsAGPL-3.0The open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more. ↗
- grafana/k6★31,198 GitHub starsAGPL-3.0A modern load testing tool, using Go and JavaScript↗
- grafana/loki★28,678 GitHub starsAGPL-3.0Like Prometheus, but for logs.↗
- grafana/pyroscope★11,616 GitHub starsAGPL-3.0Continuous Profiling Platform. Debug performance issues down to a single line of code↗
What a replacement has to do
- Collect telemetry (metrics/logs/traces), store/query it, visualize with dashboards, and send basic alerts.
What it still won’t have
- SLA-backed uptime and enterprise support
- Compliance certifications (FedRAMP, PCI DSS, SOC2) out of the box
- Adaptive telemetry cost-optimization and usage-based platform features
- Scale and operational experience for large-scale ingestion and retention tuning
- Integrated managed integrations and polished multi-tenant UX
What remains hard
- Compliance and regulation
FEDRAMP Compliant
- Brand trust
Trusted by everyone from startups to the Fortune 500
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 11 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted observability stack on a single cloud account using: Prometheus (metrics), Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and Grafana OSS for visualization. In scope: automated Terraform (or Cloud CLI) deployment of one small k8s cluster or VM, Helm charts for Prometheus/Loki/Tempo, Grafana setup with provisioning for one dashboard template, ingest via OpenTelemetry/Prometheus exporters, basic alerting to email or webhook, scripted backups for data directories, and an automated health-check. Out of scope: long-term retention tuning, adaptive telemetry aggregation algorithms, enterprise-grade multi-tenant scaling, and compliance certification. Include error handling, logging, and unit/integration tests for deployment scripts and a README with restoration and upgrade steps.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productGrafana Cloud (home)
- official pricingGrafana Pricing
- official docsGrafana Docs
- open sourceopenobserve/openobserve
- open sourcehyperdxio/hyperdx
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
