New Relic has established itself as a top observability platform with full-stack monitoring. Unifying all telemetry data — metrics, events, logs, and traces — into one platform delivers deep performance insights and enables faster troubleshooting without juggling multiple tools.
Also, New Relic prioritizes developers with tools like CodeStream, integrating error details and telemetry directly into the IDE. This streamlines debugging, enabling developers to resolve issues more efficiently within their workflows.
Better yet, New Relic pricing is flat-rate per gigabyte of data ingested, regardless of the data source. Contrarily, the top New Relic alternatives tend to have complex pricing structures based on the number of hosts, users, or specific features you pick.
Yet, these benefits can come with unexpected costs. That’s why we are sharing this New Relic cost optimization guide to help keep your observability costs in check.
What Is Cost Optimization In New Relic (And Why Does It Matter)?
A common complaint is that observability costs often balloon over time as the volume of ingested and retained data grows — an issue with most platforms.
For example, some users report sudden bill increases without clear explanations of who, what, or why — often tied to excessive log ingestion.
One Reddit user shared how their costs skyrocketed from $900 to over $8,000 in a single month due to unexpected log data from New Relic’s integration.
The goal of cost optimization in New Relic is to cut unnecessary costs and maximize its return on investment. That said, optimizing New Relic costs is often easier said than done for several key reasons.
Why Is Managing New Relic Costs Tricky?
The biggest challenge is reducing unnecessary New Relic usage and costs without sacrificing data integrity, actionable insights, and other key benefits you’ve come to love.
But there’s something else.
New Relic follows a usage-based pricing model, where billing depends on data ingested and the number of billable users onboarded. While this model is straightforward, it can lead to unexpectedly high bills during overzealous development sessions or spikes in usage and website traffic.
For businesses with fluctuating data needs, or rapid data growth, this can quickly escalate costs as they scale operations.
Ultimately, users struggle to grasp the latest New Relic pricing model. In the next section, we’ll review some practical New Relic cost optimization strategies you can apply immediately to protect your margins.
New Relic Cost Optimization Best Practices To Maximize Savings
Here’s your roadmap to optimizing New Relic costs.
1. Get to grips with the New Relic pricing model
The first step is to understand what you’re paying for. For that, check out our detailed New Relic pricing guide here for a deep dive.
You now pay only for what you use. Here’s a quick refresher.
- Free Tier: You get 100 GB of data ingestion per month, one full platform user, and unlimited basic users.
- Standard Tier: Costs $49 per core user per month, includes 100 GB of data ingested and provides limited features and support.
- Pro Tier: Priced at $349 per full platform user per month. It includes advanced features, priority support, and commitment options.
- Enterprise Tier: Custom pricing based on specific needs, offering advanced security and tailored solutions.
Note that exceeding the free data limit costs $0.30 per GB for the additional data ingested.
At the same time, be sure to use unlimited free Basic Users. These users can query and alert on ingested data without incurring additional costs.
2. Put a leash on your telemetry data
Follow these steps to pick out and address the issue:
- Log in to New Relic. Check details about your data ingestion and user counts from the usage dashboard. You want to pinpoint which areas have seen usage spikes. You can access this through the usage UI, which lets you track high-usage areas and run custom NRQL queries for detailed analysis.
- Regularly review the amount of data ingested to stay within the free tier limit of 100 GB per month. You can use New Relic’s free demo account to analyze usage patterns and identify data ingestion spikes.
- Enable log filtering to minimize unnecessary log data sent to New Relic.
- Set up retention policies for logs to automatically delete older logs no longer needed. This can reduce your storage costs.
3. Limit billable users
Review user roles and permissions regularly. You’ll want to assign full platform access to essential team members only. Keep in mind New Relic billing also depends on the number of billable users you have.
4. Create usage alerts
Set up alerts for data ingestion and user count thresholds. This is a proactive step to help you catch unexpected increases early. For example, you can set up an NRQL query to alert you when your hourly usage exceeds a certain limit.
5. Investigate recent changes
Consider any recent changes to your setup, such as updated integrations or increased logging levels. Some users have reported that unexpected increases often correlate with changes in log ingestion settings or newly added services being monitored.
6. Reach out for clarification
In case of a cost spike, and the cause of the increase is unclear, contact New Relic support for assistance.
Provide them with details of your account and any relevant changes made prior to the billing spike. They can help clarify whether the increase is due to configuration issues or if there are other factors at play.
Keep these tips in mind:
- You must notify New Relic of any good-faith invoice disputes within 15 days of the invoice date. It must be in writing and should detail the nature of the dispute to ease resolution.
- If the dispute relates to charges billed in arrears, the notice must be received within three business days of the invoice date to be considered valid.
- Once you raise a dispute, keep in touch to provide any necessary information to clarify discrepancies.
- You’ll need to clear undisputed amounts in full by the payment due date (part of an invoice not contested).
If a resolution can’t be reached by the payment due date, you can pursue available remedies. This could involve more negotiations or legal options, if necessary.
7. Negotiate New Relic discounts with a partner
Software purchasing platforms like Vertice and Vantage can save you money on New Relic subscriptions. The platforms host peer buyers’ data to help you negotiate better contract terms and bulk discounts.
Better yet, the platforms can help you minimize duplicate purchases, automate requisition and approval processes, ensure compliance with your software procurement policies, and expedite purchase approvals.
8. Enter Cloud Optimize
The Cloud Optimize feature leverages telemetry data by making essential outbound calls to public cloud providers’ inventory APIs. Check this out:

New Relic’s Cloud Optimize dashboard
This gives you real-time pricing and sizing information for all VMs, along with plenty of right-sizing options. By integrating your usage data with pricing and sizing details from your cloud provider, the tool can help you pinpoint tailored New Relic cost optimization opportunities.
9. See who, what, and why your New Relic bill is changing
While Cloud Optimize can help you identify optimization opportunities, you may need more granular and actionable insights to understand which areas are driving your New Relic bill up. This is where a robust cloud cost optimization platform for New Relic comes in.
For instance, you might want to analyze which specific products, features, or individual customers are contributing to your costs.
- If you identify a high-cost customer, you can consider renegotiating their contract at renewal to better reflect their usage.
- By examining cost-per-feature insights, you can determine which features are used most frequently, allowing you to assess whether the costs stem from increased user activity, feature popularity, or unnecessary data transfers and logging.
This way, you can engage the relevant teams to nip the problem in the bud. This is the cloud cost intelligence way. Interested in this approach?
Optimize New Relic Costs With A Cloud Cost Intelligence Platform
CloudZero empowers you to achieve that and more. This includes gaining visibility into your New Relic costs by individual customers, products, teams, features, and other granular details.
You can also view your costs alongside those from other observability and data platforms. This pulls insights from Datadog, Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, MongoDB, and more — all in one place.
With this cost intelligence, innovative brands like Drift and Upstart have saved over $2.4 million and $20 million, respectively, using CloudZero. Here’s the next step: to see CloudZero in action.