New Relic Synthetic Monitoring Pricing and Cost per Check

New Relic charges $0.005 per synthetic check above your edition's included allowance, and nothing at all for ping monitors, which are free and unlimited on every edition including the free one. That makes New Relic simultaneously the cheapest and the most expensive synthetic vendor in the market: plain uptime checking costs zero, and everything else costs the highest per-run rate any major vendor publishes, ten times Datadog's API rate and twenty times Checkly's.

There is no middle. A New Relic synthetic check is either free or it is the market maximum, and which one you get is decided entirely by whether the monitor type is "ping". That is an unusual pricing shape and it is worth understanding before you build a synthetics estate on it, because the allowances that sit between the two are much smaller than they look.

The rate, verified

These figures come from New Relic's own documentation rather than a summary of it, and two separate documentation pages state them identically. The billing rule is that included checks apply to all monitor types except the simple ping monitor.

Note what is missing from that table: a browser premium. Every other vendor charges far more for a browser run than an API run, usually by an order of magnitude and sometimes by twenty-five times. New Relic charges one flat rate for everything it bills. Only AWS CloudWatch Synthetics does the same, and AWS does it at $0.0012 rather than $0.005.

The allowances, and how fast they actually run out

Each edition includes a monthly allowance of billable checks. The ladder is steep and oddly shaped: 20 times from Free to Standard, then 100 times to Pro, then 10 times to Enterprise.

The right-hand column is the one that surprises people. A 30 day month contains 43,200 minutes, so a single scripted check running every minute from a single location consumes 43,200 checks. The free edition's 500 checks cover about eight hours of that. Standard's 10,000 cover under seven days. Neither allowance is sized for a monitor you intend to leave running, which means that on Free and Standard the allowance is best understood as a trial rather than a budget.

What one monitor costs per month

Multiply the interval into checks, then by $0.005. One non-ping monitor, one location, 30 day month:

Ten scripted monitors from three locations at a five minute interval is 259,200 checks, or $1,296 a month before a single user seat or a gigabyte of ingest. The same ten monitors at one minute is $6,480 a month. Those are large numbers for ten checks, and they are the reason the ping exemption matters so much: run those same ten as ping monitors and the line is $0.

The upgrade crossover nobody publishes

Because the overage rate is fixed and the allowances jump by orders of magnitude, there is a point where buying a bigger edition is cheaper than paying overage on a smaller one. Standard's first full platform user is $10 a month and Pro's is $349, so the seat delta is $339. Set that equal to the overage:

$339 divided by $0.005 is 67,800 checks. Add Standard's 10,000 included and the break-even lands at 77,800 non-ping checks a month, which is 1.8 monitors running every minute, or 9 monitors running every five minutes.

That is a remarkably low threshold. Fewer than two continuously running one-minute scripted checks is enough to make a $349 Pro seat the cheaper option than staying on Standard. Above that line, the overage on Standard grows without limit while Pro's million included checks sit unused. At a million checks a month, Standard's overage alone would be $4,950 against Pro's $349.

The practical reading: on New Relic, synthetics is not really a per-check product with tiers attached. It is an edition decision that a very small amount of scripted monitoring forces on you.

How the rate compares to the rest of the market

Normalized to cost per single run, against the other metered vendors we track:

On API and HTTP checks New Relic is the most expensive vendor here by a wide margin: 20 times Checkly, 10 times Datadog and Grafana, and just over 4 times AWS. On browser checks it is mid-table, cheaper than Datadog and Checkly and level with Grafana. So the shape of your estate decides everything. A team running mostly scripted API checks pays the market's worst rate. A team running mostly browser journeys pays something reasonable. The full cross-vendor breakdown, including the base fees and included allowances that change these numbers at low volume, is in our synthetic monitoring pricing comparison.

The rest of the bill

Synthetics is rarely the largest line on a New Relic invoice. Two other meters usually dominate it.

Data ingest. The first 100 GB a month is free, then $0.40 per GB on the Original data option or $0.60 per GB on Data Plus. Synthetic check results, logs, traces and metrics all land in the same pool, so a noisy application pushes the synthetics decision around indirectly.

Users. Basic users are free and unlimited. Core users are $49 each. Full platform users are where the money is: $10 for the first and $99 for each additional on Standard, capped at five, and $349 each on Pro with annual commitment, or $418.80 month to month. Because the synthetics crossover above is driven by that seat price, the two meters are entangled in a way the pricing page does not make obvious.

One tactic worth knowing if ingest is what is hurting: a lot of teams stop shipping everything into the platform and instead route the raw events into their own warehouse, keeping only what they query day to day in New Relic. That turns an open-ended per-GB charge into storage you control, and the plumbing to move data between your apps, APIs and databases is usually a smaller project than renegotiating an observability contract.

When New Relic synthetics is the right buy

It is the right buy when you are already on New Relic for APM and your synthetic needs are mostly availability. The free unlimited ping monitors are genuinely free, they sit next to your application traces, and correlating a failed check with the deploy that caused it is worth real money. Nobody else gives away unlimited uptime checking inside a full APM platform.

It is the wrong buy when synthetics is the product you actually want. At $0.005 a check you are paying a platform rate for a commodity, and if you are not using the APM side you are funding it anyway. Teams in that position generally do better on a flat-rate uptime tool, where a hundred monitors at a 30 second interval is a fixed monthly figure rather than a function of how often they run. We price that market in the uptime monitoring pricing comparison, and the two vendors people weigh most often against a metered platform are broken down in detail on our UptimeRobot pricing and Better Stack pricing pages.

Common questions

How much does New Relic synthetic monitoring cost?

Non-ping synthetic checks cost $0.005 each above your edition's included allowance, which is 500 a month on Free, 10,000 on Standard, 1 million on Pro and 10 million on Enterprise. Ping monitors are free and unlimited on every edition. One scripted check running every minute from one location costs $216 a month.

Are ping monitors free in New Relic?

Yes. New Relic's documentation states that ping monitors are included as part of every New Relic edition at no extra cost, and that the included check allowance applies to all monitor types except the simple ping monitor. There is no published cap on ping monitor volume, which makes New Relic unusual among APM platforms.

What counts as a billable synthetic check?

Every monitor type except simple ping: simple browser, scripted browser, scripted API and step monitors. Each execution of one of those from one location counts as one check. Running the same monitor from three locations every five minutes is three checks every five minutes, or 25,920 checks a month.

Is New Relic synthetic monitoring expensive?

For scripted API checks, yes. At $0.005 per run it is roughly 20 times Checkly's rate and 10 times Datadog's, the highest published per-run price among the major synthetic vendors. For browser checks it is competitive, cheaper than both Datadog and Checkly. For plain availability checking it is free, which no competitor matches.

When should I upgrade from Standard to Pro for synthetics?

At about 77,800 billable checks a month. Below that, paying overage on Standard is cheaper. Above it, the $339 seat difference between Standard's first full platform user and Pro's costs less than the overage you avoid. That threshold is under two monitors running at a one minute interval, so it arrives much earlier than most teams expect.