The New Relic alternative that doesn't charge per seat

Last verified against published pricing on September 27, 2026.

TL;DR: New Relic's user-based pricing charges per seat as well as per GB. A 100-engineer team with 100 K8s hosts pays ~$19,250/month on the Pro edition, even with a mix of Full Platform ($349), Core ($49) and Basic (free) users. base14 Scout: $250/month platform fee + $0.10/M metrics + $0.25/M logs & traces, no per-seat charges, no backend sampling, 30-day retention. Same infrastructure, ~$5,375/month. Built on OpenTelemetry.

A payments company went from 45 to 100 engineers. The New Relic bill grew with it, and forced a decision about who gets full access and who does not.

They ended up with 30 Full Platform users at $349/month, 25 Core users at $49, and the rest on free Basic accounts.

The engineers on Basic can query data and build custom dashboards, but can't open the curated APM, distributed tracing or infrastructure views. During incidents, they rely on someone with a Full Platform seat.

New Relic is a capable platform. The APM is solid, the UI is polished, and NRQL is a powerful query language. The user-based pricing model is what makes teams look elsewhere: every engineer who needs the full product is another seat.

This page compares New Relic with base14 Scout on cost at scale, data retention, vendor lock-in and support.

Why engineering teams look for a New Relic alternative​

Teams rarely leave New Relic over product quality. They leave because seat pricing ties the bill to headcount, which pushes teams to limit who gets full access. What they want is unified observability that everyone on the team can use.

The per-seat pricing problem​

On user-based pricing, New Relic's cost has two axes: users and data.

The curated experiences teams use most during incidents - APM, distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, Kubernetes - need a Full Platform user at $349/user on Pro with an annual commitment. Teams work around this with a tiered license structure: Full Platform for SREs and on-call engineers, Core for developers who need logs, and Basic for everyone else.

The workaround reduces cost but creates access gaps. An engineer with Core access who needs to trace a failing request during an incident can't open APM or distributed tracing. An engineer on Basic can query the underlying data and build a custom dashboard, but can't open the infrastructure or APM views.

New Relic also offers compute-based pricing on Pro and Enterprise, billed in compute capacity units (CCUs) with no user licenses. It removes the seat axis and replaces it with a charge for the queries and features your team runs. Pricing is through New Relic sales.

Want to see what observability costs without a seat tax? Check base14's pricing: $250/month platform fee + $0.10/M metrics + $0.25/M logs & traces. You pay per telemetry event, not per person.

The Standard-to-Pro jump​

New Relic's Standard edition allows up to 5 Full Platform users: $10 for the first and $99 for each additional. A sixth Full Platform user means moving to Pro, at $349 per user with an annual commitment.

Five users on Standard cost $406/month. Six users on Pro cost $2,094/month, about five times as much for one more person.

Teams at this size often keep 5 Full Platform users and put everyone else on Core or Basic, with the access gaps described above.

The retention trade-off​

On the original data option, New Relic keeps APM events, distributed traces and browser data for 8 days. Logs, raw dimensional metrics and custom events keep 30 days, and aggregated metrics keep 13 months.

With 8 days of traces and APM events, a latency regression that started 10 days ago has no trace data left to explain it.

Data Plus, at $0.60/GB instead of $0.40/GB, adds up to 90 days of retention for most data types, so APM data goes from 8 to 98 days. It also adds FedRAMP Moderate and HIPAA eligibility, advanced log obfuscation and enhanced data export. Retention can also be extended as an add-on at $0.05/GB per 30 days added.

The feature breadth problem​

New Relic offers APM, Infrastructure, Logs, Browser, Mobile, Synthetics, Serverless, Kubernetes monitoring, Network monitoring, Vulnerability Management, CodeStream, Errors Inbox and more. The breadth is real.

In the evaluations we run, most teams use APM, Logs and Infrastructure. The platform's size has its own overhead: learning NRQL, navigating nested UIs, and understanding which data sources feed which dashboards. Regular users absorb that more easily than occasional ones.

What to look for in a New Relic alternative​

If New Relic's pricing is too expensive for your team size, define what "better" means before evaluating alternatives. Not every tool solves the same problem.

A New Relic replacement should provide:

• No per-seat pricing: Your observability cost should scale with data, not headcount.
• Unified signals: Logs, metrics and traces in one query surface, not scattered across tabs.
• Predictable pricing: One cost axis, not two (seats + data).
• OpenTelemetry support: Vendor-neutral instrumentation for portability.
• 30-day default retention across signals: Including traces, which New Relic keeps for 8 days on the original data option.
• Hands-on support: Engineers who know your setup, not only a ticket queue.

What changes when you drop per-seat pricing​

The table gives the overview. The sections below explain each difference.

What using Scout is like​

You open Scout, pick a service, and see logs, metrics and traces in one view, without moving between APM, Logs and Infrastructure as separate products.

The query language is standard SQL, not a proprietary DSL. Traces, logs and metrics sit in tables such as otel_traces, otel_logs and otel_metrics_gauge, with OpenTelemetry fields as columns. An NRQL query like this one:

SELECT average(duration) FROM Transaction
WHERE appName = 'checkout-service' SINCE 1 hour ago

becomes this in Scout, with span duration stored in nanoseconds:

SELECT avg(Duration) / 1e6 AS avg_ms
FROM otel_traces
WHERE ServiceName = 'checkout-service'
  AND Timestamp >= now() - INTERVAL 1 HOUR

Pricing: one axis instead of two​

On user-based pricing, New Relic charges on two axes that scale independently: per user and per GB of data ingested. Hiring engineers raises the bill, and so does generating more telemetry.

Even with an optimized license mix (30 Full Platform, 25 Core, 45 Basic for a 100-person team), seats are the larger part of the bill: ~$11,700/month on seats and ~$7,550/month on data. Seats are 61% of the total, with 70 of the 100 engineers on Core or Basic.

Scout's pricing has one axis: signals. A signal is a single telemetry event - a log line, a metric point, a trace span - and you pay a $250/month platform fee plus per-signal rates:

• Metrics: $0.10 per million signals.
• Logs & Trace spans: $0.25 per million signals.

Adding engineers does not change the bill, and neither does adding attributes such as stack traces to spans you already send. Sending more spans, log records or metric points does.

Estimating your signal count​

A typical microservice generating structured JSON logs, basic metrics and distributed traces produces roughly 50-100 million signals per month. A 20-service backend with moderate traffic lands between 1-2 billion signals/month total.

To convert your New Relic GB ingest to signal counts, assume about 1.3 KB per log line, about 0.8 KB per trace span and a few bytes per metric point. Divide your monthly GB by those sizes to get signal volume.

Access: gated by license vs everyone sees the data​

At an e-commerce company with 12 engineers and 5 Full Platform users, a junior engineer on a Basic account couldn't open the APM or tracing views during a checkout outage.

She asked the on-call lead to screen-share his view over Zoom while she ran commands on her laptop.

The debugging session took far longer than it should have. Most of the extra time was coordination: "scroll down," "click on that trace," "go back to the previous view." With direct access, she'd have found the failing database query much faster.

Seat limits also affect how engineers learn. Engineers who can't explore dashboards on quiet days build less debugging experience, which matters for the observability culture a team is trying to build.

When full access costs $349/month per person, teams tend to concentrate it in a small group of licensed engineers, who then field questions from everyone else.

Scout does not charge per seat. Every engineer, SRE and support engineer who wants to understand system health gets full access. The Startup tier covers up to 50 authorized users and Enterprise raises the limit.

Retention: 8 days for traces vs 30 days​

With 8 days of APM events and traces, your team can't answer "was this request slow last month?" from trace data. Logs keep 30 days on New Relic's original data option, and aggregated metrics keep 13 months, which is longer than Scout's default.

Scout retains 30 days of full-resolution data for logs, metrics and traces alike. Extended retention is available, without moving all ingest to a higher per-GB rate.

Data portability: proprietary vs OpenTelemetry-native​

New Relic supports OpenTelemetry alongside its proprietary agents. The ecosystem around it - NRQL queries, dashboard definitions, alert configs - is still proprietary. Your instrumentation can be portable while your dashboards, alerts and saved queries stay specific to New Relic.

Scout is built entirely on OpenTelemetry standards. No proprietary query language, no proprietary agents. Your OTel instrumentation works with any compatible backend. If you already have OTel running alongside your New Relic agents, you have a head start on migration.

Support: edition-based SLAs vs SRE partnership​

New Relic's support SLA depends on the edition: a 2 business day response on Standard, a 2-hour initial response for critical issues on Pro and a 1-hour initial response on Enterprise.

base14's SRE partnership is the same for every customer: assisted onboarding (first month free), fortnightly reliability reviews with a senior SRE, custom training, and 24/7 on-call support with response times under 15 minutes via Slack.

LLM observability: in APM vs in the same data lake​

If your applications call LLM APIs - OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, or any of 50+ providers - you need visibility into token usage, costs, latency and output quality. New Relic's AI Monitoring, part of its APM agents, tracks tokens, cost and latency and compares models for providers such as OpenAI and Bedrock.

Scout includes LLM observability in the same data lake as your logs, metrics, and traces, so an LLM cost spike can be queried against the deployment that changed the prompt template.

APM and RUM​

New Relic includes APM, browser and mobile monitoring in its platform, with session replay in Browser. Only Full Platform users can open the curated APM and tracing views, so APM access follows the seat count.

Scout includes APM as an app over your OpenTelemetry traces and metrics: RED metrics per service and operation, a service map, trace drill-down, grouped errors, database and messaging operations, and host and node health beside each service. RUM covers mobile apps (crashes, ANRs, app startup, screens, network calls and session timelines), and the React and Flutter web SDKs send browser telemetry, including Core Web Vitals, as spans that join backend traces. APM is included in the platform price. RUM is available on the Enterprise plan; talk to us for pricing. We're building session replay and code profiling with design partners, and teams that need them are welcome to join.

New Relic vs base14 Scout cost comparison​

This uses the same scenario as our other comparisons, with the tiered user mix most teams end up with.

Scenario: 100 hosts running Kubernetes (30 pods/host), 430 GB logs/day, 7.5B trace spans/month, 7.5B metric data points/month, 100 engineers, Pro edition, original data option, annual billing.

Signal volume ratio: 40% logs, 30% metrics, 30% traces (~25B total signals/month).

New Relic cost estimate​

Most teams don't put everyone on Full Platform. They use a tiered license mix:

Data ingest calculation:

• Logs: 430 GB/day × 30 = 12,900 GB.
• Traces: 7,500M spans × ~0.8 KB avg = ~6,000 GB.
• Metrics: 7,500M data points × ~10 bytes avg = ~75 GB.
• Total: ~18,975 GB/month.

Pricing as of September 2026. Published rates at newrelic.com/pricing, Pro edition with an annual commitment. On monthly pay-as-you-go terms, Full Platform users cost $418.80 per user. Negotiated contracts and compute-based pricing aren't modeled.

New Relic charges for these too, but they aren't in the estimate:

• Data Plus, at $0.60/GB instead of $0.40/GB, for more than 8 days of APM and trace data or for FedRAMP and HIPAA eligibility.
• Extended retention as an add-on, at $0.05/GB per 30 days added.
• Synthetic checks beyond the included amount, at $0.005 per check.
• The EU data center, at an extra $0.05/GB.
• Live Archives for long-term log storage, at $0.007/GB-month.

Even with an optimized mix, seat licenses are 61% of the bill. The 25 Core users can't open the curated APM, distributed tracing or infrastructure views, and the 45 Basic users also can't use the Logs UI. During incidents, those engineers rely on someone with Full Platform access.

base14 Scout cost estimate​

On Scout, every telemetry signal is metered - including infrastructure metrics. There are no per-seat charges.

No egress fees, no infrastructure to run and no feature add-ons.

During the parallel run you pay for both platforms, and a New Relic annual commitment runs until the end of its term.

New Relic: ~$230,940/year with the optimized license mix. Scout: ~$64,500/year. The annual difference is ~$166,000, and every engineer gets full access instead of a tiered subset.

Want to verify these numbers with your actual telemetry volumes? Book a demo and we'll build the comparison with your real data.

Try it: one-week proof of concept​

base14 runs a structured one-week PoC with every evaluating team:

1. Pick a subset of services - typically 3-5 services that represent your stack (one high-traffic, one with complex traces, one that's been problematic).
2. We build custom dashboards and alerts - not generic templates. Dashboards that mirror what your team uses in New Relic today, rebuilt in Scout with SQL queries your engineers can read and modify.
3. Your team uses it for a week - real traffic, real incidents if they happen, real debugging sessions. Every engineer gets access from day one.
4. Compare side by side - same services, same time window, both platforms. Your team decides which one answers their questions faster.

The PoC is free. The onboarding team handles collector configuration, dashboard creation and alert setup, so your engineers spend their time evaluating.

Book a one-week PoC and see Scout on your own services before committing to anything.

Migration: from New Relic to base14 Scout​

Switching from New Relic doesn't require re-instrumenting your applications. New Relic already supports OpenTelemetry, and you run both platforms for about a month before the cutover.

Adopt or extend OpenTelemetry instrumentation​

If you already send OTel data to New Relic, you have a head start. If not, install OpenTelemetry SDKs alongside your existing New Relic agents. Both can run at once.

Point the collector at Scout​

Configure an OpenTelemetry Collector to export to base14 Scout. Keep a copy flowing to New Relic during the transition; the collector supports multiple exporters. For the full setup, see building a production-ready OTel collector.

Run both in parallel​

Run both platforms side by side for 2-4 weeks. Compare dashboards, verify alert coverage, and make sure your team can answer the same questions in Scout that they answer in New Relic today.

Our onboarding team works with your engineers during this period.

Dashboard recreation usually takes longer than collector setup: expect 2-3 days on the collector and 1-2 weeks refining dashboards and alerts. Our onboarding engineers do most of the work, but your team knows what questions the dashboards need to answer, so plan time for that conversation.

Decommission the New Relic agents​

Once your team is confident, remove the New Relic agents and cancel the subscription. Your OTel instrumentation stays. If you ever want to evaluate another backend, you change collector configuration, not application code.

The whole process takes 4-6 weeks for a mid-size team. Our onboarding assistance (first month free) covers the migration hands-on. Get started here.

What changes after migration​

After one SaaS team migrated from New Relic, a junior engineer noticed memory usage on a service creeping up steadily over several days.

She flagged it in the team's Slack channel with a Scout dashboard link.

Under New Relic she had a Basic account, without the curated infrastructure views where she would have seen the trend. The leak would likely have surfaced weeks later, when the service hit its memory limit and crashed.

Instead, a senior engineer confirmed the leak, traced it to a connection pool that wasn't releasing properly, and shipped a fix the same afternoon, with no incident and no page.

When every engineer can see the data, problems tend to surface earlier. See factors influencing MTTR.

Who should switch (and who shouldn't)​

Switch to base14 Scout if​

• Your team is large and growing. Past Standard's five Full Platform users, you decide who gets Full Platform, Core or Basic. Scout has no per-seat axis to manage.
• Cost predictability matters. Two cost axes (seats + data) make New Relic bills harder to forecast. One cost axis (signals) makes budgeting simpler.
• You want open standards. OTel-native instrumentation means your telemetry is portable, without proprietary agents or query languages.
• You want every trace kept. Scout does no backend sampling. New Relic's APM agents sample traces adaptively unless you use Infinite Tracing.
• Longer trace retention matters. Scout keeps 30 days for all signals, against 8 days for APM events and traces on New Relic's original data option, without a Data Plus premium.

Stay on New Relic if​

• Your team has 5 or fewer engineers who need full access. New Relic's Standard edition costs $10 for the first Full Platform user and $99/user for up to four more. The free tier (one Full Platform user, unlimited Basic users, 100 GB a month) covers solo developers.
• Your team has deep NRQL expertise. Scout uses standard SQL, which most engineers already know. But if your runbooks and on-call workflows have years of NRQL queries baked in, factor in the time to convert them. It's typically hours, not weeks, but it's real work.
• You need long metric history at the default price. New Relic keeps aggregated metrics for 13 months.
• You'd rather pay for compute than for seats. New Relic's compute-based pricing on Pro and Enterprise has no user licenses.

The hybrid approach​

OTel instrumentation can send data to multiple backends at once. Many teams run New Relic and Scout in parallel during evaluation, so the switch happens gradually rather than in one cutover.

See how Scout replaces New Relic's seat tax with signal-based pricing.

FAQ​

Can base14 Scout at ~$5,375/month replace New Relic at ~$19,250/month?​

See the cost comparison above. In the example, 61% of New Relic's cost is seat licenses, a cost axis Scout doesn't have, and every engineer gets full access. Scout stores every signal it receives at full resolution for 30 days.

What do I lose compared to New Relic?​

Scout RUM covers web and mobile: clicks, navigation, HTTP requests, errors, native crashes, ANRs and Core Web Vitals, all correlated with backend traces. We're building session replay and profiling with design partners; if you rely on either, talk to us about joining. New Relic also keeps aggregated metrics for 13 months by default. For backend observability, logs, metrics, traces, APM, and LLM telemetry, Scout is a full replacement.

Do I need to learn a new query language to move from New Relic?​

No. Scout uses standard SQL. This query lists the checkout service's operations with spans slower than 500 ms (durations are stored in nanoseconds):

SELECT SpanName, count(*) AS slow_spans
FROM otel_traces
WHERE ServiceName = 'checkout'
  AND Duration > 500000000
GROUP BY SpanName

NRQL queries translate clause by clause: FROM Transaction becomes FROM otel_traces, appName becomes ServiceName, and SINCE becomes a condition on Timestamp.

Can I use my existing New Relic OTel instrumentation?​

Yes. If you've already configured OTel exporters for New Relic, add Scout as a second exporter. Run both platforms in parallel without re-instrumenting a single service.

How long does migration from New Relic take?​

4-6 weeks for a typical mid-size team. The most time-consuming part is dashboard recreation, not instrumentation. Our onboarding team handles dashboard setup, alert configuration, and collector tuning during the first month (free).

Can I try Scout before committing to a full migration from New Relic?​

Yes. We run a one-week proof of concept on a subset of your services with custom dashboards and alerts. No migration required. Your team evaluates Scout on real traffic alongside New Relic.

Is base14 Scout enterprise-ready?​

SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliant. Enterprise tier includes eBPF support and bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) deployment on AWS, GCP, and Azure. Data residency options and custom SLAs available. We work with teams in regulated industries.

What support is included with base14 Scout?​

Every customer gets an SRE partnership: 24/7 support with response times under 15 minutes via Slack, fortnightly reliability reviews with a senior SRE, assisted onboarding (first month free), and custom training. No premium tier required.

Why does New Relic get expensive for large teams?​

On user-based pricing, each engineer who needs APM, tracing or infrastructure views needs a Full Platform seat. A 100-person team with 100 K8s hosts pays ~$19,245/month on Pro even with an optimized license mix (30 Full Platform, 25 Core, 45 Basic). Seat licenses are still 61% of the bill, and 70 of 100 engineers can't open the curated APM, tracing or infrastructure views.

How does signal-based pricing compare to per-GB pricing?​

Signal-based pricing charges per event (log line, trace span, metric data point) regardless of size. Per-GB pricing charges by data volume, so adding stack traces or metadata increases cost. Signal-based pricing removes the incentive to strip context. Scout: $250/month platform fee + $0.10/M metrics + $0.25/M logs & traces. No per-seat charges at any volume.

What is the best New Relic alternative for growing teams?​

base14 Scout suits teams whose New Relic bill grows with headcount. Pricing is per signal, with no per-seat or per-user charges, so every engineer gets full access. It's OpenTelemetry-native, so existing OTel instrumentation for New Relic points at Scout without changes.

How much cheaper is base14 Scout than New Relic?​

For 100 Kubernetes hosts and 100 engineers on the Pro edition, New Relic costs ~$19,245/month ($230,940 a year) in the example above. Scout costs ~$5,375/month ($64,500 a year) for the same telemetry. Most of the difference is New Relic's seat licenses.

Ready to drop the seat tax?​

Book a one-week PoC on your own services. We build the dashboards. Your team evaluates on real traffic.

• No long-term contracts. Month-to-month.
• Free onboarding and migration assistance (first month).
• OpenTelemetry-native. Your instrumentation stays portable.

Related reading​

• How to evaluate an observability platform
• The Datadog alternative that doesn't charge per host
• The CloudWatch alternative that doesn't stop at AWS
• The GCP monitoring alternative that doesn't price metrics by type
• Observability cost optimization: why the pricing model matters more than your data volume
• The problem with observability theatre
• Multi-cloud design and vendor neutrality