New Relic gives away more than almost anyone: 100GB of data ingest every month and 500 synthetic checks, free, permanently. It is a genuine offer rather than a trial. It also has the sharpest failure mode in this comparison — go over 100GB and data ingestion stops entirely and you lose platform access until you upgrade or the month rolls over.
From $5 a month · No check quotas · Set up in under a minute
Is New Relic Synthetics worth it?
As part of a New Relic estate, yes. As a standalone uptime monitor, the free 500 checks a month works out at roughly one check every 90 minutes for a single URL, which is not monitoring in any useful sense. The free tier is generous for observability and thin for synthetics specifically, and the 100GB cliff means the free plan can take your entire platform offline at the worst possible moment.
New Relic Synthetics is the synthetic monitoring component of the wider New Relic observability platform. It runs scripted and simple checks against endpoints and browser journeys, reporting alongside APM, infrastructure and log data.
Pricing works on two axes at once. Data ingest is measured in gigabytes — 100GB free each month, then $0.40 per GB on Original Data or $0.60 on Data Plus. Synthetic checks are counted per execution, with 500 a month on the free edition, 10,000 included on Standard, and overage at $0.005 per check.
The detail worth reading twice: exceed 100GB in a calendar month and ingestion stops and platform access is lost until you upgrade or the next month begins. A free monitoring tool that can switch itself off during a busy month is a different risk profile from a free tool that simply stops adding monitors.
Strong platform economics, if synthetics are part of something bigger.
Permanently, not as a trial. For a small estate this covers a lot of real observability at no cost.
Checks sit alongside APM, infrastructure, logs and browser monitoring, so a failure has context immediately.
Multi-step journeys as well as simple availability, from managed locations.
$0.005 per check beyond the allowance, which is cheap per unit and easy to reason about.
Enough for genuine monitoring once you are on a paid edition.
The platform's alerting applies to synthetics without separate tooling.
Two meters: gigabytes ingested and checks executed.
| Item | Free edition | Paid | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data ingest | 100GB/month | $0.40/GB | $0.60/GB on Data Plus |
| Synthetic checks | 500/month | 10,000 on Standard | Overage $0.005 per check |
| Exceeding 100GB free | Ingest stops | — | Platform access lost until upgrade or next month |
Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement. Every figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.
New Relic is an observability platform that includes synthetics; we are a monitoring service. If you want APM traces, infrastructure metrics and logs in one place, we do not compete and should not be considered.
For checking things on a schedule, the comparison is stark. Their free tier allows 500 checks a month, which spread across a single URL is roughly one check every 90 minutes. Our $5 plan checks 25 monitors every five minutes, which is about 216,000 checks a month, and nothing is counted.
The 100GB cliff is the difference in risk worth naming. Their free plan can stop ingesting and lock you out of the platform during a busy month. Ours does not have a meter that can do that — if you are inside your monitor count, the checks run.
The honest split: observability across a real engineering estate — theirs, and the free ingest allowance is genuinely good. Knowing that sites, certificates, domains and pages are fine, at a frequency that counts as monitoring — ours.
Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.
There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.
The free edition includes 100GB of data ingest a month and 500 synthetic checks. Both are permanent rather than a trial, but 500 checks is a small allowance for uptime monitoring specifically.
Data ingestion stops and you lose platform access until you either upgrade to a paid edition or the next calendar month begins. This is the most important thing to understand about the free tier.
One URL checked every five minutes is about 8,640 checks a month. The free allowance of 500 covers roughly one check every 90 minutes for a single URL, so it is better read as a way to try synthetics than to rely on them.
$0.005 per check beyond the allowance on paid editions. Standard includes 10,000 checks a month.
$0.40 per GB on the Original Data option or $0.60 per GB on Data Plus.
Not as a first-class monitor type with its own expiry alerting window. Certificate renewals are better served by a tool that treats them as their own concern.
No. The platform is the product; synthetics alone does not justify the complexity or the allowance limits.
They offer full observability and we do not. Their free tier allows 500 checks a month; our $5 plan runs roughly 216,000 and counts none of them, and includes certificates, domains, page changes and heartbeats.
Last updated August 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
No data meter and no ingest cliff. 25 monitors checked every five minutes from $5 a month.