New Relic Synthetics Pricing and Synthetic Monitoring Cost per Check

New Relic synthetics pricing has two parts, and only one of them is about checks. Ping monitors are included in every New Relic edition at no extra cost and do not count against any limit. Every other monitor type, from scripted API tests to browser tests, draws on a monthly allowance (500 checks on Free, 10,000 on Standard, 1 million on Pro, 10 million on Enterprise) and then costs $0.005 per check. The second part is people: you need a full platform user to work in synthetic monitoring, which is $10 for the first and $99 for each additional user on Standard.

So a team that only runs ping monitors can watch a hundred URLs every minute for the price of one user seat. A team running ten scripted API monitors every minute from one location pays about $2,110 a month in overage on Standard. The figures below come from newrelic.com/pricing, New Relic's January 2023 synthetics pricing notice and its monitor limits documentation, read on October 8, 2026.

How New Relic synthetic monitoring is billed

New Relic moved to usage pricing in 2020: you pay for data ingested, for users, and for a few add-ons. Synthetic checks are one of those add-ons, and they sit outside the data meter. New Relic's billing documentation lists synthetic monitor checks under data that does not count toward GB ingested.

What counts is the check. New Relic's monitor limits page defines it plainly: when a monitor runs from one location, that is one check. Its own example is a monitor that runs hourly from five locations, which produces 120 checks a day. Interval and location count therefore multiply together, the same way they do on Datadog.

Here is what each edition includes, as listed on the New Relic pricing page and limits documentation:

Above the allowance, New Relic charges $0.005 per additional check for all non-ping monitors. Data beyond 100 GB is $0.40 per GB on the original data option and $0.60 on Data Plus. Core users are $49 each and basic users are free, but New Relic's user type documentation says basic users cannot use its curated experiences, and synthetic monitoring is one of them.

Are New Relic ping monitors free?

Yes. New Relic's January 2023 announcement says ping monitors are included in every edition at no extra cost and that only non-ping monitor checks are billed on overage. The monitor limits page repeats it: the monthly limits apply to all monitor types except the simple ping monitor.

A ping monitor is not a crude ICMP ping either. New Relic describes it as a simple Java HTTP client that checks whether an application is online. Through the API you can set a validation string (text that must appear in the response), TLS validation, whether a redirect counts as a failure, and an interval from every minute to once a day. It sends a HEAD request by default and can be set to GET. For "is the page up and returning the right thing", that covers most needs, for free.

How much does New Relic synthetic monitoring cost at real sizes?

A 30 day month has 43,200 minutes, so a non-ping monitor that runs every minute from one location uses 43,200 checks. At $0.005 that is $216 of checks before the allowance. The table shows the monthly overage on Standard (10,000 checks included), checks only, before user seats.

The last row is where Pro starts to make sense. Pro includes 1 million checks, so 25 monitors at one minute from one location leave 80,000 checks of overage, or $400, against $5,350 on Standard. The trade is that each Pro full platform user is $349 a month on an annual commitment instead of $99.

Ping monitors do not appear in this table because they cost nothing. If your uptime monitoring is ping monitors only, New Relic's synthetic bill is $0 at any count, and you pay for the users who manage them.

What does uptime monitoring on New Relic cost per team?

For ping monitors, the bill is the user count. On Standard:

That is cheap for checks, and we will say it plainly: if your team already runs New Relic and only needs to see uptime on a dashboard or in Slack, there is no reason to pay anyone else for it. A ping monitor checking 100 URLs every minute from several locations costs nothing extra.

The part the pricing page does not show is the alert path. New Relic's alert destinations are Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, webhooks, email, AWS EventBridge, PagerDuty, New Relic Mobile Push, Microsoft Teams and Workflow Automation. There is no SMS and no voice call. To have a phone ring at 3 a.m. you connect a paging tool such as PagerDuty or Opsgenie, which is billed per user on its own invoice. That second invoice is usually larger than the New Relic line for uptime.

Does New Relic charge for alerts?

New Relic does not charge per alert notification. Alerts are part of the platform, and the destinations above can be used on any edition. The cost of alerting shows up elsewhere: in the full platform users who configure alert policies and workflows, and in the paging service that turns a notification into a call or an SMS. If a text message matters to you, budget for that service from day one.

New Relic synthetics pricing against a flat uptime plan

Because we sell a competing monitor, here is the comparison with our own plans, for the most common job: plain HTTP uptime checks at a 1 minute interval with someone phoned at night.

The honest reading: New Relic is cheaper for checks, and much stronger when you need scripted tests, multi location confirmation or text matching in the response. We do none of those three. TrackDowntime is cheaper only once the requirement is "call these three phones until the site is back", because the calls are included in the phone call alerts on Professional rather than bought per user from a paging vendor. If that is your situation, the New Relic uptime monitoring alternative page walks through moving only the alerting job and keeping New Relic for everything else.

How to keep the New Relic synthetics bill under control

1. Use ping monitors wherever the question is up or down. They are free. A scripted API monitor that only asserts a 200 status burns checks for an answer a ping monitor gives at no cost.
2. Count locations before intervals. Three locations triple the bill. One location every minute costs the same as three locations every three minutes.
3. Query your usage before the invoice does. New Relic records synthetic check usage you can query and alert on, so set an alert at 80 percent of the allowance.
4. Compare a Pro upgrade against overage. Past roughly a million non-ping checks a month, the Pro allowance beats Standard overage even with the higher seat price, but only if you would otherwise need several Standard users.
5. Watch the price pages. New Relic changed its pricing model in 2020, its synthetics billing in 2023 and its compute options since. If vendor pricing feeds your budget, a tool that tracks competitor price and website changes saves rereading the page each quarter.

Which New Relic setup fits which buyer

• Team already on New Relic with a paging rotation. Stay. Ping monitors are free and failures sit next to your traces.
• Team on New Relic Free or Standard with no paging tool. Keep New Relic for the app and add a monitor that phones people for the customer facing URLs. Our Datadog Synthetics pricing breakdown shows the same decision on Datadog.
• Agency or store that signed up for one dashboard. A flat uptime plan is simpler. Compare uptime monitoring pricing per site across the main vendors first; several are cheaper than us when nobody needs a call.
• Team running scripted flows every minute. Price Pro against Standard overage with the table above. That is New Relic's strength, and a flat uptime monitor will not replace it.

New Relic synthetics pricing questions

How much does New Relic synthetic monitoring cost? Ping monitors cost nothing extra in any edition. Other monitor types include 500 checks a month on Free, 10,000 on Standard, 1 million on Pro and 10 million on Enterprise, then cost $0.005 per check. One run from one location is one check, so a monitor running every minute from one location uses 43,200 checks a month.

What counts as a synthetic check in New Relic? One run of a monitor from one location. New Relic's example is a monitor that runs hourly from five locations, which produces 120 checks a day. Ping monitors are excluded from the limits, so only scripted, browser, step, certificate and similar monitors count toward the allowance and overage.

Is New Relic Synthetics included in the free tier? Yes. The Free edition includes one full platform user, 100 GB of data a month and 500 non-ping synthetic checks, and ping monitors are unlimited. That is enough for basic uptime monitoring with email or Slack alerts. Phone calls and SMS still need a separate paging service.

How much is a New Relic full platform user? On Standard, $10 a month for the first full platform user and $99 for each additional one, up to five. On Pro, $349 a month with an annual commitment or $418.80 pay as you go. Enterprise is priced by sales. Basic users are free but cannot use synthetic monitoring.

Is New Relic cheaper than Datadog for synthetic monitoring? For plain uptime, yes by a wide margin. Datadog bills every API test run at $5 per 10,000 runs billed annually, so one URL every minute from one location is $21.60 a month, while a New Relic ping monitor doing the same job costs nothing extra. For scripted tests the gap narrows, since New Relic charges $0.005 per check above the allowance.