Grafana Cloud vs Lemon Squeezy
Fully-managed observability — Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana
vs. Merchant of record for digital products and SaaS
Pricing tiers
Grafana Cloud
Free
Always free. 10k metrics series + 50 GB logs/traces/profiles + 3 users + 14-day retention.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
Apache 2.0 / AGPL. Run Grafana + Mimir + Loki + Tempo yourself.
$0 base (usage-based)
Pro
$19/mo platform fee + usage-based overages. 10k metrics series + 50 GB included. 13-month metrics retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
$25,000/year minimum. Custom retention, premium support, BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) option.
$25000/mo
Lemon Squeezy
Pay-as-you-go
No monthly fees. 5% + 50¢ per transaction. Includes tax handling.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Grafana Cloud vs payg on Lemon Squeezy.
| Metric | Grafana Cloud | Lemon Squeezy |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Grafana Cloud · 16 features
- Alloy (OTel agent) — Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with Grafana additions.
- Application Platform — Infrastructure + k8s + frontend + cloud provider integrations.
- Beyla (eBPF auto-instrumentation) — Zero-code auto-instrumentation via eBPF for any language.
- Faro (RUM) — Frontend observability — traces, logs, Core Web Vitals.
- Grafana in Azure Marketplace — "Azure Managed Grafana" — Azure-native deployment.
- Grafana Incident — Incident management with Slack-native flows.
- Grafana OnCall — On-call scheduling + incident response (powered by Amixr).
- Grafana SLO — Service level objective tracking + error budget visualization.
- Grafana (visualization) — Dashboards, variables, alerting, annotations over any datasource.
- k6 (synthetic + load testing) — Load testing + synthetic monitoring. JavaScript-based scripts.
- Loki (logs) — Prometheus-inspired log aggregation with LogQL.
- Mimir (metrics) — Horizontally-scalable Prometheus-compatible TSDB.
- Pyroscope (profiling) — Continuous profiling (CPU, memory, etc.).
- Self-Host Option — Full OSS stack deployable in your infra.
- Tempo (traces) — High-scale distributed tracing with TraceQL.
- Unified Alerting — Grafana-native alerting across metrics, logs, traces.
Lemon Squeezy · 12 features
- Abandoned Cart Recovery — Email retry campaigns (+5% fee on recovered).
- Affiliate Program — Built-in affiliate/referral program with payouts.
- Custom Checkout Domain — Checkout at checkout.yourbrand.com.
- Customer Portal — Self-service subscription + invoice management UI.
- Discounts / Coupons — Percentage / fixed / trial discount codes.
- Global Tax (included) — Automatic VAT/GST/sales tax calc + remittance. LS files taxes on your behalf.
- Hosted Checkout — Hosted + embeddable checkout. Customize color + logo.
- License Keys — Generate + validate license keys for software sales.
- One-off Sales — Digital products with license keys, file delivery.
- Reports & Analytics — Revenue, MRR, churn, LTV.
- Subscriptions — Recurring billing with trials, proration, discounts.
- Webhooks — Standard resource events (order_created, subscription_created/updated/cancelled,…
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Grafana Cloud | Lemon Squeezy |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Grafana Alloy (agent), grafana-cli | — |
| SDK | Faro Web SDK (RUM) | @lemonsqueezy/lemonsqueezy.js |
| REST | Grafana HTTP API, Loki Push API | Lemon Squeezy REST API |
| OTHER | Prometheus Remote Write, Tempo OTLP | Webhooks |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Grafana Cloud and Lemon Squeezy are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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