Open-source alternative
Replace Grafana Cloud with Grafana OSS + Prometheus
The best open-source alternative to Grafana Cloud is Grafana (or Prometheus) with operacle/checkcle, self-hosted on Railway. Metrics, dashboards, and uptime you host. Datadog and Grafana Cloud without the host or usage SKU.
Estimated save $12,000 a year.
Open the stackStart on Railway
How Grafana Cloud compares
| Grafana Cloud | Grafana OSS + Prometheus | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Platform fee plus usage | Open-source or fair-code license; you pay the host |
| Hosting | Vendor cloud | Self-hosted on Railway or any VPS |
| Rough monthly cost | Pro from $19/mo plus usage; Enterprise from $25,000/year spend commit source | Hosting only — no SaaS seat meter in this repo |
- Grafana
AGPL Grafana OSS dashboards and alerting (not Grafana Cloud)
- Prometheus
Apache-2.0 metrics that Grafana graphs
- operacle/checkcle
Go uptime checks
FAQ
- Is it free?
- The Grafana OSS + Prometheus licenses are open source or fair-code. You still pay hosting (Railway or any VPS) and any APIs the stack calls. There is no Grafana Cloud seat or task bill on this path.
- Can I migrate from Grafana Cloud?
- Yes. Start with the workflows or data you actually use, then cut over. The Grafana OSS + Prometheus stack page has the agent prompt and the cost table; most teams rebuild the slice that matters and leave old Grafana Cloud links until they expire.
- How do I deploy it?
- Open the Grafana OSS + Prometheus stack, copy the agent prompt, and deploy on Railway (one service, PORT, and a volume when the app needs disk). Placeholder: Grafana OSS + Prometheus (or Grafana Alloy) as the metrics backend, and Checkcle for HTTP checks. Volumes for both. This is a second-wave template after Checkcle solo. Do not deploy Grafana Cloud and call it self-host.
- What does this replace?
- Datadog / Grafana Cloud. The published small-team estimate on this stack is $12,000 a year.
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