The Best New Relic Alternatives for Startups Under $50/Month

If you've ever watched a New Relic invoice spike after adding one more engineer to the team, you know the pain. The "seat tax" — charging per user — means that as your startup grows, your observability costs grow faster than your revenue. For bootstrapped teams, that's a non-starter.

The good news: a new generation of OpenTelemetry-native platforms has emerged that decouple pricing from headcount. We evaluated the top contenders that keep you under $50/month while giving you the things actually worth buying: distributed tracing, metrics, logs, and zero vendor lock-in.

Why OpenTelemetry Matters

Every pick here is built on OpenTelemetry (OTel), the open standard for observability data. That means you can switch tools without rewriting your instrumentation — a freedom New Relic's proprietary agents don't offer. 1

The Best New Relic Alternatives

1. SigNoz — Best Overall for Full-Stack Observability

SigNoz is the closest you'll get to a New Relic replacement without the price tag. It's open-source, OTel-native, and covers distributed tracing, metrics, and logs in a single pane of glass. The cloud plan starts at $49/month — right at our budget ceiling, but you get unlimited users. 1

The UI feels modern and familiar if you're coming from DataDog or New Relic. You get flamegraphs, service maps, and custom dashboards out of the box. For a 3–5 person startup, this is the sweet spot: full power, no seat tax.

Best for: Teams that want a complete APM replacement without per-user pricing.

2. TraceKit — Best for Ultra-Low Budgets

If $49/month still feels steep, TraceKit offers request-based pricing starting at $29/month for 1 million traces. 2 You pay for data volume, not people — so adding a new engineer costs you exactly $0.

TraceKit is purpose-built for bootstrapped startups. The trade-off is a leaner feature set compared to SigNoz: you get traces and basic metrics, but the log management and alerting are less mature. For early-stage teams that just need to debug production issues without breaking the bank, it's a killer deal.

Best for: Pre-revenue and bootstrapped startups on a razor-thin budget.

3. Uptrace — Best for Minimal Infrastructure Overhead

Uptrace is another OTel-native platform, but it differentiates itself by focusing on low operational overhead. 3 You don't need to manage a database or configure complex storage backends — it's a fully managed experience that "just works."

Pricing is usage-based and competitive with the others here. Uptrace shines when you want to get started in minutes and don't want to think about infrastructure. The query interface is fast, and the alerting is solid.

Best for: Teams that want the simplest possible setup with minimal ops burden.

Pricing Comparison: How They Stack Up

The pattern is clear: every alternative here charges for data, not people. That's a fundamental shift that aligns observability costs with actual value — the more you monitor, the more you pay, not the more people you hire.

Which One Should You Pick?

• Go with SigNoz if you want the most complete feature set and can stretch to $49/month. It's the closest to a drop-in New Relic replacement. 1
• Go with TraceKit if every dollar counts and you need something functional for under $30/month. 2
• Go with Uptrace if you want the simplest managed experience with zero infrastructure fuss. 3

Full disclosure: Some of the links in this article are affiliate links. We earn a commission if you purchase through them — at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we've tested and believe in.

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