Product comparison

RUM pricing comparison 2026

Verified June 2026

Real-user monitoring prices two ways. Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana Cloud, and CloudWatch RUM charge by front-end activity (per 1,000 sessions, or per event). New Relic and Elastic fold RUM into a single data-ingest meter with no per-session SKU. Session Replay is the biggest multiplier on both sides. Here is the rate card and how to read it.

TL;DR

Session-priced: Datadog $0.15/1K (Measure) to $3/1K (Investigate), Dynatrace $2.25/1K ($4.50 with replay), Grafana $0.75/1K, CloudWatch $1/100K events. Ingest-bundled (no per-session SKU): New Relic $0.40/GB, Elastic $0.09/GB. Session Replay is the largest cost lever; gate it to error sessions.

Six approaches to one product

The RUM rate card

Each vendor at published list pricing with the underlying meter explained. Session-priced vendors bill front-end activity directly; ingest-bundled vendors fold RUM into the same per-GB meter as APM and logs. Verify on each vendor's pricing page before purchasing.

Product	List rate	Model	Note
Datadog RUM	$0.15/1K Measure, $3/1K Investigate	Per 1,000 sessions, tiered	Session Replay add-on $2.50/1K. Measure prices full traffic; Investigate prices the filtered, fully-indexed subset.
Dynatrace RUM	$2.25/1K sessions	Per session (DEM units)	With Session Replay $4.50/1K. 0.25 DEM units per session-hour, 1 unit with replay.
Grafana Frontend Observability	$0.75/1K sessions	Per session	New-customer rate (from 13 Feb 2026). Existing customers $0.90/1K with 0.25 GB traces + 0.10 GB logs credit per 1K.
AWS CloudWatch RUM	$1.00 per 100,000 events	Per event, not per session	One session emits many events (page views, errors, custom events), so per-session cost depends on instrumentation depth.
New Relic	$0.40/GB ingest	Bundled in unified ingest	No per-session RUM SKU. Browser and mobile telemetry meter through the same ingest counter above the 100 GB/mo free tier.
Elastic	$0.09/GB ingest (serverless Complete)	Bundled in APM ingest	RUM is part of the APM/serverless data ingest meter, not a separate per-session charge.

Two pricing camps

Per-session versus ingest-bundled

The first thing to settle when comparing RUM cost is which billing model a vendor uses, because the two camps are not directly comparable on a single number. Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability, and AWS CloudWatch RUM all price front-end activity directly. The natural unit is the session, the span of time a user spends in your app from arrival to timeout. Dynatrace and Grafana charge a flat rate per 1,000 sessions; Datadog charges a tiered rate that depends on how deeply you index each session; CloudWatch charges per event rather than per session, which is the same idea expressed at a finer grain.

The second camp, New Relic and Elastic, has no per-session RUM product at all. Front-end telemetry lands in the same data-ingest meter as APM traces, infrastructure metrics, and logs, and is billed per gigabyte. New Relic is $0.40 per gigabyte on the Original Data Option above its 100 GB per month free tier; Elastic serverless observability is $0.09 per gigabyte ingested on the Complete tier. For these vendors the question "what does RUM cost?" has no standalone answer, only "how many gigabytes of front-end telemetry will you ingest?"

This split has a practical consequence for forecasting. If you already know your monthly session count from an analytics tool, the per-session vendors give you a bill you can compute on the back of an envelope. If you are consolidating front-end, back-end, and infrastructure observability onto one platform and want a single meter to reason about, the ingest-bundled vendors remove the need to forecast sessions separately. Neither is universally cheaper; the crossover depends on sessions per gigabyte, which is a property of how verbosely you instrument the front end.

The Datadog tiering trap

Why Datadog RUM is hard to quote in one number

Datadog is the vendor most often misquoted, because its RUM is no longer a single rate. RUM Measure at $0.15 per 1,000 sessions captures core web vitals and page-level performance on full traffic; it is cheap precisely because it is shallow. RUM Investigate at $3.00 per 1,000 sessions prices the deep, fully-indexed sessions you can slice by attribute, replay in context, and trace into the back end. Session Replay is a third meter at $2.50 per 1,000 sessions.

The effective per-session cost therefore lives entirely in the mix. A team that runs Measure across all traffic and pushes only 5 percent of sessions into Investigate plus Replay pays roughly $0.15 plus 5 percent of ($3.00 + $2.50), or about $0.43 per 1,000 sessions blended. A team that indexes everything pays the full $5.65 per 1,000 sessions. That is a 13x range from the same vendor on the same traffic, which is why a single Datadog RUM number on a comparison table is always an oversimplification. The older bundled Browser RUM SKU at roughly $1.50 per 1,000 sessions has been retired in favour of this structure.

Where it bites

Three RUM bill-spike causes

Session Replay left on for everything

Replay is the most expensive RUM feature on every session-priced vendor: a $2.50/1K add-on at Datadog, a doubling to $4.50/1K at Dynatrace. Recording every session rather than gating replay to errors and sampled funnels is the most common RUM overspend.

Verbose custom events on CloudWatch

CloudWatch RUM meters events, not sessions. An app emitting a custom event on every click and route change can push a single session from 20 events to 200, multiplying the bill tenfold while the session count, and the apparent traffic, stays flat.

Unsampled beacons on ingest vendors

On New Relic and Elastic, RUM cost is ingest volume. A high-traffic marketing site sending full, unsampled browser beacons can quietly add tens of gigabytes per month to the ingest meter, with no session-count line item to make the cause obvious.

Customer profile fit

Which RUM model for which team

Datadog RUM

Best for teams already on Datadog that want front-end, back-end, and session replay correlated in one platform. The Measure/Investigate split rewards disciplined indexing; budget carefully because the effective rate swings widely with the mix.

Dynatrace RUM

Best for enterprises on Dynatrace Full-Stack where Davis AI ties RUM to back-end root cause automatically. Flat per-session pricing is simple to forecast; remember RUM is additive to the per-host bill.

Grafana Frontend Observability

Best for OpenTelemetry-aligned teams on Grafana Cloud. The lowest flat per-session rate ($0.75/1K for new customers) and native correlation with Tempo traces and Loki logs.

CloudWatch RUM

Best for AWS-native teams wanting basic web-vitals and error tracking without a second vendor. Cheapest headline meter for lightly instrumented sessions; lacks deep replay and front-end APM depth.

New Relic

Best for teams that want one ingest meter for everything and no session accounting. RUM cost is front-end telemetry volume; the 100 GB free tier covers small sites outright.

Elastic

Best for teams already running Elastic APM who want RUM folded into the same per-GB ingest at $0.09/GB, with index lifecycle management as the cost lever rather than session sampling.

Verify before you buy

Rates above are vendor list pricing verified in June 2026: Datadog (datadoghq.com/pricing), Dynatrace (dynatrace.com/pricing), Grafana Cloud (grafana.com docs), CloudWatch (aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/pricing), New Relic (newrelic.com/pricing), and Elastic (elastic.co/pricing). Session Replay surcharges, sampling rates, and enterprise discounts change the real total; price your own session volume before deciding.

Cost reduction

Three ways to cut a RUM bill

Sample sessions at the SDK

Capture 10 to 25 percent of normal sessions while retaining 100 percent of error sessions. This preserves operational signal and cuts session-priced and ingest-priced RUM cost in equal proportion.

Gate Session Replay to errors

Replay is the single most expensive RUM feature. Record it only for error sessions, abandoned funnels, or a small sampled subset rather than every session, and the largest line item shrinks immediately.

Trim beacons on ingest vendors

On New Relic and Elastic, drop low-value custom attributes and reduce beacon payload size. On CloudWatch, cut the number of custom events per session. Both attack the meter directly rather than the headcount.

Cross-references

/apm-pricing-comparison

APM pricing comparison

/datadog-pricing

Datadog pricing breakdown

/dynatrace-pricing

Dynatrace pricing breakdown

/new-relic-pricing

New Relic pricing breakdown

/grafana-cloud-pricing

Grafana Cloud pricing breakdown

/elastic-pricing

Elastic Cloud pricing breakdown

/aws-monitoring-cost

AWS CloudWatch cost breakdown

/comparison

Six-vendor comparison

/calculator

Multi-vendor cost calculator

Frequently asked

How is RUM priced compared to APM and infrastructure monitoring?

Real-user monitoring splits into two pricing camps. The session-priced camp (Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana Cloud Frontend Observability, AWS CloudWatch RUM) bills by the volume of front-end activity: per 1,000 sessions, or in CloudWatch's case per 100,000 events. The ingest-bundled camp (New Relic, Elastic) has no separate RUM SKU at all; browser and mobile telemetry meters through the same per-gigabyte ingest counter as APM, logs, and infrastructure. The session-priced model is easier to forecast from traffic data; the ingest-bundled model is easier to consolidate onto one bill. Verify every rate on the vendor's pricing page before purchasing.

How much does Datadog RUM cost per 1,000 sessions?

Datadog restructured RUM into tiers. RUM Measure is $0.15 per 1,000 sessions and prices full traffic (it captures core web vitals and page-level metrics on every session). RUM Investigate is $3.00 per 1,000 sessions and prices the filtered subset of sessions you fully index for deep troubleshooting, including resource waterfalls and user-journey replay context. Session Replay is a separate add-on at $2.50 per 1,000 sessions. The effective per-session cost therefore depends on how large a fraction of traffic you push into Investigate and Replay rather than leaving on the cheap Measure tier. The legacy bundled Browser RUM SKU (around $1.50 per 1,000 sessions) has been superseded by this tiered structure. Rates are Datadog annual list, verified June 2026.

How much does Dynatrace RUM cost?

Dynatrace lists Real User Monitoring at $2.25 per 1,000 sessions ($0.00225 per session), and RUM with Session Replay at $4.50 per 1,000 sessions ($0.0045 per session). Under the Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) unit model, a session consumes 0.25 DEM units per session-hour without replay and 1 DEM unit per session-hour with replay. RUM is billed on top of Dynatrace's host-based Full-Stack pricing, not instead of it, so RUM is an addition to the per-host bill rather than a standalone product. Verified against dynatrace.com/pricing, June 2026.

Does New Relic charge separately for RUM?

No. New Relic has no per-session RUM line item. Browser monitoring and mobile monitoring telemetry (page loads, AJAX calls, JavaScript errors, mobile crashes, front-end distributed traces) count toward the same data-ingest meter as everything else: $0.40 per gigabyte on the Original Data Option above the 100 GB per month free tier, or $0.60 per gigabyte on Data Plus. This means RUM cost on New Relic is a function of how much front-end telemetry you ingest, not how many sessions you record. A high-traffic site with verbose front-end instrumentation can still move the bill, so sampling or trimming beacons is the lever rather than counting sessions.

Is CloudWatch RUM cheaper than the session-priced vendors?

It looks cheaper at $1.00 per 100,000 events, but the meter is events, not sessions, and the two are not interchangeable. A single user session emits many RUM events (page views, performance events, JavaScript errors, and any custom events you record). A session that produces 20 events costs $0.0002, so 1,000 such sessions cost about $0.20, which is genuinely cheaper than the per-1,000-session rates of Datadog Investigate or Dynatrace. But an instrumentation-heavy session producing 100-plus events shifts the comparison. CloudWatch RUM also lacks the session-replay and deep front-end APM correlation of the specialist vendors, so the lower headline rate buys a narrower product.

What does Session Replay add to a RUM bill?

Session Replay is the single largest RUM cost multiplier. Datadog charges it as a separate $2.50 per 1,000 sessions add-on on top of the Measure or Investigate rate. Dynatrace roughly doubles its per-session RUM rate when replay is enabled, from $2.25 to $4.50 per 1,000 sessions. Because replay captures and stores a reconstruction of the user's screen, it is both the most operationally useful and the most expensive RUM feature. The standard cost-control pattern is to enable replay selectively (on error sessions, on a sampled fraction of normal sessions, or on specific high-value funnels) rather than recording every session.

How do I reduce a RUM bill?

Three levers dominate. First, sample sessions at the SDK: capturing 10 to 25 percent of normal sessions while retaining 100 percent of error sessions preserves operational signal at a fraction of the volume. Second, gate Session Replay tightly because it is the most expensive feature on every session-priced vendor; record replay only for error sessions or a small sampled subset. Third, on the ingest-bundled vendors (New Relic, Elastic), trim front-end beacon payloads and drop low-value custom attributes, since RUM cost there is ingest volume rather than session count. On CloudWatch RUM, reduce the number of custom events emitted per session, as the meter counts events.