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Sematext pricing 2026: per host, per agent, per retention day

Verified September 2026

Sematext publishes a rate for every combination of product, plan and retention window, which makes it one of the few observability vendors you can budget without a sales call. Here is what each product actually costs, and why retention moves the bill further than host count does.

TL;DR

Infrastructure Monitoring: $2.80 per host/mo on Basic (1-day retention) up to $10.80 per host/mo on Pro (365 days). Service Monitoring: $8.64 to $15.12 per agent/mo. Logs: from $5/mo for 500 MB/day. Tracing: from $19/mo. Synthetics: $2 per HTTP monitor/mo. Annual billing is 10 percent off. Host pricing is exactly linear with no volume break, so retention is the lever that matters.

Confirmed with vendor16 September 2026·what verification means

Confirmed with Sematext on 16 September 2026. Sematext asked to be included on this site after correcting an error on our sister site, and this page was built from their published pricing on the same day. The pricing page is JavaScript rendered and its per-product tables sit behind tab controls, so it has to be rendered rather than fetched. Every figure here comes from sematext.com/pricing and Sematext's own cost calculator. Inclusion here is not sponsorship and buys no placement: Sematext is priced on the same published-list basis as every other vendor on this site.

The pricing model

Two meters, and retention multiplies both

Sematext sells each product on its own meter and lets you mix them on one account. The meters are simple. The retention multiplier on top of them is where the real money is.

Infrastructure Monitoring is per host per month. Service Monitoring, which is the application performance side, is per monitoring agent per month. Logs are per daily volume band plus per-GB rates for data received and data stored. Tracing is per daily span volume. Synthetics are per monitor. Each product has a Basic, Standard and Pro plan, and each plan offers a different set of retention windows.

Host pricing is exactly linear. Ten hosts cost ten times one host, five hundred hosts cost five hundred times one host, and there is no published volume break at any point on the curve. That is unusual and it cuts both ways: the small fleet gets enterprise rates, and the large fleet gets no discount for being large. Above that, Sematext quotes custom plans through sales, which is where a 500-host buyer should be looking anyway.

Retention is the multiplier that actually decides the bill. The same host costs $2.80 a month at one day of retention on Basic, $3.60 at 7 days on Standard, $5.04 at 30 days on Standard, $7.20 at 30 days on Pro, and $10.80 at 365 days on Pro. That is a 3.9x spread on one host, driven entirely by how long the data sticks around. Pick the retention window before you price the fleet.

Infrastructure Monitoring

Per host, per retention window

Verified against sematext.com/pricing on 16 September 2026. List rates, monthly, before the published 10 percent annual discount.

Basic

$2.80 / host / mo

Retention: 1 day, fixed

Three free containers per host, unlimited hosts, one alert rule, out-of-the-box dashboards, email alerting, role-based access. One day of retention is the catch: enough to see a live incident, not enough to investigate last week's.

Standard

$3.60 to $5.04 / host / mo

Retention: 7, 15 or 30 days

$3.60 at 7 days, $4.32 at 15, $5.04 at 30. Five free containers per host, unlimited alert rules, scheduled reporting, dedicated account manager.

Pro

$5.76 to $10.80 / host / mo

Retention: 7, 15, 30, 60, 90, 180 or 365 days

$5.76 at 7 days rising to $10.80 at 365. Eight free containers per host, anomaly detection, ChatOps and webhook integrations, inventory and process reports, phone support.

Service Monitoring

The APM side, per agent

Sematext prices application performance monitoring per monitoring agent rather than per host, so the unit is the service you instrument.

Basic

$8.64 / agent / mo

Retention: 1 day, fixed

One alert rule, out-of-the-box dashboards, heartbeat alerts, logs and events integration.

Standard

$10.08 / agent / mo

Retention: 7, 15 or 30 days

25 alert rules, scheduled reporting, five containers per host included, dedicated account manager.

Pro

$15.12 / agent / mo

Retention: 7 days to 365 days

Unlimited alert rules, anomaly detection, ChatOps and webhook integrations, eight containers per host, phone support.

Three scenarios

What real fleets pay

Reference points at three fleet sizes, all at 30-day retention. Because host pricing is linear, these are arithmetic rather than estimates.

10 hosts, 30-day retention

  • Infra Standard, 30 days$50.40
  • Or Infra Pro, 30 days$72.00
  • Logs Basic, 500 MB/day$5.00

Range

$55 to $77/month

At 10 hosts Sematext is one of the cheapest published rates in the category. Compare the same fleet on our 10-host page before assuming the big platforms are competitive here.

/cost-for-10-hosts

100 hosts, 30-day retention

  • Infra Standard, 30 days$504.00
  • Or Infra Pro, 30 days$720.00
  • Service Monitoring, 20 agents Pro$302.40

Range

$806 to $1,022/month

Per-host pricing is exactly linear, so the 100-host bill is the per-host rate times 100 with no step function and no high-water-mark counting.

/cost-for-100-hosts

500 hosts, 30-day retention

  • Infra Standard, 30 days$2,520.00
  • Or Infra Pro, 30 days$3,600.00
  • Annual billing, 10% off Pro$3,240.00

Range

$2,520 to $3,600/month

Still linear at 500 hosts. Sematext publishes no volume break, so the list rate at 500 hosts is the list rate at 10 hosts multiplied out. Custom plans are quoted through sales.

/cost-for-500-hosts

Logs

Where Sematext started

Log management is Sematext's oldest product and it is priced on a daily-volume band plus per-GB rates, which is the same shape as the models on our log management page.

Basic is $5 a month for 500 MB a day at 7-day retention, with data received charged at $0.10 per GB and data stored at $0.15 per GB. Standard starts at $50 a month across 1, 5 and 10 GB per day bands at 7 or 15 days, with data stored at $1.57 per GB. Pro starts at $60 a month and scales to 1,000 GB a day with retention up to 365 days, with data stored at $1.90 per GB.

Note the shape of that: the received rate is flat at $0.10 per GB across all three plans, but the stored rate jumps more than tenfold from Basic to Standard. Sematext is pricing the index rather than the pipe, which is the same economics that drive a Splunk or Elastic bill. Our log management pricing page normalises these against the other vendors per GB.

Where it bites

Three Sematext bill surprises

Basic gives you one day of retention

The $2.80 per host headline buys one day of data. That is enough to watch an incident happen and not enough to investigate anything that started last week. Teams that budget off the headline and then need a week of history land on Standard at $3.60, or on Pro at $7.20 for 30 days, which is 2.6 times the number they planned for.

No volume break at any fleet size

Linear pricing is generous to a 10-host fleet and unhelpful to a 500-host one. Where Datadog and New Relic will negotiate 20 to 50 percent off list at scale, Sematext publishes one rate and holds it. At large fleet sizes, ask sales for a custom plan explicitly rather than assuming the list rate is the floor.

Container density above the free allowance

Basic includes three containers per host, Standard five, Pro eight. Dense container fleets routinely run well past eight containers per host, and that is exactly the point where per-host models stop being the cheap option. Count containers per host before you price the fleet, not after.

Cost reduction levers

Three ways to cut a Sematext bill

Buy retention per product, not per account

Retention is selected per product, so infrastructure metrics and logs do not have to share a window. Most teams need 30 days of metrics and 7 days of raw logs, not 30 of both. Splitting the windows is the single largest saving available on this vendor.

Take the annual discount

Sematext publishes a flat 10 percent off for annual billing across every product, with no minimum commitment beyond the year. On a 100-host Pro deployment at 30-day retention that is roughly $864 a year, for a decision that costs nothing operationally.

Mix plans across products

Nothing forces one plan across the account. Pro infrastructure monitoring with Basic logs is a legitimate configuration, and it is usually the right one when the metrics matter for capacity planning and the logs only matter during an incident.

Verify before you buy

Sematext publishes per-product tier pricing at sematext.com/pricing and an exact rate for every configuration at sematext.com/cost-calculator. Both pages are JavaScript rendered. Every figure above was read off them on 16 September 2026 and confirmed with Sematext the same day. Custom plans above the published bands are quoted through sales. Next scheduled re-check December 2026.

Cross-references

Related pages

/datadog-pricing

Datadog pricing breakdown

/grafana-cloud-pricing

Grafana Cloud pricing breakdown

/honeycomb-pricing

Honeycomb pricing breakdown

/apm-pricing-comparison

APM pricing across vendors

/cost-for-10-hosts

Monitoring cost at 10 hosts

/cost-for-100-hosts

Monitoring cost at 100 hosts

/log-management-pricing

Log management pricing per GB

/hidden-costs

Charges that never appear on a pricing page

/methodology

How we research pricing

Frequently asked

How much does Sematext cost?
Sematext prices each product separately and publishes a rate for every combination. Infrastructure Monitoring starts at $2.80 per host per month on Basic with one day of retention, rising to $10.80 per host on Pro with 365 days. Service Monitoring starts at $8.64 per agent per month. Logs start at $5 per month for 500 MB per day at 7-day retention. Tracing starts at $19 per month for 2 million spans per day. Synthetics start at $2 per HTTP monitor per month. Annual billing takes 10 percent off every product. Figures verified against sematext.com/pricing on 16 September 2026.
What drives a Sematext bill, host count or retention?
Retention, in most fleets. Host count scales the bill linearly with no volume break, so doubling the fleet doubles the infrastructure line. Retention multiplies the per-host rate instead: the same host costs $2.80 a month at one day of retention on Basic, $5.04 at 30 days on Standard, and $10.80 at 365 days on Pro. That is a 3.9x spread on the same host. Decide the retention window first, because it moves the number further than most fleet-sizing decisions do.
Is Sematext cheaper than Datadog?
On published list rates for infrastructure monitoring, yes, and by a wide margin. Sematext Pro at 30-day retention lists at $7.20 per host per month. Datadog infrastructure lists around $18 per host per month in the same band. The caveats are that Datadog negotiates 20 to 50 percent off list at scale while Sematext publishes no volume break, and that the products are not equivalent in breadth: Datadog sells a much wider surface of integrated products. Compare the specific products you will actually use rather than the headline per-host rate.
What does the Sematext Basic tier not include?
One day of retention, and only one alert rule. Basic is priced as an entry point rather than a production tier for most teams: one day of data is enough to watch an incident unfold but not enough to investigate a regression that started last week, and one alert rule will not cover a real service. Standard at $3.60 per host with 7-day retention is the realistic floor for production infrastructure monitoring. Basic also includes only three free containers per host against five on Standard and eight on Pro.
Does Sematext have a free tier?
No permanent free tier. Sematext runs a 14-day free trial with no credit card required across all products. After the trial every product is paid, though the entry rates are low enough that a small fleet costs single-digit dollars a month. If a permanently free allowance is the requirement, Grafana Cloud's free tier and self-hosted Prometheus are the usual answers instead.
How does Sematext price containers?
Containers are included against the host rate rather than billed separately, up to a per-tier allowance: three containers per host on Basic, five on Standard, eight on Pro. Hosts themselves are unlimited in the sense that you pay per host with no cap. For dense container fleets running well above eight containers per host, check the overage terms with Sematext before sizing, because container density is where per-host pricing models usually stop being cheap.

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