Resources // Observability
Grafana Startup Program
- High-value
Offer $100,000 credits
Suits for Non-VC-backedVC-backed
Updated Jun 2026
The offer
- $100,000 in credits for any Grafana Cloud services for 12 months, or until your next funding round, whichever comes first (managed logs/traces/metrics, k6 performance testing, profiling, incident response, frontend and application observability, synthetic monitoring)
- All Enterprise data-source plugins and 24x7 Grafana support
- A guaranteed 20% discount off list prices after credits/12 months end (more with consumption)
- Access to the integrations team. Apply via the linked Typeform (≈4 questions)
Who qualifies
- New customers (including Grafana Cloud Free) and OSS users moving to managed cloud
- Soft guidance: ideally raised < $10M and < 25 employees, but apply even if you don't fit
- If accepted you agree to be a reference customer (possible guest blogs / talks); admission at Grafana Labs' sole discretion
Community Insights
Grafana’s $100k Cloud credit is generous and the program is light to apply to (a ~4-question form, soft <$10M / <25-employee guidance). The product is well-regarded: teams migrating from Datadog cite roughly a third of the cost thanks to volume-based pricing rather than host-based, which is the recurring pro. The watch-out for after the credits run out: Grafana Cloud bills across many metered dimensions (metrics active-series, logs ingest, traces, etc.), and metric cardinality or unqueried logs can drive surprise bills. The same FinOps discipline that applies to Datadog applies here.
Best Practices (from community tips)
- Use the credits to consolidate observability (logs/metrics/traces/k6/profiling). The suite breadth is the reason to pick Cloud over self-hosting the LGTM stack.
- Watch metric cardinality and log ingest. High-cardinality labels and produced-but-never-queried logs are the top cost-blowup vectors once credits end.
- Model the post-credit bill early (the 20% discount helps, but volume pricing scales). Note credits end at your next funding round if that comes first.
- If you have SRE capacity and only need core signals, compare self-hosted OSS / AWS Managed Prometheus before committing.
Community Reviews
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Negative
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