The Showdown

Grafana Cloudvsgrafana-operator

Why pay monthly fees for Grafana Cloud when you can self-host grafana-operator for free? Let's look at the facts.

Grafana Cloud

The Expensive Option

  • Closed Source (Black box)
  • Expensive monthly fees per user
  • Data stored on their servers
WINNER

grafana-operator

The Freedom Choice

  • 100% Open Source Code
  • Free forever (Self-hosted)
  • You own your data completely
Interactive Calculator

Calculate Your "SaaS Tax"

SaaS pricing is designed to scale with your success. See how much wealth transfers from your bank account to Grafana Cloud's shareholders.

10 people
150100200+
$

*Estimated standard pricing for Grafana Cloud. Adjust if needed.

Estimated Annual Waste
$1,440
Monthly Burn Rate$120
5-Year Projection$7,200
Cost with Self-Hosted$0
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Calculations based on 10 users at $12/mo.

Detailed Breakdown

0
Manual instance provisioning
Automated K8s reconciliation
1
Manual UI configuration
Declarative YAML (GitOps)
2
Tiered pricing per user/metric
Native K8s horizontal scaling