What is it
Per-Host Pricing is a billing unit used by infrastructure-monitoring and DevOps platforms where each monitored server, VM, or node is billed per month, usually alongside ingestion-based meters.
A host is whatever the vendor’s agent runs on: a physical server, a cloud VM, or a Kubernetes node. The vendor counts them and applies a rate per host. Vendors can define the unit broadly. In 2022, LogicMonitor counted “any monitored IP address or DNS name” as a billable device, and it set its plan boundary by fleet size, with Pro covering up to 199 devices and Enterprise covering 200 or more.
The host became the default unit because buyers already track how many machines they run, and the cost of watching a machine grows with the number of machines. A host count doesn’t show how much data each machine sends, though. That’s why vendors pair the host rate with separate meters for logs, traces, and sessions. The host rate sets the minimum bill, and the volume meters decide how high it goes.
How it works
The basic formula is hosts × rate per host. Vendors differ in five ways:
| Dimension | What it controls | Example from this page |
|---|---|---|
| Counting clock | Whether a host is billed as a whole month or by the hours it runs | Grafana Application Observability charges $0.025 per host-hour, about $18 for a host that runs all month |
| Size weighting | Whether a large host costs more than a small one | Dynatrace Infrastructure Monitoring is a flat $0.04 per host-hour ($29/mo) for any host size, while Full-Stack is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour (~$58/mo for an 8 GiB host) |
| Commitment term | How much more a host costs without a contract | Datadog Infrastructure Pro is $15 per host on annual billing and $18 month-to-month or on-demand. Enterprise is $23 and $27 |
| Free host allowance | How many hosts are free | Datadog Infrastructure is free for up to 5 hosts. Grafana includes 2,232 host-hours a month, enough for three hosts running all month |
| Per-host add-ons | Other meters that grow with the host count | Datadog adds $1 per container per month ($0.002 per container-hour on-demand). Grafana meters Kubernetes containers at $0.00070 per container-hour |
The counting clock matters most when your fleet autoscales. Take a 31-day month on Grafana Application Observability with 20 hosts that run all month and 30 more that run 8 hours a day:
Unit math: (20 × 744) + (30 × 8 × 31) = 22,320 host-hours. Minus the 2,232 free host-hours = 20,088 billable × $0.025 = $502.20, plus the $19 Pro platform fee = $521.20/month. At the same ~$18 rate, billing all 50 hosts for the whole month would come to ~$900.
To bill by the hour, the vendor needs a record of when each host starts and stops sending data, not just a count at month-end. For what that metering takes, see tracking and metering usage events.
Companies using this
Six companies in the corpus have a host meter. Five are observability vendors, where the host rate is the base price for infrastructure monitoring. JFrog is the exception: it uses server count to license software rather than to meter monitoring.
Patterns observed
- The host rate stays put while the products around it change. Datadog’s Infrastructure Free, Pro, and Enterprise host rates are the same in a January 2022 capture as in the September 2026 rate card. Over the same years, its catalog grew from about 14 named products to more than 40. The one host-level term that changed was structural: the 2022 Enterprise tier had a 100-host minimum, which is gone now.
- What you monitor on a host sets its price, not the host itself. On Grafana, the same host costs $0.0100 per host-hour under Kubernetes Monitoring and $0.070 under Database Observability, a 7x gap. Splunk Observability Cloud works as a ladder: $15 per host for Infrastructure, $60 for App & Infra, and $75 for End-to-End. In 2022 it had a single “starts at $65 per host” headline instead.
- Newer rate cards bill by the hour, not by the month. Before 2023, Dynatrace priced Full-Stack per 8 GB host per month and raised that price from $69 to $74 in 2022. Its April 2023 Platform Subscription dropped what Dynatrace called “high watermark” monthly licensing. A June 2023 follow-up confirmed 15-minute billing intervals for Infrastructure Monitoring.
- Vendors are swapping a simple host count for weighted units. In February 2024, LogicMonitor listed infrastructure monitoring at $22 per resource per month. In September 2025 it moved to the “Hybrid Unit” at $16, $27, or $53 depending on package. The Hybrid Unit converts servers, cloud instances, network devices, and containers into one count, but LogicMonitor doesn’t publish the conversion formula.
Counterexamples & variants
A server licence, not a meter. JFrog sells self-managed Artifactory by the number of servers included: Pro X comes with 1 server at $27,000 a year, Enterprise X with 3 at $51,000, and Enterprise+ with 6. Nothing is metered. You buy the capacity tier, and JFrog’s SaaS version bills GB consumption instead. According to Barclays research, those licence prices went up on January 1 two years running: Pro X by 15% and Enterprise X by 6% in 2025, then Enterprise X by another 6% in 2026.
A host rate that replaces ingestion. Splunk’s entity pricing charges per monitored host, container, or device and includes unlimited ingestion for each one. The host covers the data volume rather than sitting next to a volume meter. Within one product line, Splunk also switches the unit: AppDynamics Infrastructure Edition is $6 per vCPU, while Premium Edition is $33 per host.
Weighting by memory, with a minimum size. Dynatrace Full-Stack bills per GiB of RAM, so a 64 GiB database host costs about 8x as much as an 8 GiB microservice host. Every host is billed at a minimum of 4 GiB. On a fleet of 50 small 2 GiB containers, that floor adds $730 a month, about 25% above a simple hosts × rate estimate.
All hosts or none. Datadog’s DevSecOps Pro and Enterprise SKUs have to cover every existing host and container. You can’t buy them for part of a fleet or combine them with standalone Infrastructure or Cloud Security SKUs, so you can’t trial the security layer on a few hosts before buying it for all of them.
What this means for buyers vs vendors
For buyers
Before comparing rates, find out how the vendor counts hosts. Ask whether a host is billed by the month, by the hour, or in 15-minute intervals. Ask whether containers, pods, and network devices count as hosts. Ask whether a minimum size or rounding rule applies. Then price two versions of your fleet: the steady baseline and the autoscaled peak. The gap between them tells you how much the counting clock matters to you. List every per-host add-on (containers, custom metrics, security modules) and check whether any SKU has to cover the whole fleet. If the vendor uses a weighted unit, get the conversion table in writing before you sign. Choosing the right usage metric explains why a unit you can’t recompute yourself is hard to budget for.
For vendors
A host meter is easy for buyers to understand, but it only works if they can check it. Publish counting rules, rounding floors, and conversion ratios next to the rate, not in the docs. If your customers autoscale, bill by the hour or accept that they will see the difference and resent paying for whole months. A stable host rate builds trust, so grow revenue by adding products on top of the host rather than raising the host rate itself. Show every add-on as its own line on the invoice. Usage invoicing and billing cycles covers how to present that clearly. The pricing calculator hub shows how buyers model several meters together.
| Company | Product | Pricing model | Billing units | Free tier | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datadog | Unified observability and security platform (infrastructure monitoring, APM, logs, security, RUM, and AI/LLM observability) | Yes | 2026-09-24 | ||
| Dynatrace | Unified observability, security, and business analytics platform (Full-Stack Monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, Log Management, Application Security, Digital Experience Monitoring) | No | 2026-09-01 | ||
| Grafana | Grafana Cloud — unified observability platform (metrics, logs, traces, profiles) plus AI, testing, and incident-response add-ons | Yes | 2026-10-04 | ||
| JFrog | Unified DevOps and software supply chain platform — binary/artifact management (Artifactory), security scanning (Xray), distribution, container registry, and AI/ML model lifecycle tooling | No | 2026-09-01 | ||
| LogicMonitor | Hybrid observability & AIOps platform (infrastructure, cloud, log, and digital-experience monitoring) with the Edwin AI agentic remediation layer | No | 2026-10-05 | ||
| Splunk | Unified security (SIEM/SOAR), observability, and log-management platform (a Cisco company) | Yes | 2026-09-28 |
Explore this theme in the knowledge graph
FAQ
What is per-host pricing?
Per-host pricing is a billing unit where a monitoring or DevOps vendor charges a recurring rate for each server, VM, or node its agent runs on. Buyers who use logs, traces, or sessions usually pay separate volume meters on top of it, so the host rate is the base of the bill, not the whole bill.
How much does per-host monitoring cost in 2026?
Published rates in the UsagePricing corpus run from about $7 per host per month (Dynatrace Foundation & Discovery, billed at $0.01 per host-hour) to $75 per host per month (Splunk Observability Cloud End-to-End, billed annually). Datadog Infrastructure Pro sits at $15 per host per month on an annual contract.
How do vendors count hosts when infrastructure autoscales?
It depends on the vendor's clock. Dynatrace has billed hosts in 15-minute intervals since its 2023 Platform Subscription, and Grafana Cloud meters host-hours, so a machine that runs for a few hours a day pays for those hours only. Vendors that price per host per month charge for the host count over the month, which costs more for a fleet that scales up and down.
Is a container billed as a host?
Usually not. Most vendors bill containers as a separate, cheaper unit tied to the host meter. Datadog charges $1 per container per month on top of its host rates, Grafana meters Kubernetes containers at $0.00070 per container-hour, and Dynatrace includes Kubernetes pod monitoring free on hosts that already run Full-Stack Monitoring.
Is per-host pricing cheaper than ingestion-based pricing?
Neither is cheaper in general. A host rate is easy to forecast because it follows the size of your fleet, while an ingestion meter follows how much data your services emit. A small fleet that logs heavily may do better on a host-based plan that includes ingestion, such as Splunk's entity pricing. A large fleet that logs lightly may do better on per-GB ingestion.
Which companies use per-host pricing?
Six companies in the UsagePricing blueprint corpus carry a host meter: Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana, Splunk, and LogicMonitor for observability, plus JFrog, which licenses self-managed Artifactory by server count.
Related billing units
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- Token-Based PricingA billing unit common in LLM and AI products, where customers are charged per input and output token processed.
- Per-Seat PricingA billing unit where the vendor charges a fixed fee per named user, regardless of how much each user consumes.
- Per-Resolution PricingA billing unit unique to AI customer-support products, where the vendor charges only when an AI agent resolves a customer issue without escalation.
- Bandwidth-Based PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per gigabyte of data transferred out of the platform.
- Per-Function-Invocation PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per serverless function invocation, often combined with a separate compute-time charge.
- CPU-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for the CPU time their workloads consume, typically measured in vCPU-seconds or vCPU-hours.
- GB-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for the memory their workloads consume over time, measured in gigabyte-hours.
- GPU-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for GPU time consumed, typically measured per-second or per-hour by GPU type.
- Per-API-Call PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per API request, regardless of payload size or processing time.
- Per-GB Storage PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per gigabyte of data stored on the platform per month.
- Media-Minute PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per minute of audio or video processed — used by speech, voice, and video AI vendors.
- Per-Request PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per request served — the generic meter for inference endpoints, search, scraping, and browser infrastructure.
- Per-Event PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per event ingested — the native meter of observability and billing-infrastructure platforms.
- Vector Storage PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for vectors stored or indexed — the storage dimension of vector database pricing.
- Per-Character PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per character of text processed — the standard meter for text-to-speech and translation.
- Per-Document PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per document processed or generated — common in AI writing, SEO, and document-intelligence tools.
- Per-Page PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per page crawled, parsed, or rendered — the meter for web scraping and document parsing.
- Per-Transaction PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per financial or billing transaction processed — the meter of billing and accounting platforms.
- Active-User PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per monthly or daily active user rather than per provisioned seat.
- Per-Task PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per task an automation or agent executes — Zapier's historical unit, now spreading to AI agents.
- Per-Unit PricingA billing unit used by robotics, hardware AI, and some SaaS companies where the metered object is a physical or abstract 'unit' — a robot deployed, a device sold, or a defined deliverable.
- Workflow Execution PricingA billing unit where each end-to-end workflow or automation run is metered and billed, regardless of the compute steps it contains.
- Per-Message PricingA billing unit where each individual message or reply in a conversation is metered, common in AI chat and voice platforms.
- Per-Invoice PricingA billing unit used by billing infrastructure platforms where each invoice generated or processed is metered as the primary cost driver.
- Per-Action PricingA billing unit where each discrete action taken by an AI agent or automation is metered — common in browser automation and agentic workflow tools.
- Per-Image PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated image is metered, common in image generation APIs and multimodal AI platforms.
- Per-Conversation PricingA billing unit where each complete customer conversation — from first message to resolution — is metered as a single chargeable event.
- Per-Record PricingA billing unit where each data record processed, labeled, or extracted is metered — common in data platforms and web scraping services.
- Per-Word PricingA billing unit common in translation and localization platforms where the metered object is the word count of content processed.
- Per-Video PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated video is metered, common in video generation and synthetic media platforms.
- Milestone-Based PricingA billing unit used in drug discovery and biotech AI where payment is tied to achieving defined research milestones rather than time or compute consumed.
- Per-Outcome PricingA billing unit where payment is triggered by verified outcomes delivered — distinct from outcome-based pricing models, this refers specifically to 'outcomes' as a countable billing unit.
- Per-Datapoint PricingA billing unit where each individual data measurement or signal ingested is metered — common in cloud cost intelligence and ML evaluation platforms.
- Per-Interaction PricingA billing unit where each patient-agent or user-agent interaction is metered, common in healthcare AI and customer engagement platforms.
- Data Licensing PricingA pricing structure where access to proprietary datasets or data assets is licensed separately from the software or services, common in AI training data and clinical data platforms.
- Robot-Hour PricingA billing unit where each hour a robot or autonomous system operates is metered — the robotics equivalent of a GPU-hour.
- Per-Contact PricingA billing unit where each contact or lead in the database is metered, common in AI sales development and outbound automation platforms.
- Per-Mailbox PricingA billing unit where each connected email mailbox or sending account is metered, common in AI outbound sales and email automation platforms.
- Browser-Hour PricingA billing unit where each hour of headless browser compute time is metered, common in web scraping and browser automation platforms.
- Per-Generation PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated creative asset — image, video, or design — is counted as a 'generation' and metered accordingly.
- Per-Ticket PricingA billing unit where each customer support ticket handled by an AI agent is metered — common in AI customer service platforms.
- Per-Log PricingA billing unit where each LLM request log ingested or stored is metered — common in AI observability and evaluation platforms.
- Per-Trace PricingA billing unit where each distributed trace — a complete record of an LLM request chain — is metered, common in AI observability platforms.
- Per-IP PricingA billing unit where each IP address or proxy endpoint allocated is metered — used by web scraping proxy providers.
- Per-Device PricingA billing unit where each hardware device or endpoint connected to the AI platform is metered.
- Per-Case PricingA billing unit used in legal AI platforms where each case or matter processed by the AI is metered.
- Per-Report PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated report or analysis document is metered as a discrete output.
- Per-Email PricingA billing unit where the number of emails sent in a billing period sets the price or the plan cap, common in email marketing, lifecycle messaging, and cold-outreach tools.
- Data Ingestion PricingA billing unit where customers pay per gigabyte of logs, traces, metrics or other telemetry sent into the platform, usually before retention or query costs are added.
- Per-Site PricingA billing unit where each website, store, or licensed facility is billed as a separate unit, so spend scales with the number of sites rather than the number of users.