Best offer on record: Grafana Cloud Free tier (free forever, no credit card). 4 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Live check of “Grafana Labs Startup Program (up to $100,000 in Grafana Cloud credits)”:Confirmed
Grafana Labs' official announcement page confirms the Startup Program offers up to $100,000 in Grafana Cloud credits, usable on any Grafana Cloud service for 12 months or until the startup's next funding round (whichever comes first), plus free Enterprise data-source plugins, 24x7 support, and a guaranteed 20% discount off list prices afterwards. Eligibility: open to all new customers (including Grafana Cloud Free accounts) and Grafana OSS users moving to managed cloud, ideally with under $10M raised and fewer than 25 employees, with acceptance at Grafana Labs' sole discretion and a reference-customer requirement; there is no dedicated landing page (grafana.com/startups returns 404), but the official blog page and its linked four-question Typeform application were both still live with no closure notice as of 2026-10-22.
Grafana Cloud Free tier (free forever, no credit card) high confidence
Official Grafana Cloud Free plan, read today (2026-10-22) on grafana.com/pricing and grafana.com/products/cloud/free-tier. Exact limits: 10k active metric series/month; 50 GB logs/month; 50 GB traces/month; 50 GB profiles/month; k6 limited to 500 virtual user hours/month; Synthetics (uptime) limited to 100k API test executions + 10k browser test executions/month; Frontend Observability 50k sessions/month; Grafana Assistant 3 active AI users (40M tokens/user/month) plus 25M tokens/month for service-account usage; Grafana Visualization 3 active users; IRM 3 active users; 14-day retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles & k6 tests; community support. 'Free forever', 'No charges ever', 'No credit card required' — stated on each service block. Note: the commonly cited '100K k6 executions' is outdated; k6 is now capped in virtual user hours, while the 100k figure applies to Synthetics executions.
Eligibility
Anyone — no .edu email, no student status, no startup status, and no credit card required. Free tier page markets it as 'perfect for personal projects, exploring new ideas, and early-stage startups'. No region restriction mentioned; stacks can be created in Grafana's public-cloud regions. Total user count is capped at 3 active users on the free tier.
How to claim
Sign up free at grafana.com (Create free account → grafana.com/auth/sign-up/create-user/?cta=free). Create an organization and a stack in your chosen region; all services above are available within the stated limits at $0. No credit card or payment method is asked. Upgrade to Pro (from $19/month + usage, 13-month metric retention / 30-day log-trace retention) or Enterprise (from $25,000/year spend commit) anytime if you outgrow the limits.
Expiry
No expiry or sunset stated; marketed as 'Free forever'. Limits shown are current as of 2026-10-22.
Gotchas
1) Total seat cap of 3 active users — a team larger than 3 cannot all use the free tier. 2) As of April 20, 2026, Grafana disabled alerting and reporting for NEWLY created free/trial stacks (email alerts/reports restricted to users inside your own instance; Cloud Alertmanager access disabled) as an anti-abuse measure — existing free accounts keep full functionality (third-party mirror of the Grafana status incident; medium confidence). 3) As of Jan 1, 2026, Grafana Assistant became billed on active users; free plan includes 3 AI users with a 40M tokens/user/month message cap, and paid plans charge $20 per additional active user beyond 3. 4) Free tier data is 14-day retention only; exceeding volume limits means downsampled/dropped data or upgrade — no egress-charge surprise, but no billing above limits on free (hard caps, not overage billing). 5) 'Adaptive Telemetry' and AI features included on free are allotment-limited, not unlimited.
Open to all new customers — explicitly including existing Grafana Cloud Free-account holders and Grafana OSS users migrating to managed cloud; students with a startup can apply too. Ideal profile: raised less than $10 million and under 25 employees, but the page says 'apply even if you do not meet these guidelines'. No stated company-age cap, no .edu requirement, no region limit. Admission is at Grafana Labs' sole discretion (not first-come-first-served). Accepted startups must agree to be a reference customer and may be asked to participate in marketing (guest blogs, event speaking). No credit card required to apply.
How to claim
Fill out the 4-question application form: https://grafana-labs.typeform.com/to/cSI7ohks (linked from the official blog post). Wait for Grafana Labs' discretionary decision; if accepted you receive the credit allocation plus the perks listed above.
Expiry
No published sunset date as of 2026-10-22. Each award lasts 12 months or until the company's next funding round; the guaranteed 20% discount continues after credits end. No 2025-2026 amendments to the program structure are stated on the page.
Gotchas
1) Discretionary selection — 'apply' does not mean 'get in'; no SLA on decisions. 2) Obliges reference-customer and marketing commitments. 3) Credits offset usage-based billing; they are not free hosting — if usage exceeds the credit value you must pay (at the 20% discount). 4) Program is startup-company-oriented, so a solo student project with no company may be a weak application. 5) The $100k figure is 'up to' — actual credit amounts vary per acceptance.
Student / education license — no dedicated Grafana education offer exists medium confidence
No Grafana student program, .edu-only license, or university discount program was found as of 2026-10-22: grafana.com/education/ and grafana.com/academy/ both return HTTP 404; the official free-tier and pricing pages contain no education/student section; the free tier's stated audience is 'personal projects, exploring new ideas, and early-stage startups' — students simply use the same no-credit-card free tier as everyone else. (Grafana's free learning content exists under its learning hub/docs, but it grants no cloud credits or .edu-verified accounts.)
Eligibility
N/A as a standalone program. The de facto student path is the general free tier: no .edu email required, no credit card, up to 3 users, 14-day retention.
How to claim
Students should just create a free Grafana Cloud account at grafana.com (no verification email or .edu address gate) and use it within free-tier limits; for a student-founded company, also consider the Startup Program application.
Expiry
Absence-of-program determination as of 2026-10-22; web search was unavailable (session search budget exhausted) so this is based on the official pages fetched today plus 404 probes, not an exhaustive web sweep.
Gotchas
Do not confuse Grafana Academy/courses (free learning content, if they reappear under another URL) with a cloud-credit student offer. If a student program launches later, it would appear on grafana.com.
Trial / trial-credit offers — no separate trial-credit program found; a 'Trial' tier exists alongside Free low confidence
As of 2026-10-22 the official pricing page lists no paid-plan trial-credit program for students or startups, and the sign-up page pushes 'The (actually useful) free forever plan' (create free account) rather than a time-boxed trial. The April 2026 status incident separately references a Grafana 'Trial' tier/stack category next to 'Free' (both affected by the new-stack alerting restriction), indicating a trial offering of some kind exists in the product, but Grafana's public pages reviewed today do not document trial-credit amounts, durations, or eligibility. The Startup Program (finding 2) is the only structured 'credit' offer.
Eligibility
Unknown/not documented publicly; no .edu or startup gating documented for any trial credits.
How to claim
No documented claim path; students/startups should rely on the free tier plus the Startup Program application. Worth re-checking grafana.com/pricing when search is available.
Expiry
N/A — based on absence of documentation as of 2026-10-22.
Gotchas
Absence of a documented trial-credit program is a snapshot observation; Grafana's 'Send more, charge more is broken. We are changing it.' pricing banner on the pricing page signals an in-flight pricing overhaul, so tier structure (including any trial) may change in 2026.