Best offer on record: SigNoz Cloud 30-day free trial (no credit card). 3 verified findings, checked 2026-10-22.
Offers
SigNoz Cloud 30-day free trial (no credit card) high confidence
Managed SigNoz Cloud workspaces available in US, EU, or India: "Get a 30-day trial with no credit card required" (signoz.io/teams). SigNoz docs FAQ (signoz.io/docs/faqs/general): when the trial expires with no payment method added, the deployment is deleted after a 7-day grace period (with email reminders); data cannot be recovered after deletion; an expired trial can only be reactivated via support (cloud-support@signoz.io). Trial accounts are rate-limited at the ingestion side: "You are sending data at more than 100 RPS, your ingestion may be rate limited". Post-trial pricing: Teams plan from $49/month including $49 of usage; overage at $0.30/GB logs or traces and $0.10/million metric samples; retention 15 days logs/traces, 1 month metrics on base plans (longer retention: 15/30/90/180 days or 1 year for logs/traces, 1/3/6/13 months for metrics, via support, affects pricing); Enterprise from $4000/month.
Eligibility
Open to anyone who signs up (no .edu, no startup criteria, no credit card during trial). Workspaces served from US, EU, India data centers. No student-only or startup-only trial variant found.
How to claim
Sign up at signoz.io/teams ("Get Started - Free" CTA): create account, choose a data source, instrument with OpenTelemetry and visualize. To keep the workspace after day 30, add a credit card under Settings > Billing before the trial or 7-day grace period ends.
Expiry
30 days from signup, then a 7-day grace period; after that the workspace and all data are deleted (irrecoverable; reactivation only via support). Trial does not renew automatically.
Gotchas
This is a trial, not a perpetual free tier. No trial ingestion cap in GB is published on any official page I fetched today - the previously circulated "~50 GB ingest" limit could NOT be confirmed; the only documented trial cap is the ~100 RPS ingestion rate limit. Adding a credit card "does not charge you during the trial period" (docs FAQ), but a card becomes required to continue use. Cancelling a subscription deletes the workspace and its data with no restore. Each additional workspace bills separately; no consolidated billing across workspaces.
SigNoz Startup Program - $19/month for 12 months high confidence
Eligible startups pay $19/month for SigNoz Cloud for the first 12 months instead of the $49/month Teams minimum, and that $19 includes $19 of telemetry usage each month; consumption beyond the included amount is billed at standard published rates ($0.30/GB logs or traces, $0.10/million metric samples). Roughly $19 of usage equals ~63 GB of logs or traces per month. No end date or sunset is stated on the page; the program was live as of 2026-10-22.
Eligibility
All three must hold: company less than 3 years old, fewer than 30 employees, and less than $6 million raised. No .edu/student eligibility; no credit-card requirement stated; no region limit stated. The page does not document how eligibility is verified (self-declared at signup vs. reviewed).
How to claim
Go to signoz.io/startups and click the "Start your free trial" CTA (routes to the signoz.io/teams signup). The $19 rate applies for the first 12 months of an eligible company's SigNoz Cloud subscription. Confirm the startup rate on your first invoice; contact support@signoz.io if the discount is not applied.
Expiry
The $19/month rate lasts 12 months, after which standard pricing applies (Teams from $49/month including $49 of usage). Program itself has no published expiry or sunset date.
Gotchas
Includes only $19 of usage/month - a startup shipping more telemetry will get bill overages at standard rates. The startup price is anchored to the $49 Teams minimum, which was cut from $199/month to $49/month in May 2025 (see sunset notes), so the effective discount relative to the old baseline is much larger than $30/month. No documented review process or appeal path; eligibility claims are not machine-verifiable.
Self-Hosted Community Edition - free open-source observability high confidence
SigNoz is an open-source, OpenTelemetry-native platform (metrics, traces, logs in one datastore, out-of-box APM dashboards) that you can self-host free of charge: "Get started with Community Edition" (signoz.io/pricing). Install via Docker Compose/Swarm, Linux install, or Kubernetes/Helm (including AWS, GCP, AKS, DigitalOcean guides; see signoz.io/docs/install/docker, /install/kubernetes). The pricing-page FAQ "What is the difference between SigNoz Cloud (Teams) and Community Edition?" frames the difference as: self-host the community edition yourself vs. Cloud adds managed operation plus SSO & SAML support and help configuring dashboards/alerts. There are no published data caps on the self-hosted edition - you provide your own infrastructure (ClickHouse storage, OTel collector resources are your cost). Retention is configurable per-workspace in Settings > Retention Controls. The docs product FAQ describes SigNoz as a "full-stack open source APM tool" and open source alternative to SaaS APMs. OSS license name could not be verified today (GitHub pages were unreachable from this environment).
Eligibility
No eligibility requirement: no .edu email, no credit card, no company age/funding cap - anyone, including students and startups, can self-host. Practically it requires your own server/container infrastructure (Linux/Mac/containers; the team does not support Windows installs per docs FAQ, so use containers on Windows).
How to claim
No account or payment: download/deploy via Docker Compose or the Helm chart per signoz.io/docs/install/; point OpenTelemetry SDKs/collectors at your endpoint (gRPC 4317 / HTTP 4318, no ingestion key needed, TLS off by default).
Expiry
No expiry or renewal - community edition is an ongoing open-source project; no sunset date published. Ongoing cost is your infrastructure (compute/storage), not a license fee.
Gotchas
"Free" means no software license fee; you bear infrastructure, storage, query-performance and ops cost, and any egress you arrange. The OSS license text could not be re-verified today (GitHub fetches returned 404 from this environment) - verify the repo license before commercial use if that matters. Self-hosted build lacks Cloud-only add-ons like SSO/SAML and managed help; long-term retention and high RPS are constrained by your own hardware. To leave SigNoz later, OpenTelemetry-native data makes exporting out easier, but a self-hosted-to-Cloud migration is a supported (one-way) path.
1) Teams price cut (May 2025): SigNoz cut the SigNoz Cloud Teams minimum from $199/month to $49/month, with $49 of usage now included at that price (blog: "Cloud Teams Plan Now at $49", with 2025/05 asset in page; per-unit rates unchanged at $0.30/GB logs/traces, $0.10/mn metric samples; the $19 startup price sits off this new baseline). 2) The previously cited free-trial figure of "~50 GB ingest" could NOT be found on any official page fetched today (signoz.io/pricing, /teams/, docs FAQs, cost-control docs); the only trial limit documented today is the ~100 RPS ingestion rate threshold - treat any "~50 GB" claim as unverified. 3) No student/education license or program exists on signoz.io as of 2026-10-22 (checked pricing, homepage, /startups/, docs FAQs, and the corporate sitemap, which lists no education/academic page). 4) No perpetual free SigNoz Cloud tier - "Get Started - Free" is the 30-day trial. 5) No standalone free Uptime/CDN offering found: uptime monitoring in SigNoz is a dashboard-template feature, not a separate free SaaS tier. 6) Method note: search-engine cross-checks were unavailable this session (shared WebSearch budget exhausted); verification was done directly against official signoz.io pages, docs .md endpoints, the corporate/product sitemaps, and SigNoz's own blog. GitHub (for the OSS license name) was unreachable from this environment and is the one claim left unverified.