New Relic Synthetics has no plan fee of its own. It is billed out of two meters that sit under whichever New Relic edition you are on: a monthly allowance of synthetic checks, then $0.005 per check beyond it. The allowances are 500 checks a month on Free, 10,000 on Standard, 1 million on Pro and 10 million on Enterprise. The single most important fact, and the one almost every pricing summary gets wrong, is that simple ping monitors do not count against any of it. Ping is free and unlimited on every edition. Everything else, including API tests, scripted browsers, step monitors, certificate checks and broken-link checks, consumes the allowance and then meters.
Every figure below was read from newrelic.com/pricing and docs.newrelic.com in September 2026. The arithmetic is ours, each step is shown, and a month here is 43,833 minutes, the average calendar month, so you can substitute your own volumes and intervals.
The New Relic Synthetics pricing rate card
There is no line on New Relic's price list that says "Synthetics". What you are buying is an edition, which sets the check allowance, and then usage above it. This is the whole card.
| Edition | Synthetic checks included per month | Rate beyond the allowance | Ping monitors | Full platform users | Core users |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 500 | $0.005 per check | Free, unlimited | 1 free user | Not applicable |
| Standard | 10,000 | $0.005 per check | Free, unlimited | $10 first user, $99 each after, max 5 | $49 per user |
| Pro | 1,000,000 | $0.005 per check | Free, unlimited | $349 annual, $418.80 monthly | $49 per user |
| Enterprise | 10,000,000 | $0.005 per check | Free, unlimited | Contact sales | Contact sales |
Data ingest is the third meter and it is easy to forget. Every edition includes 100 GB a month, after which original ingest is $0.40 per GB and Data Plus is $0.60. Synthetic check results are data, so a large synthetic estate contributes to that line as well as to the check line.
The correction almost every pricing article needs
Look at a handful of third-party New Relic pricing guides and you will read that Standard includes "10,000 synthetic monitors". It does not. It includes 10,000 synthetic checks, and New Relic's documentation is explicit that a check is "an individual execution of a synthetic monitor". Those are different by four orders of magnitude.
One monitor running every minute from a single location executes 43,833 times a month. Standard's entire allowance of 10,000 checks is therefore 23% of one monitor, or about 6.9 days before it meters. If you read 10,000 as a monitor count and sized a plan on it, your first invoice will not resemble your forecast.
How a check is counted, including the multiplier people miss
New Relic's own documentation states it plainly: "Your monitor will run one check from each selected location during each frequency interval." So locations multiply. A monitor set to three locations at a 5-minute frequency does not produce 8,766 checks a month, it produces 26,300. Picking a fourth location is a 33% increase in that monitor's cost, and the location picker does not look like a pricing control.
Two settings therefore decide almost your entire synthetic bill, and neither of them lives on the pricing page: the frequency and the number of locations. The table below is the conversion nobody publishes. It shows how many non-ping monitors New Relic's allowances actually cover, assuming three locations, which is the smallest configuration most teams consider credible.
| Frequency | Checks per monitor per month, 3 locations | Monitors covered on Standard | Monitors covered on Pro | Cost of one monitor beyond the allowance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every minute | 131,499 | 0.08 | 7.60 | $657.50 |
| Every 5 minutes | 26,300 | 0.38 | 38.02 | $131.50 |
| Every 10 minutes | 13,150 | 0.76 | 76.05 | $65.75 |
| Every 15 minutes | 8,767 | 1.14 | 114.07 | $43.83 |
| Every 30 minutes | 4,383 | 2.28 | 228.14 | $21.92 |
| Every hour | 2,192 | 4.56 | 456.28 | $10.96 |
The most useful single row is the 15-minute one. Standard's 10,000 checks cover exactly 1.14 monitors at a 15-minute interval from three locations, which means the allowance is sized for one advanced monitor and nothing else. At 10 minutes it no longer covers even one.
Which monitor types are free and which are billed
New Relic offers seven synthetic monitor types. Exactly one of them is outside the meter, and the documentation on check limits says so directly: the limits apply to all monitor types except the simple ping monitor.
| Monitor type | What it does | Counts against the check allowance |
|---|---|---|
| Ping | HEAD or GET against one URL, 60 second timeout | No, free and unlimited |
| Simple browser | Loads the URL in a real browser | Yes |
| Scripted browser | Custom script, 180 second timeout | Yes |
| API test | Endpoint assertions, 180 second timeout | Yes |
| Step monitor | Codeless sequential browser steps | Yes |
| Certificate check | Watches SSL certificate expiry | Yes |
| Broken links | Tests every link on a page | Yes |
This deserves to be said clearly, because it is the strongest thing about New Relic's synthetic pricing and it cuts against our own product: if all you need is "is this URL responding", New Relic will do it for nothing, forever, on any edition including the free one. That is cheaper than AlertPing, cheaper than Pingdom, cheaper than everybody. Anyone selling you an uptime tool who does not tell you that is not being straight with you.
The catch is what a ping does not tell you. It cannot assert that the JSON body contains the right field, that the response came back inside a latency budget, that the certificate expires in more than 14 days, or that a login still works. The moment you want any of those, you have left the free tier and joined the meter.
Three worked bills
All three assume Standard, three locations, and that ingest stays inside the free 100 GB.
A small team watching 12 public URLs
Plain availability, ping monitors only. Check cost is $0 because ping is not metered. The bill is entirely seats: $10 for the first full platform user and $99 for the second, so $109 a month for two people. For pure uptime, that is genuinely hard to beat.
The same 12 endpoints as API tests every 5 minutes
Now every check is billable. Twelve monitors at 8,766 checks each per location, times three locations, is 315,598 checks a month. Subtract the 10,000 allowance and multiply the remaining 305,598 by $0.005 and the synthetic line alone is $1,527.99 a month, or $18,336 a year, before seats and before ingest. The only thing that changed from the previous scenario is that the checks now assert on the response.
Three scripted browser journeys every 15 minutes
Three monitors at 2,922 checks each per location, times three locations, is 26,300 checks. Less the allowance, that is 16,300 billable checks and $81.50 a month. Scripted journeys are the expensive-sounding option and they are the cheap one here, purely because 15 minutes is a sane interval for a checkout flow and one minute is not.
That is the whole lesson of this rate card. The monitor type barely matters. The interval and the location count are the price. If you are building a cost model, model those two and treat everything else as rounding.
The seat cliff at the sixth user
Standard caps full platform users at five. The ladder runs $10, $109, $208, $307, $406 a month for one through five people. Adding a sixth is not $99 more, because there is no sixth slot: the account has to move to Pro, where full platform users are $349 each on an annual commitment. Six users on Pro is $2,094 a month.
So the sixth person costs $1,688 a month, $20,256 a year. It is the single largest step function anywhere in New Relic's pricing and it has nothing to do with how much you monitor. Core users at $49 exist partly to defer this, and are worth understanding before you hand out full platform seats by default. Pro billed monthly is $418.80 per user, so the annual commitment saves 16.67%.
How to keep a New Relic synthetic bill under control
Four things move the number, roughly in order of how much they move it.
- Audit the interval on every non-ping monitor. Going from 1 minute to 5 cuts that monitor's cost by 80% and, for anything that is not a checkout or a payment path, usually costs you nothing you will miss.
- Count your locations. Three is a reasonable floor for confirming an outage rather than trusting one probe. Six is double the bill for a marginal gain unless you genuinely serve those regions.
- Downgrade assertions you do not read. An API test that only ever checks for HTTP 200 is a ping monitor with a bill attached. Convert it and it becomes free.
- Split the estate by job. Keep the handful of scripted journeys that need New Relic's context next to your APM data, and move broad availability coverage to something flat-priced. Breadth is what makes per-execution billing expensive, and breadth is the cheapest thing to buy elsewhere.
That last point is worth a caveat in the other direction. If a synthetic failure needs to open straight into a distributed trace and the offending span, keeping the check inside New Relic is worth paying for, and splitting it out costs you the correlation. We have written up when a second uptime tool alongside APM is worth it and when it is not, including the case for not bothering.
One more thing worth separating out, because it gets billed as monitoring and is not: if the reason you are running a headless browser is to capture what is on the page rather than to get a pass or fail verdict, a scripted browser monitor is an expensive way to buy that. Pulling structured content off pages is a job for an API built for extracting page data, at a fraction of a per-execution synthetic rate, and it keeps your monitoring bill about monitoring.
New Relic Synthetics against the alternatives
Every major APM vendor meters synthetics per execution, so the comparison is really about which meter and which floor.
| Product | Uptime or ping checks | Advanced or scripted checks | Fastest interval |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Relic Synthetics | Free and unlimited, every edition | $0.005 per check after the allowance | 1 minute |
| Datadog Synthetics | Metered per API test run | Metered per browser test run | 1 minute |
| Checkly | Monitor count, 10 to 75 by plan | $4.00 per 1,000 browser runs prepaid | 30 seconds on Team |
| AlertPing | Flat, 20 to 500 monitors by plan | Assertions included, no scripted browsers | 30 seconds on Team |
Read that table honestly and New Relic wins the first column outright. It loses the second one to anybody with a flat price the moment you have breadth rather than depth, which is why the common ending is a split estate rather than a migration. If you are pricing the same job at Checkly, we have broken down what a Checkly alternative costs once the run meter is included, and the full New Relic platform cost across editions, users and ingest covers the parts of the bill this article deliberately leaves out.
Questions people ask about New Relic Synthetics pricing
How much do New Relic synthetic checks cost?
$0.005 per check beyond your edition's monthly allowance, which is 500 checks on Free, 10,000 on Standard, 1 million on Pro and 10 million on Enterprise. Simple ping monitors are excluded from the count and cost nothing on any edition. One non-ping monitor running every minute from three locations executes 131,499 times a month, which is $657.50 at list rate.
Are New Relic ping monitors free?
Yes, on every edition including the free one, and unlimited. New Relic's check-limit documentation states the limits apply to all monitor types except the simple ping monitor. If your requirement is purely whether a URL responds, New Relic is a genuinely free uptime tool and this is the least-advertised good deal in the category.
What counts as a synthetic check in New Relic?
One individual execution of one monitor from one location. New Relic's documentation states that a monitor runs one check from each selected location during each frequency interval, so a monitor pointed at three locations produces three checks per interval. Frequency and location count multiply together, and together they determine the bill.
Is New Relic synthetic monitoring expensive?
For a small number of deep checks, no. Three scripted browser journeys every 15 minutes from three locations costs $81.50 a month on Standard. For breadth it becomes expensive quickly: twelve API tests every 5 minutes from the same three locations is $1,527.99 a month, or $18,336 a year, on the synthetic line alone. Depth is affordable here and breadth is not.
How many synthetic checks does New Relic include for free?
500 a month on the Free edition, alongside 100 GB of data ingest and one free full platform user. That is roughly 8.3 hours of one monitor running every minute from a single location, or 2.8 hours from three. It is sized for evaluating the product rather than for running it, with the important exception that unlimited ping monitoring sits outside the limit entirely.
What is the minimum check frequency in New Relic Synthetics?
One minute. New Relic's scheduler takes intervals in minutes, hours or a day, and there is no sub-minute option at any edition or price. If you need a 30-second interval, New Relic cannot provide it and you need an external checker that offers one, which shifts the question from cost to capability.
Why did my New Relic synthetic bill increase?
In order of likelihood: somebody tightened an interval, somebody added a location to existing monitors, or somebody converted ping monitors into API tests to add assertions. The third is the sneakiest, because it looks like a small configuration change and it moves those monitors from free to metered. Check the location list before you check anything else, since adding one location to every monitor raises the whole synthetic line by a third.
Can I use New Relic Synthetics without buying New Relic?
No. Synthetics is not sold separately and has no standalone plan, so you are always buying an edition, at minimum the free one with its single user and 500 checks. Teams that want availability monitoring without adopting an observability platform generally end up with a dedicated checker, which is why the split estate is so common: a comparison of synthetic monitoring tools is the right place to start if that is the shape of your problem.