Zabbix itself costs nothing to license. You pay for Zabbix in two ways: Zabbix Cloud, the hosted version, which runs from $50 a month on the Nano tier to $5,000 a month on 2xLarge depending on how many new values per second (NVPS) you send, plus $0.30 per GB of storage above 10 GB; or a support subscription for a self-hosted install, which starts at $325 a month on Silver and $825 a month on Gold, both billed annually.
Most Zabbix pricing pages online copy one line, "Zabbix Cloud from $50 a month", and stop. The bill you actually get depends on three numbers you control: hosts, metrics per host and the update interval. Below are the full tier sheet from Zabbix's own calculator, the rules it applies to storage and annual billing, the support subscription grid, and four bills worked out for real-sized estates.
Only need to know when a site or API is down?
A Zabbix Cloud node is a full monitoring server. If the job is public websites, APIs, ports and SSL certificates, AlertPing Team checks 100 of them every 30 seconds from 2 regions for $348 a year, with status pages included. See the plans and limits.
How much does Zabbix Cloud cost?
Zabbix Cloud costs $50 to $5,000 a month for compute, set by one of seven tiers sized in new values per second, plus storage at $0.30 per GB a month above the first 10 GB. Paying annually takes 10% off the compute price only. A 5-day free trial comes first, and you can pay by card or by invoice.
| Tier | NVPS limit | Compute per month | Default storage | Total per month | Total per year, annual billing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nano | 50 | $50 | 10 GB, $0 | $50 | $540 |
| Micro | 100 | $100 | 50 GB, $12 | $112 | $1,224 |
| Small | 250 | $250 | 100 GB, $27 | $277 | $3,024 |
| Medium | 1,000 | $750 | 200 GB, $57 | $807 | $8,784 |
| Large | 2,500 | $1,875 | 500 GB, $147 | $2,022 | $22,014 |
| xLarge | 5,000 | $2,500 | 1,000 GB, $297 | $2,797 | $30,564 |
| 2xLarge | 10,000 | $5,000 | 2,000 GB, $597 | $5,597 | $61,164 |
Default storage is the size Zabbix's calculator recommends for each tier, and you can choose more or less. The annual column applies the 10% discount to compute and leaves storage at full price, which is how the calculator computes it. Zabbix calls every figure a starting point that can vary with configuration, so treat the table as list price, not a quote.
Two rules matter more than the price list. Once you increase disk space you cannot decrease it again, so storage only ever moves up. And when a node goes over its NVPS limit, Zabbix's FAQ says the values above the limit are discarded at random. A tier that is too small does not fail loudly, it loses data quietly.
Compute price per NVPS a month, by tier
Tier price divided by its NVPS limit. Volume halves the unit price only from 5,000 NVPS.
How is Zabbix Cloud priced, by hosts or by NVPS?
By NVPS, not by hosts. Zabbix Cloud includes unlimited hosts, metrics, users and alerts, and charges for the rate at which new values arrive. The calculator works it out as hosts times metrics per host, divided by the update interval in seconds, then picks the smallest tier whose limit is above the result.
That makes the update interval the biggest lever on the bill. Polling every 5 minutes instead of every minute cuts NVPS by a factor of five. It also explains why simple "price per host" comparisons with other tools rarely line up: a host with 20 items polled every 5 minutes and a host with 300 items polled every 30 seconds cost very different amounts.
What Zabbix costs for 50, 200 and 500 hosts
The four bills below run Zabbix's own formula with the storage size the calculator suggests. Metrics per host are realistic for Linux servers with the standard templates.
| Estate | Interval | NVPS | Tier | Per month | Per year, annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 hosts x 100 metrics | 1 min | 84 | Micro | $112 | $1,224 |
| 50 hosts x 100 metrics | 5 min | 17 | Nano | $50 | $540 |
| 200 hosts x 150 metrics | 1 min | 500 | Medium | $807 | $8,784 |
| 200 hosts x 150 metrics | 5 min | 100 | Small | $277 | $3,024 |
| 500 hosts x 200 metrics | 1 min | 1,667 | Large | $2,022 | $22,014 |
| 500 hosts x 200 metrics | 5 min | 334 | Medium | $807 | $8,784 |
Note the 200-host, 5-minute row. It lands on exactly 100 NVPS, and the calculator moves you up to Small rather than Micro because the limit has to sit above your rate, not at it. Leave headroom anyway: given the random-discard rule, running a node at its limit is a data-quality risk, not a saving.
How much does Zabbix support cost?
Zabbix support subscriptions start at $325 a month on Silver and $825 a month on Gold, both billed annually, so $3,900 and $9,900 a year. Platinum, Enterprise and Global are quoted. None of them charges by device or metric. The price follows response times, the number of Zabbix servers and proxies covered, and how many of your people can open cases.
| Subscription | Price | Hours | Initial response | Servers and proxies | Contacts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Silver | $325 a month, billed annually | 8x5, 8 cases | 1 day | 1 server, no proxies | 1 |
| Gold | From $825 a month, billed annually | 8x5, unlimited cases | 4 hours | Priced per server and per proxy | 2 |
| Platinum | Quote | 24x7 | 4 hours, 2-hour emergency | Priced per server and per proxy | 3 |
| Enterprise | Quote | 24x7, 40 consultancy hours | 4 hours, 1.5-hour emergency | Unlimited | 7 |
| Global | Quote | 24x7, 80 consultancy hours | 2 hours, 1-hour emergency | Unlimited, multiple legal entities | 20 |
Every subscription includes 5 years of guaranteed security fixes for the version you run. If it lapses, Zabbix keeps working; you lose the ticket system, the response-time guarantee and the patch commitment. Zabbix markets these subscriptions partly on compliance, NIS2 in particular. If an audit finding is what is pushing you to buy, put the obligation on a register with regulatory change monitoring so the next end-of-support date or rule change is tracked before it becomes a finding.
Is Zabbix free for commercial use?
Yes. Zabbix is open source with no license fee, no device limit and no feature gates, and you can run it in production with no subscription. The costs are the server, the database and storage it needs, and the staff time to install, tune and upgrade it. A Zabbix Cloud trial that has no payment method attached is stopped and deleted 5 days after the trial ends.
Zabbix Cloud vs self-hosted Zabbix, which costs less?
Self-hosted is cheaper on paper because the software is free, but a production Zabbix server needs a database sized for your history, backups, upgrades and someone who knows it. Zabbix Cloud trades that for a monthly fee and some limits worth knowing before you sign:
- External checks, ODBC monitoring other than MySQL and PostgreSQL, and SNMP traps are not supported on cloud nodes.
- You must set a weekly maintenance window of at least one hour, and the node may be taken offline during it.
- Backups run weekly on a schedule you cannot set, and a backup cannot be exported out of Zabbix Cloud.
- An existing self-hosted instance cannot be imported, so a move to the cloud is a rebuild.
- Included support covers the platform. Help with items, triggers and alerts is bought as extra support or consulting.
The maintenance window deserves a second look if Zabbix is what tells you a website is down. For an hour a week, the thing that would raise the alarm can be offline too. That is the gap an outside uptime check covers, and it is cheap compared with any Zabbix tier.
What Zabbix costs if you only need uptime checks
Plenty of teams price Zabbix Cloud when what they want is a page when a website, API or port stops answering. Forty public endpoints with five items each, checked every minute, come to 4 NVPS, which fits Nano at $50 a month or $540 a year on annual billing. AlertPing Team covers 100 endpoints every 30 seconds from US East and EU Central for $348 a year, and confirms a failure from a second region before paging anyone.
The trade is clear in both directions. Zabbix monitors CPU, disks, SNMP devices and internal services we cannot see. AlertPing checks from outside your network, includes public status pages, and has no node to size, patch or put into a maintenance window. Many teams run both: Zabbix inside, an outside-in monitor for the public endpoints. If you are comparing self-hosted suites, our Nagios XI pricing and Checkmk pricing breakdowns use the same worked-bill format, and the server monitoring page lists which server checks an outside monitor can do.
Zabbix pricing questions
Does Zabbix Cloud charge per host?
No. Zabbix Cloud includes unlimited hosts, metrics, users and alerts on every tier. You pay for compute by NVPS tier, from $50 to $5,000 a month, plus storage above 10 GB at $0.30 per GB a month. Host count only matters because it drives the NVPS rate.
Is there a Zabbix Cloud free trial?
Yes, a 5-day free trial. If you do not add a payment method, the trial node is stopped and then deleted 5 days after the trial ends. After that, annual billing saves 10% on compute, and you can pay by card or by invoice.
Can I change Zabbix Cloud tiers later?
Yes. Compute tiers can be upgraded or downgraded at any time from the node configuration, and an upgrade takes about 10 minutes. Storage is different: you can increase it once every 24 hours, but you can never decrease it after an increase.
Do I need a Zabbix subscription to run Zabbix in production?
No. Zabbix runs in production without any subscription and keeps running if one expires. A subscription buys guaranteed response times, access to Zabbix engineers, long-term maintenance and 5 years of security fixes, starting at $3,900 a year on Silver.