How to Cancel New Relic in 2026 — Stop Billing + Migrate to Free Monitoring

Last updated: February 2026 • Difficulty: Medium

⚠️ The New Relic billing shock: New Relic charges per "full platform user" at $49-99/month PLUS data ingest at $0.30-0.50 per GB. A team of 5 engineers with moderate logging can easily hit $800-2,000/month. The free tier includes only 1 full user and 100GB/month of data.

Why New Relic Bills Escalate

Per-user pricing: Each "full platform user" costs $49-99/month — basic users are free but limited
Data ingest charges: $0.30/GB after 100GB free — logs, traces, and metrics all count
Verbose agents: Default agent configuration sends way more data than necessary
Auto-instrumentation: New Relic agents automatically instrument libraries, generating massive trace volumes
Annual contracts: Enterprise deals have minimum commitments with auto-renewal
Retention costs: Longer data retention = higher storage fees

Option 1: Downgrade to Free Tier

Go to Administration → Plan Management
Select Free tier — includes 1 full user + 100GB/month data
Reduce team access: convert other users to "basic" (free, limited to dashboards only)
Reduce data ingest: lower sampling rates, disable unused integrations

💡 Quick savings hack: Before canceling entirely, check if reducing to 1 full user and setting aggressive data ingest limits brings the bill under control. The 100GB free tier handles basic monitoring for small apps.

Option 2: Cancel Completely

First, remove all New Relic agents from your servers and applications
Delete integrations: Kubernetes, cloud provider, infrastructure agents
Go to Administration → Account Settings → Downgrade Account
For paid plans: contact billing@newrelic.com or your account manager
Enterprise contracts: send written cancellation notice per your MSA terms (usually 30-90 days before renewal)

Step 3: Remove All Agents

Even on the free tier, running agents generates data that could exceed 100GB:

APM agents: Uninstall from each application (npm uninstall newrelic, pip uninstall newrelic, etc.)
Infrastructure agent: sudo systemctl stop newrelic-infra && sudo apt remove newrelic-infra
Browser agent: Remove the JavaScript snippet from your frontend
Kubernetes: helm uninstall newrelic-bundle
Log forwarding: Disable any Fluentd/Fluent Bit → New Relic pipelines
Revoke license keys: Delete from environment variables and CI/CD pipelines

Export Your Data First

Export dashboards as JSON using NerdGraph API
Export alert conditions and policies for recreation elsewhere
Screenshot or export key performance baselines (you'll want these for comparison)
Export SLI/SLO definitions if you've configured service levels

Free and Cheaper Alternatives

Grafana + Prometheus + Loki: Free, open-source full stack — metrics, logs, traces, dashboards. The gold standard replacement.
Grafana Cloud: Free tier: 10K metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces/month — generous for small teams
Uptime Kuma: Free, self-hosted uptime monitoring (replaces Synthetics)
Sentry: Free tier for error tracking — often the only monitoring small apps actually need
Betterstack (formerly Logtail): 1GB/month free logs with alerting
HyperDX: Open-source, unified observability, generous free tier

The Math: New Relic vs Open Source

A 5-person team with 500GB/month data ingest on New Relic Pro: 5 users × $49 + 400GB × $0.30 = $365/month = $4,380/year. Grafana Cloud free tier: $0. Self-hosted Grafana + Prometheus on a $20/month VPS: $240/year. Even Grafana Cloud Pro is ~$1,200/year for the same workload. The open-source observability stack has won.

🔍 Find All Your Developer Tool Subscriptions

New Relic is one of many SaaS tools quietly billing your company card. Upload a bank statement to JustCancel and we'll find every subscription — monitoring, analytics, cloud, and more.

Scan Your Statement — $5 One-Time

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Quick Cancel Guide: New Relic

Direct cancel link + step-by-step instructions