Can AI replace New Relic?
A consolation build is possible, but the paid product's decisive value sits outside a solo rebuild. For New Relic, collect a small transparent telemetry stream and run a few dashboards locally. The hard boundary is large telemetry platform, agents, query engine, correlation, global ingestion, and support, plus independent infrastructure and reliable alerting.
01What it costs
Checked Aug 14, 2026 · source: newrelic.com.
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | Free | 100 GB data ingest/month; 1 full-platform user; unlimited basic users; at least 8 days data retention; 500 synthetic checks/month |
| Standard, core user | $49 | — | Core observability access; unlimited basic users; Standard is limited to 5 full-platform users |
| Standard, first full-platform user | $10 | — | 1 discounted full-platform user; Standard supports up to 5 full-platform users |
| Standard, additional full-platform user | $99 | — | Users 2–5 on Standard; full-platform access |
| Pro, core user | $49 | — | Core observability access with Pro plan controls |
| Pro, full-platform user | $418.8 | $349/mo | Full-platform access with Pro controls and support |
| Enterprise | — | — | Custom users, ingest, support, retention and contract terms |
Hidden costs: Original-data ingest above 100 GB is $0.40/GB or $0.60/GB for Data Plus; EU data region adds $0.05/GB, synthetic checks above allowance are $0.005/check, and extended retention/advanced compute add separate charges
02Could AI build it for you?
The core job: Collect a small transparent telemetry stream of bounded error and log events, run a few local dashboards, alert through one channel, and publish an honest status page.
What a working version needs:
- server outside the monitored failure domain
- PostgreSQL
- optional ClickHouse
- email or webhook destination
- public HTTPS
Editorial comparison targets the Data Plus plan and a small independent monitoring service DIY substitute. Recheck price before merge.
03What you'd give up
- large telemetry platform, agents, query engine, correlation, global ingestion, and support
- global probe network
- phone and SMS delivery
- massive retention
- advanced incident response and support
People still pay for New Relic because monitoring must continue working during the exact outage it reports, which makes independent infrastructure and alert delivery the real product. The recurring cost buys probe geography, clocks, retries, deduplication, sampling, storage, paging, notification delivery, on-call rules, and its own uptime, not just the visible interface.
04Free and cheaper alternatives
eBPF observability with opinions; best when your apps live in containers.
Versus paying: Its automatic eBPF view is compelling for containers, but it lacks New Relic's broad language agents, browser and mobile monitoring, entity model, and managed integrations.
coroot.com →Logs, traces, metrics, errors and replay in one ClickHouse-backed stack.
hyperdx.io →Monitoring, incidents and status pages in one stack; simplicity did not survive.
Versus paying: It offers a broad suite, but operating the stack is substantial work and its APM agents, entity correlations, and ecosystem are less mature than New Relic's.
oneuptime.com →A single-binary observability stack that remembers storage is not free.
Versus paying: It handles the core signals, but it lacks New Relic's mature application agents, browser and mobile telemetry, entity inventory, and managed-scale experience.
openobserve.ai →05The build prompt
Paste this into an AI coding tool (such as Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable or Replit) to build your own version. Read the verdict first: this one is hard to get right.
Build a closest honest personal substitute for New Relic in an empty repository. Use Go, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, a Next.js 15 dashboard, and Docker Compose; do not offer alternative stacks. The core loop is: collect a small transparent telemetry stream of bounded error and log events, run a few local dashboards, alert through one channel, and publish an honest status page. Make the first run work locally with one documented command. Store all user data locally by default and make export straightforward. Put secrets in .env, ship .env.example, and never commit credentials. Implement HTTP, TCP, DNS, TLS-expiry, and heartbeat checks with explicit timeout and retry policies. Run checks from one independently hosted worker and store raw results plus incident state transitions. Send deduplicated alerts to email or one webhook destination with recovery notifications. Create services, maintenance windows, incidents, subscribers, and a public status page. Add bounded event ingestion for application errors with sampling and sensitive-field scrubbing. Provide health checks, retention settings, exports, backups, and a test-alert function. Include clear empty, loading, success, and recoverable error states. Add input validation, safe filenames, and graceful handling of unavailable APIs. Write focused tests for the core transformation and one end-to-end happy path. Create a README with setup, architecture, permissions, data location, and backup steps. Do not add accounts, billing, telemetry, analytics, or a hosted control plane. Do not claim to reproduce proprietary data, network liquidity, regulated access, or frontier infrastructure. Deliberately leave out a worldwide probe network. Deliberately leave out phone, SMS, and managed on-call escalation. Deliberately leave out unbounded logs, enterprise observability, and vendor-operated incident response. Finish by running the tests and listing the exact commands used.
06Open-source starting points
- Uptime Kuma: Popular open-source uptime monitoring dashboard with many check types.
App prices, verdicts, alternatives and build prompts are adapted from Can I Vibecode It? (MIT License, © 2026 Rob Hallam). Each price shows the date it was checked and its source. Prices change; confirm on the vendor's site before you decide.
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