The Grafana Cloud alternative for teams who want charts, not clusters
Grafana Cloud is powerful when you already run Prometheus, Loki, or InfluxDB and want hosted dashboards. For a solo founder or small team tracking a dozen business metrics, standing up collectors and storage pipelines is overhead you don't need.
Umlogger sends samples over a single HTTP request and renders time-series charts in the console — $1/month flat, alerts and daily email digests included, nothing to host.
Start free trial →Umlogger vs Grafana Cloud
Same metrics you care about — without the collector tax.
| Datadog | Grafana Cloud | Umlogger | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $50+ per 1K metrics | $19+/month | $1/month flat |
| Free trial | 14 days | 14 days | 42 days |
| Setup time | Days | Hours | 5 minutes |
| Surprise overage bills | Yes | Yes | Never |
| Daily email summaries | — | — | ✓ Included |
| Custom alerts | ✓ Extra cost | ✓ Extra cost | ✓ Included |
| Infrastructure to run | Agent required | Collector needed | Nothing |
| Data retention | 15 days default (paid tiers) | Varies by plan | Full history included |
| Alert channels | Email, Slack, PagerDuty (tiered) | Email, Slack (paid add-ons) | Email included |
| API simplicity | Agent + multi-service API | Prometheus / Influx collectors | One HTTP GET |
| Support | Enterprise tiers | Community + paid plans | Direct email support |
| Minimum contract | Annual on some tiers | Monthly | Month-to-month |
What you give up
Umlogger is focused metric tracking, not a full Grafana stack. You won't get:
- Highly customizable Grafana dashboards and panel libraries
- Native Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo pipelines in one UI
- Self-hosted flexibility across dozens of data sources
- Enterprise SSO and org-wide dashboard governance
What you gain
- $1/month flat — no InfluxDB or Prometheus storage bills
- No collector — curl or fetch from your app, cron, or serverless function
- Built-in alerts & digests — threshold emails without wiring Notification policies
- Minutes to first chart — not hours wiring scrape configs
Send your first metric
curl "https://data.umlogger.com/api/m?key=pmk_YOUR_METRIC_KEY&value=42"