Datadog RUM Pricing 2026: $3.15/1K Sessions + Gotchas
Datadog RUM pricing for 2026. Two-part meter: RUM Measure $0.15 per 1,000 sessions on all traffic, plus RUM Investigate $3.00 per 1,000 sessions on the filtered subset you index (annual commit). Session Replay is a separate $2.50 per 1,000 add-on. No free tier.
The fast facts
| Pricing model | per-session |
| Cheapest paid | Quote only |
| Per 1,000 sessions | $3.15 |
| Per GB ingest | , |
| Per 1,000 replays | $2.50 |
| Free tier | No |
| Session replay | addon |
| Retention | 30 days |
| Annual discount | Not published |
| Source | www.datadoghq.com/pricing/list/ |
The pricing model
Two-part per-session meter. RUM Measure ($0.15 per 1K sessions, annual) prices all traffic; RUM Investigate ($3.00 per 1K sessions, annual) prices the filtered subset you fully index. Session Replay is a separate add-on ($2.50 per 1K sessions). Investigate retains sessions 30 days.
The two-part meter: Measure plus Investigate
Datadog restructured RUM pricing away from a single flat per-session rate. It now bills in two stacked meters. RUM Measure is $0.15 per 1,000 sessions and applies to all traffic, capturing Core Web Vitals and 30-plus out-of-the-box performance metrics on every session. RUM Investigate is $3.00 per 1,000 sessions and applies only to the filtered subset of sessions you fully index for deep troubleshooting, waterfalls, and user-journey detail. Both figures are the annual-commit rates published on Datadog's pricing list.
The effective per-session cost therefore depends entirely on what fraction of traffic you push into Investigate rather than leaving on the cheap Measure tier. If you investigate every session, the combined rate is $0.15 + $3.00 = roughly $3.15 per 1,000 sessions on annual commit. If you filter Investigate down to, say, 20% of traffic, the blended rate drops toward $0.15 + (0.20 × $3.00) = $0.75 per 1,000 sessions. The legacy flat ~$1.50 per 1,000 bundled RUM SKU has been superseded by this model.
On-demand is billed at a premium
On-demand (unprepaid) usage costs more than annual commit: RUM Investigate is $4.50 per 1,000 sessions on-demand versus $3.00 on annual, and Measure is $0.22 versus $0.15. Teams that consistently exceed their annual baseline end up at the on-demand rate for the overage, which can drive year-end bills well above the original quote.
For a workload of 5 million sessions per month with all sessions investigated and no replay, the annual-commit cost is 5,000 × $3.15 = roughly $15,750/month or about $189,000/year. The same workload entirely on-demand ($0.22 Measure + $4.50 Investigate = $4.72/1K) would cost roughly $23,600/month or about $283,000/year. The annual commit becomes operationally important above ~1 million sessions per month.
Session replay is a separate add-on
Session Replay is not bundled into the RUM rate. It is a separate add-on at $2.50 per 1,000 sessions on annual commit ($3.60 on-demand). At 100% replay coverage on fully-investigated traffic, Datadog's combined rate is roughly $3.15 + $2.50 = $5.65 per 1,000 sessions, which is more expensive than Dynatrace's $4.50 per 1,000 combined. Because replay is metered separately, you only pay it on the sessions you actually record, so dialling replay coverage down is a direct cost lever.
Mobile RUM is a separate SKU
Datadog Mobile RUM is a different product, priced separately. If you instrument both web and mobile, your bill is the sum of the two product meters; there is no cross-product bundle discount that we could verify on the public pricing page.
Per-session billing scales hard with traffic spikes
The defining gotcha of Datadog RUM is that bills scale with session volume, there is no plateau, no soft cap, no automatic sampling. A viral traffic event that doubles session volume for a week will roughly double the Measure charge for that week, and any of those sessions you investigate add the Investigate rate on top. Teams running on Datadog RUM typically configure budget alerts at 80% and 100% of the monthly commit so finance has warning before the overage hits the next invoice.
Retention
Investigated sessions are retained for 30 days as standard. Extended retention is an enterprise-conversation feature rather than a transparently-published self-service tier; expect to negotiate it as part of the annual commit.
How Datadog RUM compares
- Versus Dynatrace RUM, Dynatrace's $2.25/1K basic rate undercuts Datadog's ~$3.15/1K investigate-everything rate, and Dynatrace-with-replay ($4.50/1K) is cheaper than Datadog-with-replay (~$5.65/1K). Datadog wins on breadth of the wider observability platform, not on RUM price.
- Versus Sentry, Sentry's $0.50/1K base rate is roughly 6x cheaper than Datadog's investigate-everything rate. Sentry is a viable alternative if your replay coverage is moderate and you can tolerate the error-monitoring-first product framing.
- Versus AWS CloudWatch RUM, AWS is dramatically cheaper (~$0.10/1K sessions effective) but its dashboards, session detail, and integrations are much weaker than Datadog's.
- Versus Raygun, Raygun's $80/month Basic plan (billed annually) covers 100K sessions/month at an effective $0.80/1K, dramatically cheaper than Datadog. The trade-off is feature breadth; Datadog offers session replay, Raygun does not.
When Datadog RUM is the right choice
- You already run Datadog for APM, logs, or infrastructure and want a single observability pane.
- You want the cheap Measure tier on all traffic and index only a filtered subset into the pricier Investigate tier.
- Your team is comfortable with per-session billing scaling and you have budget-alert discipline.
- You are committing to a multi-year annual deal large enough to negotiate below the list rates.
When Datadog RUM is the wrong choice
- You only need Core Web Vitals capture, Cloudflare Web Analytics is free for that.
- Your monthly session volume is under 100K, Raygun's Basic ($80/month billed annually) covers it far more cheaply than Datadog's investigate rate.
- You are price-sensitive and need full-traffic investigation, Sentry or Dynatrace basic RUM is significantly cheaper.
- You operate in AWS-native mode and want CloudWatch dashboards, AWS CloudWatch RUM is much cheaper and integrates with the rest of your AWS observability stack.
For the APM side of Datadog, see our sister site's Datadog pricing breakdown. For the structural per-session pricing model comparison across all per-session vendors, see per-session pricing models.
Try it in the calculator
The RUM cost calculator includes Datadog alongside 17 other vendors. Enter your monthly page views, session replay coverage, retention, and sampling rate to see how Datadog's pricing compares head-to-head against the alternatives.
Where to go next
- Multi-vendor calculator — estimate Datadog's cost against 17 alternatives at your specific workload.
- Per-session pricing models — how Datadog's pricing model compares structurally to Datadog, Dynatrace, and Raygun.
- Quote-only vendors — the five RUM vendors that don't publish prices and the operational consequences.
- Hidden RUM costs — sampling, retention storage, replay storage, and overage gotchas across the category.
- Methodology — how we verified the Datadog pricing data shown above (verified 2026-06-16).