RUM Cost FAQ
The questions we get most often about Real User Monitoring pricing, free tiers, session replay billing, and which vendor wins for which workload.
How much does Real User Monitoring (RUM) cost in 2026?
Published per-session rates range from $0.50 per 1,000 sessions (Sentry) to $4.50 per 1,000 sessions (Datadog and Dynatrace with replay). Annual entry-tier subscriptions run from $80/yr (Raygun) to $11,988/yr (Catchpoint Expert). Cloudflare Web Analytics is completely free with no published cap. Five vendors, Akamai mPulse, Splunk RUM, Pingdom RUM, Fullstory paid tiers, and Catchpoint enterprise, are quote-only.
Which RUM tool is the cheapest?
For Core Web Vitals capture without session replay, Cloudflare Web Analytics is free and uncapped. For commercial workloads with replay, Raygun's Basic plan ($80/yr covering 100,000 sessions/month) is the lowest published per-session rate at $0.80 per 1K sessions effective. Sentry's free tier (5K errors + 50 replays per month) is the most generous free tier for hobby and pre-launch use.
Does session replay cost extra?
It depends on the vendor. Datadog and AWS CloudWatch RUM bundle session replay into the per-session price, replay is free at the meter. Dynatrace charges replay separately ($2.25 per 1K sessions on top of the basic $2.25/1K RUM rate, so $4.50/1K total). Sentry has per-replay overages at $3.75 per 1K. LogRocket treats session replay as the entire product. Cloudflare and SpeedCurve do not offer session replay at all.
What is the difference between RUM cost and APM cost?
RUM (Real User Monitoring) measures real user experience in the browser, page load times, Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), JavaScript errors, optional session replay. RUM is typically priced per-session or per-pageview. APM (Application Performance Monitoring) measures backend application health, request traces, host metrics, log volume. APM is typically priced per-host or per-GB ingested. See /rum-vs-apm-cost for a side-by-side cost comparison and our sister site monitoringcost.com for APM-only pricing detail.
How do I estimate my RUM cost?
Use the calculator on the homepage or at /calculator. Enter your monthly page views, average pages per session, session replay coverage percentage, retention requirement, and sampling rate. The calculator returns monthly and annual cost for all 18 listed vendors, sortable by cheapest monthly, cheapest annual, effective per-1K-session rate, or free-tier coverage. Inputs run client-side in your browser, no data is sent anywhere.
Why is rumcost.com not about the alcoholic drink?
RUM in the observability context is an acronym for Real User Monitoring, a category of frontend performance and error monitoring software. We chose rumcost.com because it is the exact-match domain for the software category. The site is optimised for procurement queries from web engineering teams. If you arrived here looking for the price of a bottle of rum the spirit, you are in the wrong place.
Are the prices on this site current?
Every numerical claim was verified on 2026-06-16 by fetching the vendor's own public pricing page. We re-verify quarterly; the next scheduled refresh is September 2026. The footer of every page carries a 'Last verified' stamp. See the methodology page for the full source-URL list and verification process.
What is a quote-only vendor?
A quote-only vendor does not publish per-session, per-GB, or tier pricing, you must contact their sales team for a quote. Akamai mPulse, Splunk RUM, Pingdom RUM, Fullstory paid tiers, and Catchpoint enterprise are all quote-only as of June 2026. We do not fabricate numbers for these vendors. We flag them with a 'Quote Only' badge in the matrix and link to their contact page. See /quote-only-vendors for the operational consequences (typical 4-6 week procurement cycle, NDA before benchmarking).
Does Cloudflare really offer free unlimited RUM?
Cloudflare Web Analytics is free with no published cap. There is no paid tier. The product captures Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) and basic page-view counts. It does not capture session replay, JavaScript errors, or custom events. It is genuinely free and works well for sites that already proxy through Cloudflare's network. The lack of session replay and error tracking is the main constraint.
What about open-source RUM tools?
Three open-source RUM options exist: Grafana Faro (SDK + collector, hosted on Grafana Cloud or self-hosted), Boomerang.js (the JavaScript RUM library SOASTA originally open-sourced, still maintained), and sentry-self-hosted (the full Sentry stack run on your own infrastructure). All have zero per-session SaaS cost but real infrastructure and operational cost. See /open-source-rum for an honest breakdown of self-host engineering economics.
Will switching RUM vendors actually save money?
Often yes, the 9x spread between cheapest published per-session rate (Sentry $0.50/1K) and most expensive (Datadog $4.50/1K) means that a 1 million-session-per-month workload could cost $500/mo or $4,500/mo depending on vendor. The cost of switching, however, is real: SDK swap-out, instrumentation re-validation, alert reconfiguration, dashboard rebuild, team retraining. Budget 2-4 weeks of engineering time for a clean switch. See /how-to-reduce-rum-costs for the migration economics.
Should I sponsor or partner with rumcost.com?
We do not currently sell sponsorship, take affiliate commissions, or accept payment for matrix placement. The site is published independently by Digital Signet. If you work at one of the listed vendors and want to correct or update pricing data, email oliver@digitalsignet.com, corrections are typically applied within 48 hours. We may consider sponsorship in future once the site reaches meaningful traffic; we will publish the sponsorship policy explicitly when we do.
More questions?
Email oliver@digitalsignet.com. New common questions get added to this page in the next quarterly refresh. The methodology page answers questions about how we sourced and verified each number. The quote-only vendors page goes deeper on why we don't fabricate prices for five vendors.