Startups: Apply today for up to $100,000 in Grafana Cloud credits

At Grafana Labs, we believe in providing observability solutions for organizations of every size and stage. That’s why we have free tiers and enterprise plans and everything in between. But across our broad spectrum of users, startups have particular needs and challenges.

For example, if they catch fire, they are going to need to scale rapidly. It’s a good problem to have, but it also carries financial risk. Founders typically have limited funds, and they’re often caught between reinvesting in that growth and simply keeping the lights on. But it doesn’t have to be like that.

To alleviate this pressure and avoid some of those tradeoffs, we are excited to introduce the Grafana Labs Startup Program. Announced today as part of ObservabilityCON 2024, the program includes up to $100,000 in Grafana Cloud credits to eligible startups for 12 months or until their next round of funding.

Telemetry management platform Datable.io is among the first to be accepted into the program. CEO Julian Giuca says Grafana Cloud provides the startup with an observability solution to monitor customer instances in its single-tenant architecture. The credits, he added, are helping them dedicate more of their energy toward growing the business.

“Grafana Cloud’s solutions and open source approach gives us a ton of flexibility, and the startup program has allowed us to focus on execution without worrying about our monitoring stack,” Julian says. “We strongly believe in OpenTelemetry, which made Grafana Cloud an easy choice. Come by our office any time of day, and you’ll see a Grafana dashboard up on multiple screens. It’s a critical part of our daily operations, and it gives us the confidence our systems are healthy and customers happy.”

Why we’re launching the startup program

Again and again, we see startups come to us after getting burned by observability solutions that seemed like the right fit but ultimately became cost prohibitive as they scaled. Moreover, these same startups find themselves locked into proprietary platforms that don’t allow them to leverage open standards or adapt their platform to evolving practices, making it difficult to avail themselves of the benefits of an open and composable platform like Grafana Cloud.

With the Grafana Labs Startup Program, our goal is to help startups head off this problem before sticker shock ever happens. We want to be good partners to the startup community, helping them grow their business long-term so they’re able to create amazing products without the stress of an unexpectedly high observability bill.

And if, for whatever reason, you eventually want to transition away from Grafana Cloud — I know, hard to believe — rest assured that we embrace openness and composability so you don’t have to worry about lock-in at all.

What to know about our new startup program

All new customers (including those with Grafana Cloud Free accounts) are eligible for the program, as well as those already using Grafana OSS who want to move to a fully managed solution.

In terms of requirements for applying, we ask that you agree to be a reference customer. We may also ask you to mutually agree to marketing activities, such as guest blogs and speaking at events. Ideally, participants will have raised less than $10 million in funding and be under 25 employees, but please apply even if you do not meet these guidelines

If your startup meets the necessary criteria, you will receive:

• $100,000 in credits that can be used for any Grafana Cloud services for 12 months. That includes our managed backends for logs, traces, and metrics, as well as solutions for performance testing, profiling, incident response and management, frontend and application observability, and synthetic monitoring.
• All Enterprise data source plugins and 24x7 Grafana support
• A guaranteed 20% discount from list prices after you deplete the credits or your 12 months are completed. Further discounts are available based on consumption — we scale with you.
• Access to our integrations team to strategize the creation of a plugin and/or solution to better integrate with the overall Grafana Cloud ecosystem.

We can’t wait to see how we can help the next generation of startups flourish in the years ahead. If you’re interested and eligible, we encourage you to apply here. The four-question application will take less than two minutes to complete!