Budget Arize AX Pro at US$50 a month plus US$800 for every million spans past its allowance. For a production agent, that overage sets the bill more than the base fee does. Count spans per run on a week of real traffic, then settle retention, region, compliance, access, and data handling before production traffic reaches AX.
When you need this
- A team on AX Free or Pro is about to send production traffic.
- Security or legal must approve sending prompts, retrieved documents, and outputs to a vendor.
- Finance asks what tracing will cost at next year's volume.
Evaluation criteria
Plan limits
Which plan fits the traffic?
Look forAX Free costs US$0 for 25,000 spans and 1 GB a month, with 15-day retention. AX Pro costs US$50 a month for 50,000 spans and 10 GB, with 30-day retention. Enterprise pricing is custom. Every plan includes unlimited users, evaluations, experiments, and labeling queues.
Span count
How many spans does one run produce?
Look forCount every model call, tool call, retrieval step, and chain step as a span. GILD calculates that at 20 spans per run, Pro's allowance covers 2,500 runs a month, about 83 a day. Measure a week of real traffic before choosing a plan.
Past the allowance
What happens when spans or storage exceed the plan?
Look forOn Oct 25, 2026 the tooltips on Arize's pricing page listed US$0.0008 for each span past Pro's allowance and US$3 for each extra GB; on Oct 28, 2026 the page and plan docs listed no overage rate, so get it in writing. At the old rate, each run in the span-count example above added US$0.016, and GILD calculated about US$170 a month for 10,000 runs on Pro before any extra ingestion. Free lists no overage rate, and its tooltip tells Free users to upgrade to Pro for higher limits. Arize's pricing page and usage docs do not say whether Free drops or holds spans past its cap, so move to Pro before production traffic. Enterprise contracts set an annual ingestion limit, and administrators can split it into monthly caps per space. Ingestion past a space's cap can fail until the month resets or an administrator raises the cap.
Retention
How long must traces stay queryable?
Look forFree and Pro keep data for the retention window listed with each plan. Since July 10, 2026, Pro users can extend retention to 13 months in the app. The charge is immediate and prorated, and Arize shows its price only on the in-app upgrade screen, so read it there before you confirm. Enterprise sets retention by contract. Enterprise Data Fabric copies traces, evaluations, and annotations to your bucket and warehouse every 60 minutes in Iceberg format.
Evaluation and agent spend
What else costs money?
Look forOnline evals call your configured model provider, so your team pays for judge tokens. Lower the sampling rate, or use code evaluators where they are enough. Signal pauses at 10 issues a month on Free and 25 on Pro. Enterprise has unlimited Signal issues and can open fix pull requests. Alyx runs on Arize-managed Azure OpenAI or Anthropic models unless you connect your own provider.
Region and network
Where does trace data live, and how does it get there?
Look forEvery plan can choose a US, EU, or Canada region. Arize PrivateConnect keeps traffic on AWS PrivateLink, Azure Private Link, or Google Private Service Connect. Under Enterprise, self-hosted AX runs on Kubernetes in Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, OpenShift, or Rancher.
Compliance
Which assurances does the plan carry?
Look forPro adds SOC 2 Type II and GDPR coverage. HIPAA requires Enterprise. Arize's compliance docs and Trust Center also list PCI DSS 4.0, CSA STAR Level 1, and ISO/IEC 27001.
Access
Who can see which traces?
Look forFree has 1 space. Pro has 1 organization with 2 spaces. Enterprise adds multiple organizations and spaces, SAML SSO with just-in-time provisioning, custom roles at the space or project level, and audit logs.
Masking and deletion
What if sensitive data gets in?
Look forMask inputs and outputs before export, and redact PII in a span processor. If PII reaches AX, delete spans by time window with the GraphQL deleteData mutation or by ID with the REST API. Confirm each deletion and record its scope, time, and reason for audit.
Ownership
Who stands behind the contract?
Look forDynatrace completed its acquisition of Arize on October 1, 2026. Dynatrace says AX stays a standalone product and Phoenix stays an open-source project, and it plans to connect both to Dynatrace over time. Ask how renewals, support, and the roadmap change.
Questions to ask vendors
- How many spans does a typical run produce, and how many runs a month do we expect?
- What will Pro's per-span overage add at that volume, and at what volume does an Enterprise contract cost less?
- Which region did we sign up in, and does it meet every customer contract?
- Which projects need more than 30 days of retention, and why?
- Which fields are masked before export?
Red flags
- Budgeting production on AX Pro's base fee without pricing the overage on a measured span count.
- LLM judges on every span with no sampling, billed to the team's model account.
- HIPAA data sent to a Free or Pro space.
- Assuming the retention window deletes everything. Data copied to a dataset or a warehouse stays.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Official documentation
- 17
- Arize AX pricing
- Arize AX docs: Pricing and usage
- Arize AX docs: Release notes (13-month retention on Pro, Jul 10, 2026; Signal general availability, Jul 29, 2026)
- Arize AX docs: Space rate limiting
- Arize AX docs: Sync traces with Data Fabric
- Arize AX docs: Run online evals on traces
- Arize AX docs: View eval results and costs
- Arize AX docs: Signal
- Arize AX docs: Alyx
- Arize AX docs: Arize Private Connect
- Arize AX docs: Self-hosted
- Arize AX docs: Compliance
- Arize Trust Center
- Arize AX docs: SSO & RBAC
- Arize AX docs: Mask and redact sensitive data
- Arize AX docs: Delete traces with sensitive data
- Dynatrace: Dynatrace completes acquisition of Arize (Oct 1, 2026)