How much does k6 cost?

k6 publishes 3 tiers, from Free for k6 OSS up to On request for Grafana Cloud k6. The entry tier costs nothing.

What is the difference between k6 OSS and Grafana Cloud free tier on k6?

Grafana Cloud free tier costs Free against Free, and adds includes a monthly allowance of virtual user hours, hosted test results and dashboards, shared with the rest of the grafana cloud free tier.

Which testing tools can I use without paying?

6 of the 8 testing tools listed alongside k6 have a free tier: Jest, Cucumber, Percy, Detox, Appium.

Does k6 charge per user?

The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 3 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.

Are these k6 prices current?

They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.

What should I compare k6 against before paying?

The closest testing tools in this directory are Jest, Cucumber, Percy, Detox. Each has a side-by-side comparison with k6 covering price, platforms and features.

Testing · pricing

k6 pricing

k6 publishes 3 tiers. Below is each one, what it adds over the tier beneath it, and where the ladder stops being worth climbing for most people.

As of 30 August 2026, k6 pricing is free across 3 published tiers. Figures are the vendor's list prices as recorded on this page's last check; the vendor's site is the final word.

Entry price: Free
Model: Open source, no licence fee
Tiers: 3
Free tier: Yes

k6 plans, side by side

Every published tier in ascending order of price, with the number of features each one lists. An absence here means the record does not itemise it, not that the tier lacks it.

k6 pricing tiers
Plan	Price	Features listed	Step up from the tier below
k6 OSS	Free	4	Entry tier
Grafana Cloud free tier	Free	3	+$0/month, 3 more features
Grafana Cloud k6	On request	4	Priced on request

What each tier adds

The set difference between each tier's feature list and the one beneath it. Where a tier lists nothing new, the vendor has either stopped repeating the inherited list or the tier raises limits rather than adding capability, the record does not distinguish the two, so this page does not either.

k6 OSS

Free

The entry tier. It covers agpl-3.0 licence, full test engine, no virtual user limits, runs on one machine unless distributed yourself, no hosted result storage.

Grafana Cloud free tier

Free

Over k6 OSS, this tier adds:

Includes a monthly allowance of virtual user hours
Hosted test results and dashboards
Shared with the rest of the Grafana Cloud free tier

Grafana Cloud k6

On request

Over Grafana Cloud free tier, this tier adds:

Billed by virtual user hours consumed
Load generation from multiple regions
Retained test history and comparison
Pricing on application beyond the included allowance

Where k6 stops being free

k6 OSS, Free

AGPL-3.0 licence
Full test engine, no virtual user limits
Runs on one machine unless distributed yourself
No hosted result storage

No paid tier on record

k6 lists a free tier and no priced tier above it in the record we hold.

What the product covers

The full k6 feature record, grouped as the catalogue groups it. This is the product as a whole; the record does not map every feature onto a specific tier.

Other

JavaScript test scripts
Thresholds and checks
Protocol coverage
Browser module
Executors
xk6 extensions
Metrics output
Kubernetes operator

People bring k6 in for gating a deployment pipeline on a threshold such as 95th percentile latency under a defined arrival rate, generating tens of thousands of requests per second from a small number of machines without a load generator fleet, testing grpc and websocket services with the same tooling and thresholds used for http endpoints, correlating a load test against existing dashboards for an organisation already running grafana and prometheus. If that is not the job you are buying for, the alternatives to k6 are worth a look before you commit to a tier.

How that compares in Testing

Too few testing tools in this directory publish a starting price to quote a meaningful median, so the table below is a like-for-like list rather than a ranking.

k6 entry price against other Testing tools
Tool	Entry price	Model	Rated	Head to head
k6 (this page)	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-
Jest	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs k6
Cucumber	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs k6
Percy	Free	Freemium, paid tiers by screenshot volume	-	vs k6
Detox	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs k6
Appium	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs k6
PractiTest	On request	Per user per month, yearly minimum on Corporate tier	-	vs k6

Ratings are aggregated from third-party sources and imported with each catalogue entry, they are not reviews hosted on Softwr. How each figure is used is set out on the k6 badges page.

Before you pay for k6

Three things this page cannot tell you, and all three change the bill. The record carries a price and a billing period but not the unit - per-seat and flat-rate pricing are indistinguishable in this data, so a five-person team may be looking at five times the figure above. It carries no annual rate, so any discount for paying yearly is not something this page can quote. And it carries no trial length.

What it can tell you is the shape of the ladder: 3 tiers between Free and On request, with the jump itemised above. Because there is a free tier, the cheapest way to answer the rest is to use it before paying anything.

k6 runs on windows, macos, linux, docker, kubernetes, and is published by Grafana Labs of New York, New York, United States. The full record is on the k6 review, and the rest of the category is under best testing tools.

k6 pricing on the vendor's own site

k6 pricing questions

How much does k6 cost?: k6 publishes 3 tiers, from Free for k6 OSS up to On request for Grafana Cloud k6. The entry tier costs nothing.
Does k6 have a free plan?: Yes. The k6 OSS tier costs nothing and covers agpl-3.0 licence, full test engine, no virtual user limits, runs on one machine unless distributed yourself.
What is the difference between k6 OSS and Grafana Cloud free tier on k6?: Grafana Cloud free tier costs Free against Free, and adds includes a monthly allowance of virtual user hours, hosted test results and dashboards, shared with the rest of the grafana cloud free tier.
Which testing tools can I use without paying?: 6 of the 8 testing tools listed alongside k6 have a free tier: Jest, Cucumber, Percy, Detox, Appium.
What am I actually paying for with k6?: The record lists 8 features across 1 area: other. In practice it is brought in for gating a deployment pipeline on a threshold such as 95th percentile latency under a defined arrival rate, generating tens of thousands of requests per second from a small number of machines without a load generator fleet, testing grpc and websocket services with the same tooling and thresholds used for http endpoints.
Does k6 charge per user?: The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 3 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.
Are these k6 prices current?: They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.
What should I compare k6 against before paying?: The closest testing tools in this directory are Jest, Cucumber, Percy, Detox. Each has a side-by-side comparison with k6 covering price, platforms and features.