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Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

(blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
151 points thunderbong | 6 comments | 30 Jun 25 18:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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ljm ◴[30 Jun 25 20:24 UTC] No.44427444[source]▶
I wonder how much that no-expense-spared, money-is-no-object attitude to buying SaaS impacts an engineers ability to make sensible decisions around infra and architecture. Coinbase might have been fine blowing 65 mil but take that approach to a new startup and you could trivially eat up a significant amount of runway with it.

I won’t single out Datadog on this because the exact same thing happens with cloud spend, and it’s very literally burning money.

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swyx ◴[30 Jun 25 20:44 UTC] No.44427650[source]▶
the visible cost of burning runway on a bill is very often far less than the invisible cost of burning engineer time rebuilding undifferentiated heavy lifting rather than working on product/customer needs
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1. 9283409232 ◴[30 Jun 25 20:52 UTC] No.44427744[source]▶
People say this but I wonder about this from time to time. I don't think anyone is asking to rebuild datadog from scratch for your company but surely it's worth it to migrate to something not as expensive even if it takes a bit of elbow grease.
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2. closeparen ◴[30 Jun 25 22:38 UTC] No.44428690[source]▶
Assuming there's nothing else you could do with that elbow grease that would create more value than the SaaS bill costs.
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3. 9283409232 ◴[01 Jul 25 01:46 UTC] No.44429796[source]▶
Value is not a hard science. I've seen people shelve tech debt in favor of work on a feature that no one ends up using.
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4. nemothekid ◴[01 Jul 25 01:54 UTC] No.44429841{3}[source]▶
1. Leadership doesn’t want to burn engineer cycles on undifferentiated features.

2. Management doesn’t get recognized for working on undifferentiated features.

3. Engineers working on undifferentiated features aren’t recognized when looking for new jobs.

Saving money “makes” sense but getting people to actually prioritize it is hard.

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5. ◴[01 Jul 25 03:15 UTC] No.44430241{3}[source]▶
6. uaas ◴[01 Jul 25 06:26 UTC] No.44431152{4}[source]▶
Well, saving money is a differentiator, and one of the best things an engineer can put on their CVs.