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Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

(blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
151 points thunderbong | 1 comments | 30 Jun 25 18:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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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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1. JohnMakin ◴[30 Jun 25 22:19 UTC] No.44428533[source]▶
> 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.

Most startups are not going to have anywhere near the scale to generate anything approaching this bill.

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

Unless you're in the business of deploying and maintaining production-ready datacenters at scale, it very literally isn't.