Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

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.

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

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.

Assuming there's nothing else you could do with that elbow grease that would create more value than the SaaS bill costs.

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.