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

I wouldn't really say "very often". Occasionally, perhaps.

Even from a pure zero-sum mathematical perspective, it can make sense to invest even as much as 2 or 3 months of engineer time on cloud cost savings measures. If the engineer is making $200K, that's a $30000 - $50000 investment. When you see the eye-watering cloud bills many startups have, you would realize that, that investment is peanuts in comparison to the potential savings over the next several years.

And then you also have to keep in mind that, these things are usually not actually zero-sum. The engineer could be new, and working on the efficiency project helps them onboard to your stack. It could be the case that customers are complaining (or could start complaining in the future) about how slow your product is, so you actually improve the product by improving the infrastructure. Or it could just be the very common case that there isn't actually a higher-value thing for that engineer to be working on at that time.