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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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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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pphysch ◴[30 Jun 25 20:57 UTC] No.44427799[source]▶
Most of the complexity in observability is clientside.

It is not hard to spin up Grafana and VictoriaMetrics (and now VictoriaLogs) and keep them running. It is not hard to build a Grafana dashboard that correlates data across both metrics and logs sources, and alerting functionality is pretty good now.

The "heavy lift" is instrumenting your applications and infrastructure to provide valuable metrics and logs without exceeding a performance budget. I'm skeptical that Datadog actually does much of that heavy-lifting and that they are actually worth the money. You can probably save 10x with same/better outcomes by paying for managed Grafana + managed DBs and a couple FTEs as observability experts.

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1. ljm ◴[01 Jul 25 13:41 UTC] No.44433840[source]▶
I used to be quite fond of Datadog but after one or two completely surprising bills (thanks to their granular but unintuitive pricing model), I wouldn't recommend it to anybody any more. If I were more cynical I would say the pricing model is designed to be confusing so customers spend more than they need, and this is only made worse by the extreme breadth of the platform now.

These days I'd suggest to just suck it up, spin up a Grafana box, and wire up OpenTelemetry.