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A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

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Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#91
post #76

Datadog prices are out of this world. I assumed their front facing prices were for the lone dev, so when I reached out as a company looking to integrate multiple of their products I expected a deal, and got very little compromise. I told them up front they were going to have to cut prices by 90% for us to consider them -- no budge. And they are pretty belligerent salesman, not wanting to leave me alone. After a while…

My understanding their stack is Python. So they probably have high costs as well :)

[deleted]

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#92

OpenTelemetry is going to be an existential threat to DataDog and other companies that effectively rely on vendor lock-in to exploit customers. Not sure how companies rationalize these types of services at scale when there are so many open source options to run for a fraction of the cost. You could hire 100+ engineers and still save money compared to a 65M bill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540419

I’ve seen an attempted move from DD to OT and it was a nightmare of undocumented features and little compounded issues. Tracing was non functional. It doesn’t seem mature enough yet.

Were you watching me?

Because that's what happened.

I am a user of New Relic. Not because I'm happy. But because OpenTelemetry doesn't come close to the same features. Fortunately, at least OT is about 10x harder to set up with worse documentation.

Wait a minute...

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#93

Datadog prices are out of this world. I assumed their front facing prices were for the lone dev, so when I reached out as a company looking to integrate multiple of their products I expected a deal, and got very little compromise. I told them up front they were going to have to cut prices by 90% for us to consider them -- no budge. And they are pretty belligerent salesman, not wanting to leave me alone. After a while…

Datadog startup journey from my perspective:

1. use Datadog, because it gets you a bunch of stuff without having to really set it up, like anomaly detection, which is poor man's monitoring & alerting

2. once you start getting product-market fit and the number of instances you run grows you notice your monthly bill going crazier and crazier and you now have something that starts to resemble an ops team -> migrate to a different product, set up proper monitoring

I've seen that at 3 companies I worked at.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#94

Datadog prices are out of this world. I assumed their front facing prices were for the lone dev, so when I reached out as a company looking to integrate multiple of their products I expected a deal, and got very little compromise. I told them up front they were going to have to cut prices by 90% for us to consider them -- no budge. And they are pretty belligerent salesman, not wanting to leave me alone. After a while…

Their sales team is a nightmare, I had to block them on personal and company email.

Just wait until they find your personal cell phone number and try to force you into scheduling a "time that works" on the calendar.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#95
post #76

Datadog prices are out of this world. I assumed their front facing prices were for the lone dev, so when I reached out as a company looking to integrate multiple of their products I expected a deal, and got very little compromise. I told them up front they were going to have to cut prices by 90% for us to consider them -- no budge. And they are pretty belligerent salesman, not wanting to leave me alone. After a while…

My understanding their stack is Python. So they probably have high costs as well :)

Sentry is python and has extremely reasonable costs (and you can even self-host it).

Honestly if you want to complain at the cost of hosting (which, we don't know if they would) then licensing the software and allowing people to self-host would be the solution.

$65M is enough that I could fund a team running google's monarch system for 7-8 years.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#96
post #89

OpenTelemetry is going to be an existential threat to DataDog and other companies that effectively rely on vendor lock-in to exploit customers. Not sure how companies rationalize these types of services at scale when there are so many open source options to run for a fraction of the cost. You could hire 100+ engineers and still save money compared to a 65M bill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540419

> You could hire 100+ engineers and still save money compared to a 65M bill I see cloud costs like this a lot and it really puzzles me. It seems like people would rather pay 10X+ more to just not have to think about it than even to hire other people to think about it, because then you have to think about hiring and HR. "Here's a blank check. Just make it go away." Of course corporate consultants run on that, so I gue…

Operational costs can be billed to a project. It's not really that the business doesn't want to save money on this stuff, but it's much easier to wind up in this situation when the loops to hire some engineers are 4x as complicated as just adding another sub-org to the data dog billing..

Does seem like a pretty wild bill, thou.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#97

I worked at Coinbase until very recently and can confirm this is Coinbase They paid upfront for 3 years of usage, and yes they were burning > $20m/year on datadog

Dear Lord...the commission on that hog. The sales team eating good.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#99
post #89

OpenTelemetry is going to be an existential threat to DataDog and other companies that effectively rely on vendor lock-in to exploit customers. Not sure how companies rationalize these types of services at scale when there are so many open source options to run for a fraction of the cost. You could hire 100+ engineers and still save money compared to a 65M bill https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540419

> You could hire 100+ engineers and still save money compared to a 65M bill I see cloud costs like this a lot and it really puzzles me. It seems like people would rather pay 10X+ more to just not have to think about it than even to hire other people to think about it, because then you have to think about hiring and HR. "Here's a blank check. Just make it go away." Of course corporate consultants run on that, so I gue…

This is indeed the case and one can argue that it makes sense for a small company to focus on the MVP and initial growth. But every such decision needs to be reexamined from time to time as the company scales up. That is unpleasant, requires an expert, so many businesses procrastinate on this and make expensive mistakes. My 2c.

Re: A cryptocurrency company had a $65M bill, per Datadog’s Q1 earnings call

#100
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their sales team is a nightmare, I had to block them on personal and company email.

[flagged]

Ive worked in sales for over 10 years. Incel is a weird insult for salespeople, as I've never met a group of people that sleeps around more than salespeople. I spent years selling cars even, and if you bring a gf or wife you're having trouble with to go car shopping... Odds of her later sleeping with the car salesman are not zero to put it mildly.
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