Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

We recently did the same, and our Datadog bill was only five figures. We're finding the new stack to not be a poor man's anything, but more flexible, complete and manageable than yet another SaaS. With just a little extra learning curve observability is a domain where open source trounces proprietary, and not just if you don't have money to set on fire.

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#5

Post by asnyder » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 8:22 PM UTC

There's also https://openobserve.ai, while not as stable as Grafana/Prometheus/Clickhouse, feels a bit easier to setup and manage. Though has a bit of ways to go, does the basics and more without issue.

Crazy crazy they spent so much on observability. Even with DataDog they could've optimized that spend. DataDog does lots of bad things with billing where by default, especially with on-demand instances you get charged significantly more than you should as they have (had?) pretty deficient counting towards instance hours and instances.

For example, rather than run the agent (which counts as an instance regardless of if it's on for a minute), you can send the logs, metrics, etc. directly to their ingestion endpoints and not have those instances counted towards their usage other than log and metric usage.

Maybe at that level they don't even get into actual by usage anymore, and they just negotiate arbitrary amounts for some absurd quota of use.

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#6

Post by ljm » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 8:24 PM UTC

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.

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#7

Post by abxyz » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 8:32 PM UTC

(May 2023)

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#8

Post by oulipo » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 8:38 PM UTC

delichon wrote: post #4

> For observability, Coinbase spun up a dedicated team with the goal of moving off of Datadog, and onto a Grafana/Prometheus/Clickhouse stack. We recently did the same, and our Datadog bill was only five figures. We're finding the new stack to not be a poor man's anything, but more flexible, complete and manageable than yet another SaaS. With just a little extra learning curve observability is a domain where open sou…

Have you tried the ClickStack? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44194082

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#9

Post by everfrustrated » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 8:44 PM UTC

>Originally published on 11 May 2023

Re: Datadog's $65M/year customer mystery solved

#10

Post by swyx » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 8:44 PM UTC

ljm wrote: post #6

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, an…

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