Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Datadog S-1

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 101 posts

Re: Datadog S-1

#91

Post by clarkdave »

hugoromano wrote: post #74

My service contract expired with them this Friday. Opted not to renew because of price change in synthetics product 100x initial release. The product is reliable, but billing is troubling.

The Synthetics pricing does seem unreasonably high.

We were using Synthetics during beta alongside Pingdom - doing pretty much the same on both. Beta period ended and sales rep said our Synthetics bill would be something crazy, like 10x our Pingdom bill, and it’d start next month (they later said that was a mistake and it would actually start in 2 months, when I pushed back).

We immediately suspended all our Synthetics tests. It’s nice having them with the rest of our Datadog stuff, but it’s not 10x better than Pingdom.

Datadog is still a great tool overall, but experiences like that make me wary of putting all our eggs in the DD basket and getting locked in.

Re: Datadog S-1

#92

Post by opsunit »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #59
welder wrote: post #46

Love their product, hate their shady billing. I'm in the middle of a bad experience with Datadog's billing/sales team. My monthly Custom Metrics usage wasn't being billed for because they said they didn't have a way to track it. Naturally my usage gradually increased because without the monthly bill increasing. When renewing a while back they went over my usage on phone and quoted prices, same usage profile as this m…

Same. At several companies I've been at we've used or investigated Datadog. One place accidentally spun up a bunch of EMR nodes on AWS for a single run (less than 1 hour), to which we got charged their going rate ($15/mo?) for every instance - even though they were only up for an hour. DD refused to reverse this, though eventually did help up make sure those nodes got excluded going forward ... gee thanks. $15/hr/nod…

+1 for Wavefront. I've been a user since their pre-launch beta and have nothing but good things to say about the product and the team.

Their billing is based on rate not count, which is a better model IMHO.

Re: Datadog S-1

#93

Post by purephase »

welder wrote: post #46

Love their product, hate their shady billing. I'm in the middle of a bad experience with Datadog's billing/sales team. My monthly Custom Metrics usage wasn't being billed for because they said they didn't have a way to track it. Naturally my usage gradually increased because without the monthly bill increasing. When renewing a while back they went over my usage on phone and quoted prices, same usage profile as this m…

Similar issue. We had to scramble off of Datadog quickly, as they adjusted our billing and it increased by a factor of 8 in a single month. This was due to our tag usage. Same pattern, previously unbilled, and next month bill increased 8 fold.

No slow adjustment, warned us about 2 weeks prior to the next month billing cycle. If they had given us one additional month, we could have re-worked our tagging but we were given no options at all.

Lost nearly 2 weeks of productivity out of a few team members as they needed to focus on getting us off of Datadog and onto a competitor.

Never going to consider using them again.

Re: Datadog S-1

#94

Post by AJ007 »

gonational wrote: post #70
mdanis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run our customer success group at Datadog and that doesn’t sound right - let me follow up with the team and look into this for you!

I love how customer service is quick and great when it’s combined with PR.

I’m surprised they haven’t had more responses on here already.

We’ve been a customer for years, but the billing has made us pretty restrictive of how and where it’s being used.

Re: Datadog S-1

#95

Post by Karunamon »

013a wrote: post #81
welder wrote: post #46

Love their product, hate their shady billing. I'm in the middle of a bad experience with Datadog's billing/sales team. My monthly Custom Metrics usage wasn't being billed for because they said they didn't have a way to track it. Naturally my usage gradually increased because without the monthly bill increasing. When renewing a while back they went over my usage on phone and quoted prices, same usage profile as this m…

Their billing is HORRIBLE. Its actually a big reason why we are investigating moving off. Its insanely unclear. I get that their product domain is complex, and thus its hard to bill for, but... its things like, if you're container-focused, you still pay for nodes, and you get X number of containers per node that you're allowed to track. You wire up an AWS integration and it (1) counts as a node? I've heard different…

>We joke about Datadog among our ops team. When we were investigating adopting them, I signed up for an account with my company email.

The exact same thing happened to me an employer or two ago. Their sales droids were so aggressive with the calls (one time, many of our people were on vacation, one guy answered, told them no thanks, and then that same caller proceeded to ring nearly every phone in the cube farm sequentially) that, to this day, that team refers to getting bothered by pushy vendors as "getting datadogged".

Re: Datadog S-1

#96

Post by prdonahue »

AJ007 wrote: post #94
gonational wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how customer service is quick and great when it’s combined with PR.

I’m surprised they haven’t had more responses on here already. We’ve been a customer for years, but the billing has made us pretty restrictive of how and where it’s being used.

> I’m surprised they haven’t had more responses on here already.

You're not supposed to comment on anything related to your filing until your registration statement becomes "effective". See details on the quiet period here: https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answersquiethtm.html.

Re: Datadog S-1

#97

Post by bdcravens »

byteshock wrote: post #87
welder wrote: post #46

Love their product, hate their shady billing. I'm in the middle of a bad experience with Datadog's billing/sales team. My monthly Custom Metrics usage wasn't being billed for because they said they didn't have a way to track it. Naturally my usage gradually increased because without the monthly bill increasing. When renewing a while back they went over my usage on phone and quoted prices, same usage profile as this m…

Big companies seem to have bad practice when it comes to cancelling subscriptions. We started out with New Relic but was unhappy with the customer support. We wanted to upgrade our subscription and reached out 3 times. We were ignored all three times. It took 3 tries to get our subscription cancelled. Datadog seems a lot better. Their support team actually gets back to you at least. If you are a small customer New Re…

We had a different experience with New Relic - call, don't email, and you get better results.

Re: Datadog S-1

#98

Post by nrmitchi »

013a wrote: post #81
welder wrote: post #46

Love their product, hate their shady billing. I'm in the middle of a bad experience with Datadog's billing/sales team. My monthly Custom Metrics usage wasn't being billed for because they said they didn't have a way to track it. Naturally my usage gradually increased because without the monthly bill increasing. When renewing a while back they went over my usage on phone and quoted prices, same usage profile as this m…

Their billing is HORRIBLE. Its actually a big reason why we are investigating moving off. Its insanely unclear. I get that their product domain is complex, and thus its hard to bill for, but... its things like, if you're container-focused, you still pay for nodes, and you get X number of containers per node that you're allowed to track. You wire up an AWS integration and it (1) counts as a node? I've heard different…

> The datadog-agent inside our kube clusters was constantly one of our largest logging services

This. Just this. Until I recognized this, these agent logs were making up more than 50% of our total log volume. These were, for the most part, a single log message that an APM was malformed.

I only noticed this when renewing my companies Datadog contract, and couldn't fathom how we had been generating so many logs.

I was pretty disappointed when their sales rep had been pushing us to increase our committed log volume, without mentioning that literally thousands of dollars per month was being spent for Datadog to send themselves their own logs. As far as I'm concerned these logs should either be filtered out of the index by default, or not count towards billing.

Re: Datadog S-1

#99

Post by Nostromos »

waitwhatt wrote: post #86

This company has a shite hiring process. Ask you to submit pull request on github with answers to a challenge (and you can publicly view other people's answers as it is a public repo). The answers were straight forward and I didn't pass. And I could see my answers were the same as other people submitting. Very odd company.

What role were you interviewing for?
Post reply on HN