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Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

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 I just blocked their domain to my email.

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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.

Right, the monitoring cost with datadog of my little business would be 7 figures (and revenue is only 7 figures!!) I mean, I guess they want to exclude people like me.. but then why market to me?

I'm not familiar with pricing but depending on alternatives maybe this isn't so bad?

> and you now have something that starts to resemble an ops team

Like what if Datadog just replaces your ops team completely? What if we start to see AI tools that do cost a lot of money but they can replace a team? Just curious.

Datadog does one part of an ops team, even if it could do all functions of an ops team I would make convincing arguments about your sovereignty of fixing your issues and being resistant to price gouging

We're going through this now. What other products are out there, preferably easy for a moron to set up?

Check out Grafana.

You should check out SigNoz (https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz) - It's an open source alternative to DataDog with metrics, traces and logs in a single application. You can just self host it yourself or try the hosted version.

PS: I am one of the maintainers at SigNoz

we're working on one! based on open telemetry (no vendor lock-in) and clickhouse (which makes it cheaper/faster)

it currently supports logs, traces, session replay/RUM, alerts and dashboards - would love to hear what you think :) https://www.hyperdx.io

Datadog costs more to monitor your AWS t3.medium instance than the actual instance.

I asked them how them can justify that.

They recommended I use "modern infrastructure" which means Docker.

Was Datadog pricing per-host? If so, then I guess running a Kubernetes cluster using the biggest available instances is the most "modern" solution to Datadog-using infrastructure.

It is mainly per host $15 or $23 PCM with the first 5-10 containers free then $0.002 per hour (~$1.5 PCM) per container. The insight and stats you get are quite granular and valuable however. For large scale deployments you can ignore certain containers etc.

Per host and/or per container

Basically, yes.

Sounds like New Relic 2.0

not even close. NR doesn't bill overages, doesn't do per-host. we switched and saved tens of thousands monthly

> They recommended I use "modern infrastructure" which means Docker.

It looks to me they recommended to never consider Datadog for anything whatsoever, ever again.

(Disclaimer: I work at Chronosphere, a Datadog competitor) This is a big issue in the observability space. We have written a few blog posts on this, but basically it’s easy to fall into a trap where cardinality and high dimensional monitoring causes your metrics to pop, causing costs to skyrocket. You have a few experiments, are running a bunch of smaller k8s pods per cluster and whoosh! you might be looking at millions, rather than thousands of time series that you're sending to your provider. Most vendors won’t provide tooling or suggest ways to reduce these costs, b/c they have no economic incentive to do so…. Anyway, bottom line is that no one should have to pay more to observe a service than to operate it.

Also: it’s 2023. Every company needs to be getting compatible with open standards like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, etc.

Some of the vendors in the space are absolutely going in on OTel. DD seems to be working actively against it.

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.

Just wait until they find your wife's phone number. (OK, this wasn't datadog, but some similarly aggressive headhunting agency went from calling me to calling my wife - who is in no way affiliated with my company - to ask her if she could tell me about how they could help me in hiring, yadda yadda.)

I would contact the police about that.

I had something similar happen with a Facebook recruiter. I didn't reply to her first two emails so she started emailing my mom to try to get in touch with me. My mom called me because she thought it was a phishing email. I had never had that happen before.

I have started invoicing companies for wasting my time and also threatening them with CAN-SPAM complaints for failing to include an opt-out, an actual mailing address, etc.

Then, when my invoice isn’t paid, I threaten collections on them personally and the company. Usually that solves it. Then I’m “such a dick” but highly effective in recovering my time.

Please make this into an automated business.

Wait, have any companies actually paid you?!

Please answer OP

That's a great approach and I'd also be curious to know if somebody has paid you, my immediate guess would be "no" - but you never know

Just keep scheduling a time that works, and then don't show up.

Man I bet you could write a really dumb script that automates it too.

Make sure you include a logger in that script to catch any anomalies

Back in the days when this kind of thing happened on the telephone, the SERIOUSLY passive aggressive trick was to talk to them, and then hang up on yourself. Repeatedly.

"Hi this is Arnie from CHewemup'n'Spitemout Staffing, is this Bob?"

"Hey Arnie, what perfect timing! I just started looking for a new opportunity, and I'm really excited to— CLICK."

Ring ring.

"This is Arnie, we seem to have been cut off."

"Oh Arnie, right, thought you hung up on me."

"No, not me, must be a bad connection. You were saying?"

"Yes, I was saying this is a great time to talk about opportunities. I just finished a major Java Enterprise JavaBeans project, and I'm— CLICK."

Lather, rinse, repeat, as the meme used to go before we called them memes.

oh man, that's great-- you could probably get through a LOTT more CLICKs before they get the point. what a great use of human psychology-- they assume you have good intentions because you called them... it's a bit devious, but i'm gonna have to add that one to the toolbox hahaha.

Jolly Roger telephone company is another fun choice. At ~$20 /yr seems not terrible for a bit of fun.

https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

I also will give out the number to local strip clubs for sales people which seems to be confusing to them.

I reported them to the FTC. No idea if it did anything but they never called back.

I briefly worked there. They literally have no idea what they're doing, like not even a little bit.

I think the vast majority of us don't either

> Datadog prices are out of this world.

I was never sure of what exactly Datadog did, so I looked at their pricing. At first, I thought "$23/month/host isn't THAT bad...", then notice that was only for one product.

If you used their full suite, those costs could REALLY add up.

Especially when you're realize that the billing features have been turned up to 11 on turn-key rollout. Sampling set at 100%, gosh that's expensive right out of the box, but no accident.

This is the company that released synthetic API checks at like 100X the price of Pingdom checks. Ended up using their free Pingdom integration to pull in the check data..

The best way to deal with them is to never engage with their sales team. Use what you need, don’t let them talk you into more.

Every year, I get a barrage of phone calls and emails from them, and I actively choose to not engage.

Pricing has remained pretty much flat aside from the expected growth. They work hard to get you to overcommit and overpay.

Also, you don’t need all your logs indexed. Saved a company I’m under contract with a massive amount of money (10s of thousands/month) by pointing out that you should just index (sample) a percentage of them to identify if there is a trend, and you can rehydrate later.

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.

I thought Sentry was Ruby?

You can take a look at the Python codebase for Sentry over here: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry

There's rust stuff too: https://github.com/getsentry/relay

Oh neat, it's a big Django project!

Originally, yes, but it's been rewritten in Go.

oh, nice to know! thanks

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