Datadog’s $65M/year customer mystery solved | Hacker News Reader

Datadog’s $65M/year customer mystery solved

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31 pointstim_sw16 comments

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If this commenter is to be believed it was a 3 year contract prepaid at 20ish per year

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866061

Mentioned and dismissed in the article, fwiw.

Any reason to believe one claim over the other?

It’s not clear to me that the article actually contradicts it

this article says it was straight up 65m for the year

otoh the throwaway also mentioned the in-house grafana/prometheus solution that this article described

I don’t think it does. It says that much was due that year.

thanks for the correction, seems i misread it.

it does seem like the article attacks the throwaway without evidence

The article is accurate

I misunderstood and thought this was a bill paid q1 2023 (after the new 3 year contract) not in q1 2022

Datadog was started in 2010. Even though the cloud existed, it was relatively immature in that it frequently required ssh into a box to fix something. Devops was big. This is why SaaS worked and was so valuable.

I've started thinking SaaS is over.

Most startups will still do software as a service, but that alone will not create a defensible moat with crazy high growth rates. The green pasture is gone and the fences are being torn down.

Something else like network effects, proprietary data, foundation models that are truly excellent, etc. has to be part of the offering now.

The answer is in the article, at a certain price, building their own was not worth it for CB and any other option would've probably been inferior. Then again Datadog's products are best in class enough to be their moat, getting product right is easier said than done

Datadog have been pestering multiple people in my company by name. Not sure how they got our details. They also try via LinkedIn so maybe that’s how. Very annoying.

We blocked their domain on our email security gateway.

I can’t imagine spending $65M on a single vendor. And it’s just for logging and monitoring.

The Datadog account manager or sales team must have had $$ in their eyes once the CB wire transfer cleared. Even a modest 5% commission is $3.25M (before taxes).

There's no other tool anywhere near as useful on the planet for seeing what you are doing. DataDog is amazing. Stunning instrument of revelation.

It's a ton of money but also., as others have said, Coindesk was rolling in money & needed above all to keep winning. This was a great spend to keep on top of their technical situation.

I do think we'll see better & better OpenTelemetry alternatives, over time, but wow, DataDog just runs, is so reliable, so great, does so much. Getting deep. Down the DD path makes all the sense to me.

The real story: Datadog LOST a $65M/year customer.

they didn’t lose them, they retained with revenue contraction by restructuring the deal to make sense

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