It's true that with Datadog, a spike in your usage can have a dramatic impact on your bill. This feels true though of any usage model. We've all read stories about out of control AWS bills. Datadog does at least provide some guardrails to prevent things from getting out of control: https://docs.datadoghq.com/account_management/billing/usage_...
With these usage metrics and a little bit of automation (for example the Webhooks integration: https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/webhooks/), you could stop shipping telemetry at a certain threshold.
My issue isn't necessarily that a usage spike impacts the bill, that's fine!
The problem is that because of the billing complexity, it's hard to predict how billing will scale with usage. There are just too many axes. Even steady-state billing is hard to price out before signing up, so much so that the answer we received from sales was to just try it and see what the bill is.
This becomes a road block. "I'd like to move us to Datadog! – Oh yeah, how much does it cost? – I won't know until after we've moved." – these conversations are hard to have internally.
The product is fantastic, I'm a big fan. And the total price isn't necessarily bad, it's just opaque, and required a lot of work on my side to model out the pricing, present the business case, get sign-off, and manage the contract over the years. Not something that I, as one of ~8 engineers, wanted to spend my time doing.
The problem is that because of the billing complexity, it's hard to predict how billing will scale with usage. There are just too many axes. Even steady-state billing is hard to price out before signing up, so much so that the answer we received from sales was to just try it and see what the bill is.
This becomes a road block. "I'd like to move us to Datadog! – Oh yeah, how much does it cost? – I won't know until after we've moved." – these conversations are hard to have internally.
The product is fantastic, I'm a big fan. And the total price isn't necessarily bad, it's just opaque, and required a lot of work on my side to model out the pricing, present the business case, get sign-off, and manage the contract over the years. Not something that I, as one of ~8 engineers, wanted to spend my time doing.