Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone?

Posted by kvaranasi_ on Sunday January 11, 2026 @06:07PM
from the ask-hn dept.

Is it just me or do you guys think Datadog pricing is crazy? I mean even to SEE APM you have to pay like $50/mo minimum. What if my app has just 10 requests per month, can I get for free? No, pay us. What if it's just me building? No, still pay us.

But hey we'll give you this metrics page for free which just basically tells you your RAM usage.

And the worst part is, there is no proper alternative for this. And people are ok with that too. Am I crazy for thinking this?

( 11 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by viraptor on Sunday January 11, 2026 @06:57PM (#46581904)

You can use grafana which contains APM, logs, metrics and alerting with a free tier for tiny projects. But honestly if you get 10 requests, you likely don't need APM and if you need APM, you should be getting at least $50/mth from your service.

Or just host the grafana (or different) stack yourself.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by kvaranasi_ on Sunday January 11, 2026 @07:19PM (#46582072)

Grafana sucks imo. Their UI is bad, it takes time to setup. It's very difficult to maintain it all together. There should be a free alternative. I'm surprised there is literally no free alternative to Datadog.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by viraptor on Sunday January 11, 2026 @07:42PM (#46582244)

> Grafana sucks imo. Their UI is bad, it takes time to setup. It's very difficult to maintain it all together.

You want free and easy and polished experience.

Grafana works fine. If you want something better than that, you'll have to pay for it or create it yourself.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by al_borland on Sunday January 11, 2026 @06:15PM (#46581521)

What specific features are you looking for where there is no alternative? There are a lot of tools for monitoring.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by kvaranasi_ on Sunday January 11, 2026 @06:18PM (#46581556)

APM, logs, metrics and alerting all on a single pane of glass.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by toomuchtodo on Sunday January 11, 2026 @08:34PM (#46582706)

You are expecting high quality and free, and unwilling to pay $50/month. Is this crazy? It’s certainly unrealistic.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by aristofun on Sunday January 11, 2026 @09:35PM (#46583269)

Newrelic has pretty generous free tier

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by pranabgohain on Monday January 12, 2026 @12:15AM (#46584355)

Check out kloudmate.com. Delivers everything Datadog or NewRelic do, at a fraction of the time, complexity, or cost.

Currently also offers free AI-powered anomaly detection and RCA, along with a full-scale Incident Management module.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by linesofcode on Monday January 12, 2026 @12:34AM (#46584478)

Sentry has a different but overlapping feature-set as DataDog and has a free tier.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by squomp on Monday January 12, 2026 @12:24PM (#46591496)

Scout APM is good especially if you're using Rails or Python. Everything is included in the free tier.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone? by thiago_fm on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @03:49AM (#46598652)

Signoz (invested by YC) is the cheaper alternative. They use OpenTelemetry and seems to work for basic scenarios well.

Of course, it doesn't have the 293428492 features that Datadog has, but works well enough for the main APM use-case

[ Parent | on HN ]