Datadog pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
Datadog (datadoghq.com) is a monitoring tool. Modular usage pricing: per host for infrastructure and APM, per GB ingested and per million indexed events for logs and spans, per error-event tier for Error Tracking; no per-user fees.. Free plan: Free infrastructure tier for up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention; paid products have a 14-day trial..
What Datadog costs
- 50k errors: $30/mo (Error Tracking first 50K errors/mo: $30 month-to-month ($25 annual, $36 on-demand); no per-user fees)
- APM, 2 hosts: $84.16/mo (APM $36/host month-to-month x 2 = $72; 10 GB ingest within 2 x 150 GB included; 10M indexed spans - 2M included = 8M x $1.52 (7-day, month-to-month) = $12.16)
- 50 GB logs: $107/mo (Ingest 50 GB x $0.10 = $5 + 50M indexed events x $2.04 (15-day retention, month-to-month) = $102)
Plan compared: Error Tracking, month-to-month (first 50K errors). Every price is for the same small SaaS app (2 hosts, 10 million requests and spans, 50,000 errors and 50 GB of logs a month, 3 developers) on the cheapest self-serve plan that fully covers that job, billed monthly, including overage and per-user fees. Free plans count when they cover the whole scenario and allow commercial use.
Datadog price hikes
- Datadog raised LLM Observability retention prices up to 4x · Sep 28, 2026
LLM Observability retention add-ons per 10K spans/month rose: 30-day $1.50 to $6.50, 60-day $3 to $8, 90-day $4 to $9.
Cheaper alternatives to Datadog
At 50,000 errors a month, Datadog costs $30/mo. 3 monitoring tools cost less:
- Better Stack: free (Free plan (errors); pay-as-you-go Logs & Traces, US region (apm, logs))
- Grafana Cloud: free (Free)
- Sentry: $29/mo (Team)
Datadog alternatives: 3 cheaper monitoring tools compared, at every size.
Every change we logged
- Sep 28, 2026 · Price increase: LLM Observability retention add-ons per 10K spans/month rose: 30-day $1.50 to $6.50, 60-day $3 to $8, 90-day $4 to $9.
Sources
Pricing page: datadoghq.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Prices from Datadog's pricing list page (month-to-month column) and billing docs for APM allotments. A third-party claim (CostBench) of an April 2026 per-host increase could not be reconciled with the current list and was not recorded; PricingSaaS history checked only for its latest 20 of 125 changes.