I'm in the middle of a bad experience with Datadog's billing/sales team. My monthly Custom Metrics usage wasn't being billed for because they said they didn't have a way to track it. Naturally my usage gradually increased because without the monthly bill increasing. When renewing a while back they went over my usage on phone and quoted prices, same usage profile as this month. Now this month my bill increased almost 400% and they said "oh we just soft-launched billing for this feature without notifying you". No heads-up when communicating with them that I wasn't actually being billed for my usage.
Still trying to get a refund for this curveball bill. Their sales team keeps forever escalating to management, leadership, and they say it has to be approved by a C-level. It's been over 20 days and they say it might take 2-3 more weeks before C-level makes a decision on credit or not. I've never heard of this many layers involved in something like this before with other companies.
Same. At several companies I've been at we've used or investigated Datadog. One place accidentally spun up a bunch of EMR nodes on AWS for a single run (less than 1 hour), to which we got charged their going rate ($15/mo?) for every instance - even though they were only up for an hour. DD refused to reverse this, though eventually did help up make sure those nodes got excluded going forward ... gee thanks. $15/hr/node for monitoring is too rich for my blood.
Most recently it was looked at to help monitor a small Kubernetes test cluster. 3 nodes. Now the base rate of $18/mo is just fine... except now they charge $1/mo/container past 10 containers per host. Because K8s (depending on how you install it) runs a bunch of little containers handling various back end things, you might not deploy anything to the cluster and still be WAY over that 10 container limit. In our case it came out to like $200/mo to monitor 3 nodes - that were no where near fully loaded.
They've got a great product but their billing just has not ever really made sense. While I haven't used them, Wavefront makes a lot more sense - pay per metric. Got a bunch of containers that don't need monitoring, then don't send metrics (or send them infrequently). Easy.
All that you’ve said resonates with my experience, but:
“Because K8s (depending on how you install it) runs a bunch of little containers handling various back end things, you might not deploy anything to the cluster and still be WAY over that 10 container limit. ”
The way we manage that is to explicitly filter for containers. Don’t monitor all containers by default, make it opt-in and you’ll be fine.
Their billing is HORRIBLE. Its actually a big reason why we are investigating moving off.
Its insanely unclear. I get that their product domain is complex, and thus its hard to bill for, but... its things like, if you're container-focused, you still pay for nodes, and you get X number of containers per node that you're allowed to track. You wire up an AWS integration and it (1) counts as a node? I've heard different things from different salespeople about this, and (2) drives up your AWS bill like crazy because of the amount of data it pulls (our AWS bill is low-five-figures, and the Datadog integration represents 3-5% of it). The datadog-agent inside our kube clusters was constantly one of our largest logging services, until we started filtering those out. We had one of our services go crazy on logs one month, driving up our bill by 1500% until someone caught it (we're small. we make mistakes. we're learning). You can't delete the logs, they wouldn't, so we had to eat a 5 figure bill when we're used to, like $1000/month.
And its expensive. Maybe its comparable to something like New Relic, I don't know, but relative to StackDriver or CloudWatch? Its in a totally different league. Just on logging, its hard to do apples-to-apples because DD bills on lines whereas CloudWatch bills on bytes, but for our logging patterns, even with our annual enterprise discount on DD (and no discounts on AWS) DataDog is about 5x more expensive. CloudWatch (even with the new Insights product) is pretty hard to ask front-line developers to use, but StackDriver is pretty nice, and its also pretty cheap.
We joke about Datadog among our ops team. When we were investigating adopting them, I signed up for an account with my company email. Within a week, members of their sales teams were emailing our frontend developers, who I imagine they found by linking my company email to a LinkedIn company, about setting up a call. I'd get about one unprompted call a week from someone from their sales org.
Their product is great. Possibly even special, though I don't believe its miles better than StackDriver. The company is a nightmare. I tell everyone I can to stay away, at least until they sort out their sales and technical support organizations, if they ever do.
“And its expensive. Maybe its comparable to something like New Relic, I don't know, but relative to StackDriver or CloudWatch? Its in a totally different league. ”
To be fair to Datadog, their UI/UX is also in a totally different league. Stackdriver Logging is a total PITA to use when trying to investigate and correlate historical logs.
>We joke about Datadog among our ops team. When we were investigating adopting them, I signed up for an account with my company email.
The exact same thing happened to me an employer or two ago. Their sales droids were so aggressive with the calls (one time, many of our people were on vacation, one guy answered, told them no thanks, and then that same caller proceeded to ring nearly every phone in the cube farm sequentially) that, to this day, that team refers to getting bothered by pushy vendors as "getting datadogged".
> The datadog-agent inside our kube clusters was constantly one of our largest logging services
This. Just this. Until I recognized this, these agent logs were making up more than 50% of our total log volume. These were, for the most part, a single log message that an APM was malformed.
I only noticed this when renewing my companies Datadog contract, and couldn't fathom how we had been generating so many logs.
I was pretty disappointed when their sales rep had been pushing us to increase our committed log volume, without mentioning that literally thousands of dollars per month was being spent for Datadog to send themselves their own logs. As far as I'm concerned these logs should either be filtered out of the index by default, or not count towards billing.
Had a similar bad experience. We had a situation where we were running instances with short durations; AWS bills by the second, but Datadog bills hourly. We ended up having a Datadog bill that was higher than our AWS bill!
They had the opportunity to help us out - they ended up using it as leverage in their sales process, only willing to work with us IF we signed up for additional services. (I think a better word fits, but I won’t go there)
We tried to work with them, but eventually just ate the expense.
Yea their pricing model charging per host is dangerous with many small machines. It will become more of an issue as more companies move to distributed micro-services.
How Datadog handled your situation is what happens when sales tries to take on customer support, as datadog is doing. Incentives are misaligned. Similarities to Yelp.
The fact that a billing issue like this gets escalated to C-level for some determination of account credit is, on its face, absurd. It suggests that billing practices at the company are so off the wall that they have a weeks-long backlog of billing disputes that can only be handled by a C-level, indicating a vacuum where policy and process might exist.
Either that, or they’re jerking you around. Both are pretty bad.
Even the basic billing concepts are too confusing. You pay for some Host count. You open the billing and usage console, and you see about 6 graphs for Hosts under two tabs. What's an APM Host, an Infra Host, and Agent Host? Which are double-counted, and which are not? Answers can be found, of course, but it could be a lot more clear.
Also, as others have noted, they turn on new features that could incur more cost, but they don't really provide RBAC, so anyone on your (maybe huge) team can start using those features.
Similar issue. We had to scramble off of Datadog quickly, as they adjusted our billing and it increased by a factor of 8 in a single month. This was due to our tag usage. Same pattern, previously unbilled, and next month bill increased 8 fold.
No slow adjustment, warned us about 2 weeks prior to the next month billing cycle. If they had given us one additional month, we could have re-worked our tagging but we were given no options at all.
Lost nearly 2 weeks of productivity out of a few team members as they needed to focus on getting us off of Datadog and onto a competitor.
> I’m surprised they haven’t had more responses on here already.
You're not supposed to comment on anything related to your filing until your registration statement becomes "effective". See details on the quiet period here: https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answersquiethtm.html.
Big companies seem to have bad practice when it comes to cancelling subscriptions.
We started out with New Relic but was unhappy with the customer support. We wanted to upgrade our subscription and reached out 3 times. We were ignored all three times. It took 3 tries to get our subscription cancelled.
Datadog seems a lot better. Their support team actually gets back to you at least. If you are a small customer New Relic will not care for you as much as the big customers. Even though we were using $500+ per month.
To add another example Postman keeps charging my card after my account was deleted. I reached out and they said Rey couldn’t find any previous record from my email and requested I forward the email I got. But I can’t because ProtonMail doesn’t allow forwarding. To this day Postman is attempting to charge my card every month. Lucky for me I usually don’t have money on that account but once it does come in Postman can expect a chargeback and formal complaint to the authorities of their shady business practices which violates EU regulations.
TLDR; big companies suck when it comes to canceling subscriptions.
I'm in the middle of a bad experience with Datadog's billing/sales team. My monthly Custom Metrics usage wasn't being billed for because they said they didn't have a way to track it. Naturally my usage gradually increased because without the monthly bill increasing. When renewing a while back they went over my usage on phone and quoted prices, same usage profile as this month. Now this month my bill increased almost 400% and they said "oh we just soft-launched billing for this feature without notifying you". No heads-up when communicating with them that I wasn't actually being billed for my usage.
Still trying to get a refund for this curveball bill. Their sales team keeps forever escalating to management, leadership, and they say it has to be approved by a C-level. It's been over 20 days and they say it might take 2-3 more weeks before C-level makes a decision on credit or not. I've never heard of this many layers involved in something like this before with other companies.