It's expensive for good reason, it's the best out there.

That's debatable. I prefer Grafana.

Like any SaaS dev tool, when at scale, you negotiate and pay a fraction of the list price.

It's meaningless to look at the price of Datadog@5 hosts -- at 500 or 5000, you're paying a completely detached number from the website list price, likely a small fraction.

Based on my experience at two companies with thousands of hosts on Datadog, this is not true. You'll only be able to negotiate a small discount.

You'll also experience their habit of launching new features, waiting a while for customers to adopt them, then starting to charge extra for them.

Don't get me wrong, Datadog has great products. But they're also great at extracting money from their customers.

Which blows away the reason a lot of people/teams/companies like SaaS. Because there is no negotiation, no sales requisitions, no long lead time while they come up with a quote. You see the price you pay the price you get the service, same as anyone else.

Every SaaS provider offers discounts based on length of commitment and volume of spend. Most will say look at AWS, but even there you have list prices and private/bulk pricing. Throw in EDPs, negotiated credits, savings plans, reservations, etc and you're nowhere near list prices.