We screwed up — and I want to apologize.

A bit of background, first:

The team here at Better Stack built a state-of-the-art data processing pipeline. Storing logs in object storage while keeping derived metrics on local NVMe SSD drives brings the best of both worlds:

• low-latency dashboards at a massive scale
• and extremely fast high-throughput log search with horizontally scalable ingestion.

So when it came time to start charging for metrics in the summer of 2024, I looked for inspiration across our competitors.

I knew we had superior tech and could charge less than our competitors. But how much less should we charge?

I was blown away by the lack of transparency when it came to pricing metrics

Imagine you have a small app generating 200 GB of uncompressed logs per month along with derived metrics on the side: how much will the datadogs of the world charge you for metrics? I dare you to try to figure that out from Datadog pricing page.

"Is it a standard metric? Or a custom metric. Or a custom event? Ok, so how many custom metrics do I have when I exclude the included hosted metrics… (5mins later) Alright, I give up"

Oh, I see — that’s how Datadog makes $1B per year from metrics alone:

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