How I cut my Datadog bill by 90% - the open-source observability stack I switched to
I was paying $1,800/month to Datadog for 40 hosts. Now I pay $0. Here's the open-source stack that replaced it. What Datadog was costing me 40 hosts × $15/host/month (infrastructure monitoring) 50M custom metrics × $0.05 per 100 = $2,500/month Log management: 50GB/day × $0.10/GB = $1,500/month APM: $31/host/month for 10 hosts = $310/month Total: ~$6,000/month The metric cost was the killer. Once…
The original owner of a Datadog subscription, which cost $1,800 per month for monitoring 40 hosts, decided to cut costs and switch to an open-source observability stack. The new stack consists of Prometheus for metrics, Grafana for visualization, Loki and Promtail for log management, SigNoz for application performance monitoring (APM), Uptime Kuma for uptime monitoring, and PagerDuty for incident management.
Additionally, Better Stack is used for a status page. By adopting this self-hosted solution, the cost dropped from $6,000 to just $31 per month, resulting in significant savings of $5,995 per month or approximately $72,000 per year. The migration process took about 30 hours over five weeks, with the hardest part being the team's adaptation to Grafana.
The open-source stack provides similar visibility into infrastructure, logs, and APM while eliminating per-metric pricing and offering predictable costs. Despite some UX differences, the self-hosted solution offers unlimited metrics and the added benefit of keeping data on the organization's servers.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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