Datadog pricing calculator
Estimate your Datadog bill, and what an audit would take off it.
Datadog's published list prices, applied to your hosts, APM, custom metrics and logs. Then the reduction a free, read-only DevLift audit typically finds on each line.
| Line | Per month | Typical cut |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure hostsHosts × plan rate | $0 | $0 |
| APM hostsAPM hosts × rate | $0 | $0 |
| Custom metricsMetrics beyond the per-host allotment × $0.05 | $0 | $0 |
| Log ingestionGB per day × 30 × $0.10 | $0 | $0 |
| Log indexing, 15-dayMillion events per day × 30 × rate | $0 | $0 |
Ranges reflect reductions seen across production accounts. The audit gives you an exact figure, line by line, before anything changes.
How Datadog pricing works
Five meters, and the defaults favour the meter.
Infrastructure hosts
Billed per host per month. Pro is $15 and Enterprise $23 on annual terms, more on demand. Every machine with an agent counts, including ones nobody looks at.
APM hosts
$31 per host per month on annual terms for hosts running tracing. Agents installed everywhere for convenience are the usual overspend.
Custom metrics
Pro includes 100 per host and Enterprise 200. Beyond that, every unique metric and tag combination is billed. One high-cardinality tag can add thousands.
Log ingestion
$0.10 per gigabyte ingested. Cheap on its own, which is why nobody notices until the volume doubles.
Log indexing
$1.70 per million events at 15-day retention on annual terms. Indexing everything is the default, and it is where most of the bill goes.
Commitments and renewals
Annual commitments lock in a volume. Cutting usage before the renewal is what changes the next contract, so timing matters as much as the changes.
Where it goes
What the audit usually finds.
Read-only access, seven days, a line-by-line report. These are the findings that come up in most accounts.
- Custom metrics tagged with identifiers nobody queries, added for one investigation and never removed.
- Debug and access logs indexed at full retention when a fraction is ever searched.
- APM agents on machines that serve no traced traffic, and host counts set at a renewal a year ago.
- Monitors that page and are never acted on, each one costing attention rather than money.
- A renewal date nobody is planning for, so next year's commitment is this year's usage plus growth.
Questions
About the numbers.
How accurate is this calculator?
It uses Datadog's published list prices with annual billing as the default, and on-demand rates if you switch the toggle. Contracts often carry committed-use discounts and bundles, so treat the result as a ceiling and the shape of the bill as the useful part.
What counts as a custom metric?
Every unique combination of a metric name and its tag values is one custom metric. Pro includes 100 per host and Enterprise 200; everything above that is billed. High-cardinality tags such as user or request identifiers are how a few metrics become tens of thousands.
Why is logging the biggest surprise on most bills?
Ingestion is cheap per gigabyte, but indexing is billed per million events at the retention you choose, and the default is to index everything. Exclusion filters, archiving to your own storage with rehydration, and Flex tiers are where most of the reduction comes from.
How does DevLift cut a Datadog bill?
Iris finds the tags nobody queries and drops them, routes unsearched logs to archive, trims host and APM agents on machines that never needed them, consolidates monitors, and times the work around your renewal. A senior engineer approves every change.
Should we switch to Grafana or New Relic instead?
Sometimes, but rarely for cost alone. Most Datadog bills can be cut substantially without a migration, and the audit tells you by how much. If a move still makes sense afterwards, it is a separate, scoped project.
What if we're mid-contract?
Usage still hides waste inside committed spend. Reducing it now lowers the renewal, and we plan the changes around the renewal date so the next commitment reflects what you actually use.
Get the exact number.
Schedule a free demo with an engineer and leave with the free audit scoped. Bring last month's invoice and you'll get a first read on the call.
You'll pick a time on the next page.