Does Datadog have a free tier?

Datadog offers a free tier for Infrastructure monitoring with up to 5 hosts and 1-day data retention. APM and Log Management have separate free tiers. The free tier is useful for evaluation but most production teams need paid plans. Datadog also offers a 14-day free trial for paid features.

How much does Datadog cost for a typical startup?

A typical startup with 10 hosts, APM, and log management can expect to pay $500–$1,500/month on Datadog. Infrastructure Pro for 10 hosts = $150/month. Add APM ($310/month), logs at 50GB/day ingestion (~$300/month), and you're at ~$760/month before dashboards and monitors. Bills can spike dramatically with log volume increases.

How does Datadog pricing compare to New Relic?

Datadog and New Relic use different pricing models. Datadog charges per host + per product. New Relic charges per user + data ingest (100GB free/month, then $0.30/GB). For small teams with high host counts, Datadog can be cheaper. For large teams with heavy log ingestion, New Relic's per-user model can be more predictable. Most teams find Datadog bills grow faster due to multi-product pricing.

How does Datadog log pricing work?

Datadog Log Management has two cost components: ingestion ($0.10/GB) and indexing ($1.70 per million log events per month for 15-day retention). Most teams are surprised that indexing often costs 5–10x more than ingestion. A team ingesting 100GB/day with 10% indexed = ~$300/month ingestion + ~$5,100/month indexing. Using Flex Logs or archiving to S3 can dramatically cut costs.

Datadog Pricing 2026 — Infrastructure, APM & Log Costs

Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring Pricing

Datadog's core infrastructure product charges per host monitored. A "host" is any physical or virtual server, cloud instance, or container host running the Datadog agent.

Plan	Per Host / Month	Retention	Best For
Free	$0	1 day (5 hosts max)	Evaluation, tiny projects
Pro	$15/host	15 months	Most production teams
Enterprise	$23/host	15 months	Orgs needing RBAC, SLOs, audit logs

Containers are billed at $0.002/container-hour (Pro) on top of host costs. Kubernetes nodes count as hosts.

Datadog APM (Application Performance Monitoring)

Plan	Per Host / Month	Included Spans	Notes
APM Pro	$31/host	1M indexed spans/host	Includes distributed tracing
APM Enterprise	$40/host	1M indexed spans/host	Adds Data Streams, Error Tracking+

Additional indexed spans: $1.70/million. Ingested spans: $0.10/GB. APM is priced separately from infrastructure — you pay both if you use both.

Datadog Log Management Pricing

Product	Price	Notes
Log Ingestion	$0.10/GB	All logs ingested, not necessarily indexed
Log Indexing (Standard, 15 days)	$1.70/million events	Logs you can actively query
Log Indexing (Flex, 30 days)	$0.05/million events/day	Lower cost, higher latency queries
Log Archive (S3/GCS)	Storage cost only	Long-term storage with rehydration

Real-World Cost Scenarios

Small startup (5 hosts, infra only)

Infrastructure Pro (5 hosts) $75/month

No APM, no logs $0

Total monthly $75/month

Bare-bones infrastructure monitoring. Includes metrics, dashboards, alerts. No traces or logs.

Growing team (10 hosts + APM + basic logging)

Infrastructure Pro (10 hosts) $150/month

APM Pro (10 hosts) $310/month

Logs: 50GB/day ingestion ~$150/month

Logs: 10% indexed (150M events/mo) ~$255/month

Total monthly ~$865/month

Typical for a $1M ARR SaaS. Log costs grow fast — even with 10% indexing rate, logs are ~47% of the total bill.

Scale-up (25 hosts + full observability stack)

Infrastructure Enterprise (25 hosts) $575/month

APM Enterprise (25 hosts) $1,000/month

Logs (200GB/day ingestion + indexing) ~$2,000/month

Synthetics + RUM + other products ~$500/month

Total monthly ~$4,075/month

~$49,000/year. At this scale, most teams negotiate an annual enterprise contract for 20-40% discount.

Get Alerted When Datadog Changes Pricing

Datadog has raised prices multiple times. Monitor their pricing page and get notified before it affects your budget.

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Datadog vs New Relic vs Grafana Cloud

Feature	Datadog	New Relic	Grafana Cloud
Pricing model	Per host + per product	Per user + data ingest	Per series + per log volume
Free tier	✓ 5 hosts, 1 day	✓ 100GB data/month	✓ 10K series, 50GB logs
Infrastructure entry	$15/host/month	$0 (data ingest only)	$8/1,000 series/month
APM / tracing	$31/host/month	Included in data ingest	$0.50/GB traces
Log management	$0.10/GB + $1.70/M indexed	$0.30/GB (after 100GB free)	$0.50/GB (after 50GB free)
Cost predictability	Low — many products, variable usage	Medium — user count is fixed	Medium — usage-based
Best for	Large teams needing full observability	Teams with many users, high ingestion	Open-source-first teams

How to Reduce Your Datadog Bill

Datadog costs are notoriously hard to predict. Here are the most effective cost control levers:

Use Flex Logs instead of Standard indexing — 97% cheaper for logs you rarely query
Archive to S3/GCS — pay only storage costs for compliance logs
Drop noisy logs at ingestion — use Logging without Limits to filter before indexing
Commit to annual contracts — typically 20–40% discount
Use tagging and exclusion filters — exclude health checks and debug logs from indexing
Monitor your own Datadog spend — set up budget alerts in Datadog's Usage page