Datadog prices are out of this world. I assumed their front facing prices were for the lone dev, so when I reached out as a company looking to integrate multiple of their products I expected a deal, and got very little compromise. I told them up front they were going to have to cut prices by 90% for us to consider them -- no budge. And they are pretty belligerent salesman, not wanting to leave me alone. After a while I just blocked their domain to my email.

Datadog startup journey from my perspective:

1. use Datadog, because it gets you a bunch of stuff without having to really set it up, like anomaly detection, which is poor man's monitoring & alerting

2. once you start getting product-market fit and the number of instances you run grows you notice your monthly bill going crazier and crazier and you now have something that starts to resemble an ops team -> migrate to a different product, set up proper monitoring

I've seen that at 3 companies I worked at.

We're going through this now. What other products are out there, preferably easy for a moron to set up?

You should check out SigNoz (https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz) - It's an open source alternative to DataDog with metrics, traces and logs in a single application. You can just self host it yourself or try the hosted version.

PS: I am one of the maintainers at SigNoz