You are not alone. Datadog is designed for enterprise budgets. If you are a startup or small team, there is a simpler option.
Datadog Infrastructure is $15/host/mo. APM adds $31/host/mo. Log Management is $0.10/GB ingested plus $1.70/million events. A team with 10 hosts, APM, and logging can easily spend $500+/mo.
For an enterprise team with a large budget and complex requirements, Datadog is probably worth it. For everyone else, the math does not work.
Ticker is a self-hosted metrics dashboard tool. Single Go binary, embedded SQLite, running in 30 seconds. Free tier: 10 metrics, 24h retention. Pro: $0.99/mo/mo.
curl -fsSL https://stockyard.dev/ticker/install.sh | sh
| Ticker | Datadog | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $0.99/mo/mo flat | $15/host/mo |
| Hosting | Self-hosted | Cloud only |
| Free tier | 10 metrics, 24h retention | Limited |
| Setup time | 30 seconds | Account + config |
| Dependencies | None (single binary) | N/A (managed) |
| Data location | Your server | Their cloud |
Ticker is a simple metrics dashboard — not a full observability platform. It does not have APM, distributed tracing, log management, synthetics, or 700+ integrations. If you need full observability, Datadog is the industry standard for a reason.
Free tier included. No credit card required.
Datadog charges per host per month, with different rates for infrastructure monitoring, APM, log management, and synthetics. A single production host with infrastructure monitoring and APM runs $31 per month. Add log management ($1.70 per million events) and you are well past $50 per host. For a team running 10 servers, the monthly Datadog bill lands between $300 and $500 before anyone configures a custom dashboard. The bill is particularly unpredictable because log volume pricing makes costs spike during incidents — exactly when you can least afford to worry about your monitoring bill.
Self-hosted monitoring does not eliminate operational work, but it does eliminate the billing surprise. Stockyard tools like Bellwether (uptime checks), Outpost (infrastructure metrics), and Quarry (log management) each run as standalone binaries. You pick the monitoring functions you actually use instead of paying for a platform where 80 percent of features stay unconfigured.