Datadog Pricing in 2026: Why Your Bill Keeps Growing and How to Cut It by 70%

Datadog bills grow 30–50% year over year due to cardinality explosion, log volume drift, and SKU sprawl. A breakdown of Datadog's per-SKU pricing (infrastructure, APM, logs, custom metrics) shows how costs compound. For mid-market teams spending $15K+/month, switching to a self-hosted or managed open-source stack (Prometheus, Loki, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) can cut costs by 50–75%. A typical migration takes 8–12 weeks and 200–400 engineering hours. The post includes cost comparison tables across small, mid-size, and large deployments, and ends with a CTA for Skedler's migration services.