October 2024 Summaries

Juraj from Better Stack acknowledges a mistake in the company's initial pricing strategy for metrics, which was inspired by competitors like Datadog but turned out to be confusing and expensive for customers. Despite their advanced data processing pipeline that combines low-latency dashboards and high-throughput log search, the pricing was initially set to be 10 times cheaper than Datadog but still proved costly for users. To address this, Better Stack has drastically reduced the price for retaining 1 billion metrics data points from $1,000 to $5, making it 200 times cheaper. Emphasizing transparency, the company is implementing granular usage reporting, recommendations for reducing metrics cardinality, billing alerts, spending limits, and a single, straightforward pricing page to prevent unexpected bills. The changes aim to simplify cost management for users and eliminate the need for self-hosting alternatives like Prometheus.