Datadog does not have a pricing problem so much as a defaults problem. Priced per host, per GB and per million events, with defaults tuned for completeness rather than economy, an unmanaged account grows its bill faster than its usage. The teams that keep Datadog affordable treat cost as an operating discipline, not a renewal-time scramble.
Start by understanding what you are actually buying: the complete guide to Datadog pricing, charges and ROI covers how each product line is billed and where the surprises hide. If you are choosing or re-negotiating a plan, work through the pricing plan evaluation checklist before committing.
The single most common cost surprise is custom metrics: custom versus standard metrics explains why one high-cardinality tag can cost more than a rack of hosts. Logs are the other: ingestion and retention controls live in the log management guide, and they are cost controls as much as operational ones.
For the commercial context around all of this, our main site covers Datadog pricing and cost optimisation as a service: what a managed provider does differently, and how we cut log volume by 77% in our own operations without losing coverage.