Actual Datadog Pricing 2026

How Datadog pricing works

Datadog uses a modular, product-by-product pricing model. Rather than offering a single platform fee, Datadog charges separately for each product category — Infrastructure Monitoring, Log Management, APM, Synthetics, Security, and more — so you only pay for what you use. Most products are billed based on a usage dimension specific to that product (hosts, log events, sessions, committers, etc.), and costs scale with consumption.

Primary billing dimensions

Datadog's pricing revolves around several billing units depending on the product:

• Per host, per month — Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Workload Protection, and several security products charge based on the number of hosts (physical or virtual OS instances) you monitor.
• Per ingested/indexed volume — Log Management charges per GB ingested and per million log events indexed. Retention tier and duration affect cost.
• Per session or test run — Real User Monitoring, Product Analytics, and Continuous Testing charge based on sessions or test executions.
• Per committer — CI Pipeline Visibility, Test Optimization, and Code Coverage are priced per active Git committer (3+ commits/month).
• Per seat — Incident Response and On-Call products charge per user seat.
• Per event, execution, or credit — Workflow Automation, Event Management, and AI Credits use consumption-based units.

Each product also includes baseline allotments (e.g., 5 containers per Infrastructure Pro host, 150 GB span ingestion per APM host) with overage charges for usage beyond those allotments.

Billing cadence and discounts

Datadog offers three billing models for most products:

• Annual commitment — the lowest per-unit rate; requires a 12-month contract.
• Month-to-month — slightly higher than annual; no long-term commitment.
• On-demand (hourly) — the highest rate; billed by the hour with no commitment, useful for burst or evaluation usage.

Annual pricing is typically 17–30% cheaper than on-demand pricing depending on the product. Multi-year and volume discounts are available for larger deployments (e.g., 500+ hosts/month for Infrastructure, 3B+ log events/month for Log Management).

Free tier and trials

Datadog offers a free Infrastructure Monitoring tier that includes up to 5 hosts with 1-day metric retention and core visualization features. Most paid products offer a 14-day free trial with full functionality. There is no platform-wide freemium plan — the free tier is limited to Infrastructure Monitoring only.

Add-ons and bundled SKUs

Several products are available as standalone purchases or as part of bundled SKUs that offer savings:

• DevSecOps Pro/Enterprise bundles Infrastructure Monitoring with Cloud Security Management.
• APM Pro bundles APM with Data Streams Monitoring; APM Enterprise adds Continuous Profiler.
• Incident Response bundles On-Call with Incident Management at a discount vs. purchasing each standalone.

Some products include cross-product allotments — for example, Infrastructure Enterprise hosts include 20 workflow executions per host/month, and Test Optimization committers include Code Coverage at no extra cost.

Key cost drivers to watch

• Custom metrics — allotted per host (100 for Pro, 200 for Enterprise); overages are billed separately.
• Container monitoring — 5–10 containers allotted per host depending on plan; additional containers cost $0.002/hr.
• Log retention tier and duration — Standard Indexing costs significantly more than Flex Storage; longer retention periods increase cost.
• Span ingestion and retention — APM includes 150 GB ingestion and 1M indexed spans per host; additional volume is billed per GB or per million spans.
• On-demand overages — exceeding committed volumes typically costs 50% more than your contracted rate.

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Datadog pricing plans

Datadog's pricing is organized by product category rather than a single tiered plan. Below is a breakdown of every major product, its plans, pricing, and what's included.

Infrastructure Monitoring

Free — $0/month

• Up to 5 hosts
• 1-day metric retention
• Core collection and visualization features
• Standard events and metrics

Pro — $15/host/month (annual) | $18 on-demand

• 1,000+ integrations
• Out-of-the-box dashboards
• 15-month metric retention
• 5 containers allotted per host
• 100 custom metrics per host
• 500 custom events per host

Best for: Teams that need full-featured infrastructure monitoring with long-term retention.

Enterprise — $23/host/month (annual) | $27 on-demand

Everything in Pro, plus:

• Machine learning-based alerts (anomaly, outlier, forecast)
• Live Processes
• Governance Console
• 10 containers allotted per host
• 200 custom metrics per host
• 1,000 custom events per host
• SCIM, multiple SAML providers, IP allowlist
• Data Access Control (100 datasets)

Best for: Large organizations needing advanced administrative controls and ML-powered alerting.

DevSecOps Pro — $22/host/month (annual) | $27 on-demand

All Infrastructure Pro features + Cloud Security Management (CSM) Pro:

• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
• Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM)
• Vulnerability Management for containers and hosts
• Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)

DevSecOps Enterprise — $34/host/month (annual) | $41 on-demand

All Infrastructure Enterprise features + CSM Enterprise:

• File integrity monitoring
• Workload Protection for Linux, Windows, Kubernetes, and Docker
• 10 containers allotted per host

Volume discounts available for 500+ hosts/month.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

APM — $31/host/month (annual) | $36 on-demand

With Infrastructure Monitoring attached. Standalone: $36/host/month (annual).

• End-to-end distributed tracing
• Automatic service discovery and dependency mapping (Universal Service Monitoring)
• 15-minute live trace search; 15-day historical search
• RED metrics based on 100% of traffic with 15-month retention
• 150 GB span ingestion per host/month
• 1M indexed spans per host/month

APM Pro — $35/host/month (annual) | $42 on-demand

Standalone: $41/host/month (annual).

Everything in APM, plus Data Streams Monitoring:

• Automatic dependency mapping of queues, consumers, and producers
• End-to-end pipeline latency and consumer lag metrics

APM Enterprise — $40/host/month (annual) | $48 on-demand

Standalone: $47/host/month (annual).

Everything in APM Pro, plus Continuous Profiler:

• Code-level tracing (wall, lock, CPU, I/O time)
• CPU and memory code profiles
• Code performance comparisons across versions

Add-on: AWS Fargate — $2.60/task (annual) | $3.70 on-demand.

Note: You must commit to a single APM tier across all hosts — you cannot mix tiers.

Log Management

Ingestion — $0.10/GB/month (annual and on-demand)

Per GB of uncompressed data ingested. Includes processing, enrichment, live tail, and archiving.

Standard Indexing (15-day retention) — $1.70/million log events/month (annual) | $2.55 on-demand

Other retention options available: 3-day, 7-day, 30-day, and 30+ days (contact sales). For real-time exploration, alerting, and dashboards.

Flex Storage — $0.05/million events stored/month (annual) | $0.075 on-demand

Long-term retention (1–15 months) without rehydration. Best for infrequently accessed logs.

Flex Logs Starter — $0.60/million events stored/month (annual) | $0.90 on-demand

Bundled compute for volumes below 2B/month. Retention options: 3, 6, 12, or 15 months.

Log Forwarding — $0.25/GB outbound/destination/month

Forward logs to external destinations (SIEM, BI tools). Forwarding to S3/GCP/Azure archives is free.

Volume discounts available for 3B+ events/month.

Continuous Testing & Synthetic Monitoring

API Testing — $5/10K test runs/month (annual) | $7.20 on-demand

Test API endpoints and multi-step workflows with globally managed locations.

Browser Testing — $12/1K test runs/month (annual) | $18 on-demand

Record tests without code, self-healing tests, step-by-step screenshots.

Mobile App Testing — $50/100 test runs/month (annual) | $72 on-demand

Real Android and iOS device testing.

Continuous Testing (add-on) — $79/additional parallelization/month (annual) | $114 on-demand

Run multiple tests simultaneously in CI/CD pipelines.

AI Credits

Starting at $500/500 credits/month (annual) | $1.30/credit on-demand

• Bits Chat (search telemetry, create dashboards): ~0.5–0.7 credits/use
• Bits Investigation (automated root cause analysis): ~6.5 credits/use
• Bits Code (AI-assisted code fixes): ~5 credits/use
• Bits Agent Builder (custom AI agents): ~0.3 credits/message

Credits reset monthly — unused credits do not roll over. Overages billed at the on-demand rate.

Incident Response

On-Call — $20/seat/month (annual) | $29 on-demand

Unlimited schedules, escalation policies, routing rules. Pages via SMS, voice, push, email.

Incident Management — $30/seat/month (annual) | $43.20 on-demand

Automated timelines, Slack/Jira integrations, unlimited status pages, AI postmortems.

Incident Response Bundle — $40/seat/month (annual) | $58 on-demand

All On-Call + all Incident Management features combined.

CI/CD & Software Delivery

CI Pipeline Visibility — $8/committer/month (annual) | $12 on-demand

400K spans allotted per committer/month. Supports GitLab, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, and more.

Test Optimization — $20/committer/month (annual) | $29 on-demand

1M spans allotted per committer/month. Flaky test detection, Test Impact Analysis.

Code Coverage — $8/committer/month (annual) | $12 on-demand

Included free for Test Optimization and Code Security committers.

Other Notable Products

Enterprise and custom pricing

Several products — including Database Monitoring, Network Monitoring, SIEM, Serverless Monitoring, and Experiments — require contacting Datadog sales for a custom quote. Enterprise-level negotiations typically involve custom bundles, volume commitments, and multi-year terms.

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Datadog hidden costs and fees

Datadog's list prices cover base product access, but several secondary charges can inflate your bill if you're not tracking them. Here are the most common hidden costs to watch for.

Container overages

Infrastructure Pro includes 5 containers per host; Enterprise includes 10. Each additional container costs $0.002 per container per hour ($1.44/container/month). In heavily containerized environments — especially Kubernetes clusters running dozens of pods per node — this can add up fast. Monitor your container-to-host ratio and right-size your plan accordingly.

Custom metric overages

Infrastructure Pro allots 100 custom metrics per host; Enterprise allots 200. These are averaged across your account, not per host. If your team instruments application-specific metrics (ad revenue, cart abandonment, in-game economy health), overages are billed at rates that vary by contract. Log-based and span-based metrics also count toward this allocation.

Span ingestion and retention overages

APM includes 150 GB of ingested spans and 1 million indexed spans per host per month. Exceeding these allotments costs $0.10/GB for ingestion and $1.27–$2.50 per million indexed spans depending on retention period. On-demand APM customers are metered hourly, not monthly — so a single spike can trigger overage charges even if your monthly average is under the allotment.

Log rehydration charges

Rehydrating archived logs costs $0.10 per compressed GB scanned, plus the standard indexing rate for any events re-indexed. If you frequently pull historical logs back for investigation, these charges compound. Consider Flex Storage ($0.05/million events) for logs you'll need to search occasionally without full rehydration.

Log forwarding to external destinations

Forwarding logs to S3, GCP Storage, or Azure Blob is free. But forwarding to external destinations — a SIEM, BI tool, or another Datadog account — costs $0.25/GB outbound per destination per month. Multiple forwarding destinations multiply the cost.

Overages on committed plans

When your usage exceeds a committed volume, Datadog charges a premium — typically 50% above the annual rate — on the overage. For example, if your log ingestion commitment is 100 GB/month and you ingest 150 GB, the extra 50 GB is billed at 1.5x your contracted rate. Budget a buffer or negotiate overage cap terms in your contract.

Unused AI Credits

AI Credits reset monthly and do not roll over. If you purchase a 500-credit bundle but only use 200 credits, those 300 credits are lost. Size your credit commitment based on actual usage patterns, not projected adoption.

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How to negotiate lower Datadog pricing

Datadog's list prices are a starting point, not a final offer. Annual contracts, volume commitments, and bundled purchases all create room for negotiation — especially as your deployment scales beyond entry-level usage.

1. Commit to annual billing upfront

Datadog's on-demand rates are 30–50% higher than annual rates across most products. Switching from on-demand to an annual commitment is the simplest way to reduce your bill. For example, Infrastructure Pro drops from $18/host/month on-demand to $15/host/month on an annual plan — a 17% savings with no other negotiation required. Use your current on-demand spend as leverage to show Datadog you're a serious buyer ready to commit.

2. Negotiate volume discounts at scale

Datadog explicitly offers multi-year and volume discounts for larger deployments. The pricing page flags these for Infrastructure (500+ hosts), Log Management (3B+ events/month), Continuous Testing, and several other products. If you're approaching or exceeding these thresholds, request tiered pricing that decreases your per-unit cost as your usage grows. Even below the stated thresholds, Datadog's sales team has discretion to offer volume pricing — especially if you can project growth over 12–24 months.

3. Bundle products for package discounts

Datadog's bundled SKUs (DevSecOps Pro/Enterprise, APM Pro/Enterprise, Incident Response Bundle) are already discounted versus purchasing each product standalone. Use this to your advantage: if you're evaluating multiple Datadog products, negotiate a custom bundle that combines your specific product mix at a lower blended rate. Datadog is incentivized to expand your product footprint — use that to negotiate favorable terms for adding new products alongside your existing commitments.

4. Use competitive alternatives as leverage

Datadog competes directly with Grafana Cloud, New Relic, Splunk, Elastic, and open-source stacks like Prometheus + Grafana. If you have pricing from a competitor — or a credible migration plan to an open-source alternative — bring it to the negotiation. Datadog's sales team is more flexible on pricing when there's a real risk of losing the deal. Even mentioning an internal evaluation of alternatives can shift the conversation.

5. Time your purchase strategically

Like most enterprise software vendors, Datadog's sales team operates on quarterly targets. Engaging in pricing conversations near the end of a fiscal quarter (March, June, September, December) or at fiscal year-end gives you leverage, as reps are more motivated to close deals. If your contract is up for renewal, start the conversation 60–90 days early and signal that you're evaluating alternatives — this creates urgency on their side.

6. Negotiate Enterprise contracts line by line

For Enterprise-tier or custom pricing deals, don't accept the first proposal as-is. Key areas to negotiate include:

• Overage rates — Datadog's standard overage is 50% above the annual rate. Push for overage rates closer to your committed rate, especially if your usage is variable.
• Committed volume floors — Negotiate a lower minimum commitment if your usage is uncertain, or request a "ramp" plan where your commitment increases gradually over the contract term.
• Retention periods — Longer log retention (30-day vs. 15-day) and span retention carry significant cost differences. Negotiate retention pricing as part of your overall deal rather than accepting list rates.
• Allotment overrides — Ask for increased container, custom metric, or span allotments per host as part of your enterprise agreement, reducing the likelihood of overage charges.
• Payment terms — Request net-60 or net-90 payment terms, or negotiate quarterly billing instead of upfront annual payment, to improve cash flow.

7. Consolidate spend across products

If you're using Datadog for multiple product categories (Infrastructure + APM + Logs + Security), your total spend gives you significant negotiating power. Frame the conversation around your total annual commitment rather than negotiating each product in isolation. Datadog's account teams have more flexibility on per-unit pricing when the overall deal size is larger.

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