Datadog disclosed a non-recurring $65M upfront bill from Q1 2022, which was linked to a crypto customer.
The mystery customer was confirmed to be Coinbase, which incurred the $65M Datadog bill for its 2021 usage.
After cutting costs in early 2022, Coinbase built a Grafana/Prometheus/ClickHouse observability stack but returned to Datadog with a more favorable contract.
Observability vendor spend becomes a build-versus-buy decision when annual bills exceed $2–5M, as hiring a platform team may be more cost-effective.
Datadog’s tooling can reduce and mitigate outages, making a multi-million-dollar subscription self-funding through lost-revenue prevention.
The trend of large tech firms optimizing or replacing vendor infrastructure spend is expected to continue amid economic pressures.
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