You Don't Need Datadog (Yet)

I see startups spending $5,000/month on Datadog with 8 engineers. That's $625 per engineer per month for monitoring. At that stage, you need that money for product development.

Here's the observability stack that costs under $200/month and covers 80% of what you need.

The Stack

Metrics: Prometheus + Grafana (free, self-hosted on K8s)