TL;DR: Datadog's per-host pricing is deliberately structured to feel cheap at two or three nodes and expensive by the time you actually need it. The base infrastructure plan charges per host, per month, and that cost multiplies with every add-on — APM, log management, synthetics — each

What's in this article

Why Datadog's Pricing Forces the Self-Hosting Conversation

The Five Contenders and Their Honest Resource Costs

Setting Up Prometheus + Grafana in Docker Compose