~1600%better ROI
An enterprise fintech provider consolidated application, infra, and WAF logs on CtrlB, replacing a multi-platform setup with one air-gapped data lake and achieving ~1600% better ROI.
CtrlB vs Datadog · Pricing
CtrlB vs Datadog: What Your Observability Data Really Costs
Datadog's log ingestion may look inexpensive at first, but costs can increase when logs need to be indexed and made searchable. Retrieving archived logs can add further to cost. Let’s see how each cost adds up below.
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A few real workloads
90%lower cost
A mid-market logistics SaaS company unified logs and traces on CtrlB, cutting observability costs by up to 90% in a fully air-gapped setup.
1.3 PBtelemetry per month
A YC-backed quick-commerce company runs 1.3 PB/month of security telemetry through CtrlB, with WAF investigations dropping from 5–20 minutes to ~500 ms.
vs
Pay for the data you use, and that’s it. CtrlB charges by GB, with 30 days of retention included. Keep everything searchable without worrying about sampling, hidden fees, or surprise costs as your data grows.
What you pay for
Logs, traces and metrics
Ingestionunlimited ingest
$0.20 / GBIndexingstore and search all your data
includedRetention30 days retention
includedInfrastructure
Hosts and agentsno opaque host or agent pricing
noneCustom Metricscounted in GB, not per tag combination
includedAll of it searchable
Send any JSON, and new fields are indexed the moment they appear, with no schema maintenance.
The cost can add up at every step. You pay to ingest your logs, then again to index and search them based on retention. Need older logs? Bringing them back from the archive can add another charge, making costs harder to predict.
What you pay for
Logs
Ingestionevery GB that arrives
$0.10 / GBIndexing30-day retention, only what you index
$2.50 / GBRehydrationreading archived logs back, plus re-indexing
$0.10 / GBInfrastructure
Hostsper server, counted at your peak hour
$15 / hostCustom metricseach unique tag combination counts separately
$5 / 100A slice is searchable
You pay to ingest the full volume, even when you filter some of it out. Then you pay again to index the data you choose to keep searchable.
Compare costs at your scale
Input your data volume, then set the percentage of logs indexed on Datadog to see how much you could save by switching to CtrlB.
20 TB
logs per month
30-day retention
30-day retention
100%
of that searchable
on Datadog
on Datadog
$576,000
a year back in budget
at these settings
at these settings
Data volume20 TB
1 TB40 TB
Datadog: share of logs indexed and searchable100%
0%, nothing queryable0%100%, full coverage100%
CtrlB 20,000 GB × $0.20 (all indexed) = $4,000
Datadog 20,000 GB × $0.10 (ingest, all of it) = $2,000
20,000 GB × $2.50/GB (= 1M events, index 100%) = $50,000
total = $52,000
ingestion
indexing
$0
$26k
$53k
$79k
$105k
$4,000
$52,000
CtrlB
100% indexed
Datadog
100% indexed
CtrlB comes in $48,000 a month lower and still indexes 100% of the volume, against 100% on Datadog.
How this is calculated. CtrlB is volume × $0.20/GB, with 30-day retention and 100% indexing included. Datadog is (full volume × $0.10/GB to ingest, including logs that are never indexed) + (indexed share × $2.50/GB for 30-day retention). Both sides assume 1 TB = 1,000 GB and 1M events = 1 GB (so $2.50/GB indexing = $2.50 per million events).
What usually makes a Datadog bill spike
Most unexpected increases trace back to a short list of patterns.
ingestexclusion filter
$
DEBUGDEBUG01
Unfiltered or verbose logs
Ingestion is charged on every GB that reaches Datadog, including logs an exclusion filter drops before indexing. A debug flag left on in production is billed in full.
HOST
$$$$$$$$$$
$1 / month$0.002 / container hour
02
High container churn in Kubernetes
Containers beyond the per-host allowance cost $1 a month each on an annual plan, or $0.002 per container hour on demand. Short-lived pods and frequent redeploys push that count up.
$5 / 100
03
Custom metrics with high tag cardinality
Each unique combination of metric name and tag values is billed at $5 per 100. A tag like user_id or pod_name multiplies the count, and a histogram counts five times per combination.
3 days
$1.06
30 days
$2.50
04
Long retention without archiving
Indexing logs for 30 days costs $2.50 per million events, against $1.06 for 3 days. Keeping everything searchable for a month costs 2.4 times what a short window does.
top 1% ≈ 7 h
droppedbilled for the whole month
droppedbilled for the whole month
05
Autoscaling without usage caps
Hosts are billed at the highest hourly count once the top 1% of hours is dropped. In a 30-day month that is about 7 hours, so a scale-out that runs longer than that sets the host count for the whole month.
Questions teams ask about Datadog pricing
An annual plan has two main charges. You pay $0.10 per GB of data ingested, then $1.06 to $2.50 per million events indexed, depending on whether you keep them for 3, 7, 15, or 30 days. If you need to search archived logs, you also pay $0.10 per compressed GB scanned, and those events are indexed again.
Yes. You still pay for the data sent to Datadog, even if you don't index it. Exclusion filters can reduce what you pay for indexing, but they don't reduce the ingestion cost.
Datadog counts each unique metric + tag combination as a custom metric. So if you add more unique tag values, you create more metric combinations. That's where high cardinality can drive up your custom metric count. Infrastructure Pro includes 100 custom metrics per host, while Enterprise includes 200. Anything beyond that is charged at $5 per 100 custom metrics per month.
Hosts are counted every hour. The bill uses the highest hourly count after the busiest 1% of hours in the month is set aside.
You get 150 GB of data per month for free, with 14 days of retention. The Pro plan costs $0.20 per GB and includes 30 days of retention. For Enterprise, pricing is customized based on your data volume.
Yes. Keep a short window, around 7 days, of indexed logs in Datadog for live dashboards and alerts, and keep the full history in CtrlB for longer retention and lower bill.