Datadog is the market-leading observability platform, and its pricing is famously modular: each product is billed separately and the modules stack. Here is how the main ones work, as of June 2026. All figures are list rates from the Datadog pricing page; see our full Datadog pricing breakdown for the per-product table.
The headline rates
| Product | Unit | Rate (annual) |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure (Pro) | per host / month | $15 |
| APM | per host / month | $31 |
| Log ingest | per GB | $0.10 |
| Log indexing | per million events | $1.27 |
| RUM | per 1,000 sessions | $1.50 |
| Session Replay | per 1,000 sessions | +$1.80 |
Why the per-host model matters
Infrastructure and APM are billed per host. That is simple to budget for a stable fleet of large hosts, but it penalizes dense Kubernetes nodes and ephemeral/autoscaled hosts - you pay for each host even if it lives for minutes. APM also cannot be bought standalone: every APM host needs a paired Infrastructure plan, so the real cost of adding tracing to a host is about $46/host/month (Infra $15 + APM $31) at the Pro/Standard tier.
Logs: ingest is cheap, indexing is not
Datadog splits logs into two meters. Ingesting is cheap ($0.10/GB), but indexing - making logs searchable - is $1.27 per million events at 15-day retention, and longer retention costs more. For a chatty service, the indexing line frequently dwarfs ingest. This is the single biggest source of “why is my Datadog bill so high” surprises. See how it compares on the log management category page.
Custom metrics: the other surprise
Each Infrastructure host includes 10 custom metrics; beyond that it is about $1 per 100 custom metrics per month (annual). High-cardinality custom metrics (lots of tag combinations) can quietly become a large line item.
How Datadog compares
Datadog’s depth (800+ integrations, best-in-class dashboards) is unmatched, but it is rarely the cheapest. Compare it head to head: Datadog vs New Relic (usage + per-user), Datadog vs Grafana Cloud (generous free tier) and Datadog vs Dynatrace (consumption-based). For cost control, read how to cut observability costs.
Bottom line
Budget Datadog as a stack, not a single number: per-host Infra + per-host APM + per-GB ingest + indexing + per-session RUM. Model your hosts and log volume in the cost calculator. Prices are a June-2026 snapshot; verify on the Datadog pricing page.