Datadog is the most popular observability platform in the world. It's also the source of more Twitter horror stories than any other piece of B2B software. Search "Datadog bill" and you'll find threads about teams getting invoiced 5x what they budgeted, indie devs being charged more than their AWS bill, and at least one $65M annual contract that made the rounds during a Coinbase earnings call. If you're a small team — anywhere from 1 to 30 engineers — Datadog is probably overkill. Not because it's bad. Because it's built for companies with platform teams whose entire job is taming the observability stack. You don't have that. You have a product to ship. I'm writing this from a slightly biased seat: I'm building Pingoni , an API monitoring tool that's one of the alternatives I'm about to compare. I'll be upfront about where Pingoni fits and where it doesn't.…