alt Hacker NewsEdit: a couple of comments pointed out that the blog does mention paying Datadog. Leaving my comment as is below, because I still find the whole interaction weird. It makes me wonder if the story is fabricated.
> we lost visibility into production systems that depend fundamentally on continuous observability signals to operate safely.
The Datadog message implies that Deductive wasn't paying for any service from Datadog: "We've noticed you're actively evaluating Datadog" and "our Master Subscription Agreement that you accepted by using our service".
And Deductive apparently did this from Feb to Dec 2025. Quite a long time for a free evaluation, but perhaps they were just using the very limited free tier?
It's a little strange to be relying on a free tier or evaluation for "production systems that depend fundamentally on continuous observability". Presumably it couldn't have been that important to Deductive, otherwise they would have paid for the service they were "depending fundamentally" on.
Replies
> First, our Datadog bills were steep, roughly 2-3x of what we would otherwise expect to pay for equivalent telemetry storage and retention.
The blog says they were paying(?)
It may very well be a canned message since such issues would typically be detected during the evaluation period.
> otherwise they would have paid for the service they were "depending fundamentally" on.
It's a "*.ai" company. Deductive probably spent more human time on their fancy animated landing page than engineering their actual system. If they vibe coded most of their product, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even know they were using Datadog until they got the email.
> Two things, however, were consistently true throughout our usage. First, our Datadog bills were steep, roughly 2-3x of what we would otherwise expect to pay for equivalent telemetry storage and retention. Second, despite the richness of the platform, we rarely used Datadog for anything beyond being a reliable system of record for logs, metrics, and traces. We were paying for workflows we almost never touched.
This paragraph from the article makes it clear otherwise.