The Datadog alternative that won't bill you into oblivion
Datadog is built for teams with dedicated platform engineers and six-figure observability budgets. For indie SaaS and small product teams, the per-metric pricing model turns a handful of custom metrics into a recurring surprise on every invoice.
Umlogger covers the metrics indie teams actually need — latency, signups, MRR, cron health — for $1/month flat. No agent to deploy, no YAML to maintain, live in about five minutes.
Start free trial →Umlogger vs Datadog
A straight comparison — including the rows Datadog's pricing page doesn't highlight.
| Datadog | Grafana Cloud | Umlogger | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $50+ per 1K metrics | $19+/month | $1/month flat |
| Free trial | 14 days | 14 days | 42 days |
| Setup time | Days | Hours | 5 minutes |
| Surprise overage bills | Yes | Yes | Never |
| Daily email summaries | — | — | ✓ Included |
| Custom alerts | ✓ Extra cost | ✓ Extra cost | ✓ Included |
| Infrastructure to run | Agent required | Collector needed | Nothing |
| Data retention | 15 days default (paid tiers) | Varies by plan | Full history included |
| Alert channels | Email, Slack, PagerDuty (tiered) | Email, Slack (paid add-ons) | Email included |
| API simplicity | Agent + multi-service API | Prometheus / Influx collectors | One HTTP GET |
| Support | Enterprise tiers | Community + paid plans | Direct email support |
| Minimum contract | Annual on some tiers | Monthly | Month-to-month |
What you give up
Umlogger is not a full observability platform. If you need these, Datadog (or a dedicated tool) may still be the right call:
- APM and distributed tracing across microservices
- Centralized log management and log-based metrics
- Infrastructure maps and host-level monitoring at scale
- Synthetic monitoring and RUM at enterprise depth
What you gain
- Predictable cost — $1/month, unlimited metrics, no overage line items
- Speed — one HTTP call per sample, no agent install
- Included alerts & digests — email alerts and daily summaries without add-on SKUs
- Zero ops — no collectors, clusters, or dashboards to host yourself
Send your first metric
curl "https://data.umlogger.com/api/m?key=pmk_YOUR_METRIC_KEY&value=42"
Full API docs · Pricing · Why Datadog is overkill for indie SaaS