> All of this is necessary once you have a large volume of trace data and don't want to break the bank to observe it

In my opinion, there are two approaches:

- I try to do this monitoring as cheaply as possible, which means 100% free software and on premises hardware / minimally used cloud resources. No vendors.

- I pay a vendor.

And nothing else.

From my experience as a SaaS vendor, evaluating paid monitoring options (including NewRelic and Honeycomb) and having used them in the past: Anything more than $0 that doesn't increase the bottom line by a greater asymptotic value is "expensive."

When I worked in an organization that is trying to find (1) a marginally cheaper way to do monitoring between two vendors, and therefore (2) predict the future, like how much their usage will be or how much they will grow... the most expensive part of the whole process is all the people working at the organization. That number never seems to go down in response to the choice you make between vendors, it only seems to go down in response to interest rates or catastrophic business externalities. So in my opinion, it's sort of moot which vendor you choose, if you have already crossed the Rubicon to paying vendors.

So in an intellectually honest way, no matter how you slice it, NewRelic is "just as expensive" as everything else.

> A lot of observability vendors are in the business of offering steep discounts in year one, locking you in with even more proprietary tech, and increasing your bill.

The hard, intellectually honest, no-bullshit truth of the matter is that the SaaS vendor's job with pricing is turning whatever the customer likes to hear (upfront invoices and discounts, royalties, per use pricing, whatever) into whatever the investors / owners like to hear (90% margins, hockey stick revenue growth, hockey stick user growth, you can take a long vacation, etc.) via deal term nonsense.

For me, for example, I decide I want to make a certain amount of money, and then I turn it into one set of nonsense for customers (a premium fee or up front payment, set up to be economically equivalent) and another set of nonsense for investors (a 90% margin, a hockey stick growth).

You might be thinking: this is totally fringe and unorthodox. Listen, go read the Sony emails hack, and see how Michael Lynton deals with this obvious pricing reality. They are a huge, expertly run organization, and all their deals with people were constantly about making up some deal term bullshit the counterparty likes, and then Sony's expert staff of financial modelers gaming out the deal terms to determine the real economic value important to Sony. You don't have to operate in this vacuum as an IC anymore, you can peer directly into how executives actually work at giant corporations, if you dare, and see the realities for yourself.

Call me jaded, but having done this long enough, there is no story simpler than "the price is whatever the market will bear, and we'll tell you whatever you want to hear that maximizes it." So the most interesting price point is zero, which is not at all an unorthodox opinion, and indeed, many of the very most disruptive entrepreneurs got to where they were going by valuing their time at zero and rolling out metrics themselves.