It's true that with Datadog, a spike in your usage can have a dramatic impact on your bill. This feels true though of any usage model. We've all read stories about out of control AWS bills. Datadog does at least provide some guardrails to prevent things from getting out of control: https://docs.datadoghq.com/account_management/billing/usage_...

With these usage metrics and a little bit of automation (for example the Webhooks integration: https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/webhooks/), you could stop shipping telemetry at a certain threshold.

Disclosure: I work at Datadog.