At Listen Notes, we pride ourselves on maintaining a robust infrastructure with minimal downtime. Since our founding in 2017, we’ve relied on Datadog, PagerDuty, and Statuspage. That remained true until December 2024, when we decided to consolidate our monitoring stack and significantly reduce costs—from roughly US $3,500 per year to just US $348 per year—by switching to BetterStack.
Why We Switched
When choosing technology stacks, most startup founders gravitate toward tools they’re already familiar with. I previously worked at Nextdoor, where Datadog and PagerDuty were in use (not sure if they still are). It was a no-brainer for me to adopt them at Listen Notes to visualize metrics and send alerts. As for Statuspage, I honestly don’t remember why we initially chose it—yet we kept paying for it for years.
Like many small businesses, we continuously review our expenses to see where we can cut costs. Since Datadog, PagerDuty, and Atlassian are all enterprise-focused (and publicly traded) companies, their products often come with features we don’t need or want to pay for. We wondered if there was a single tool that could cover our use cases—monitoring, alerting, and a public status page. After some research (thanks, Google), we discovered BetterStack.
Disclaimer: We have no affiliation with BetterStack; we’re simply happy customers.
The Migration
We spent about two weeks migrating away from the “big three” to BetterStack. Here’s what it entailed:
1. Atlassian Statuspage
Migrating from Statuspage was straightforward. We set up uptime monitors in BetterStack, created a new status page, and pointed the listennotesstatus.com domain to it. This was completed within minutes.
2. PagerDuty
Switching from PagerDuty to BetterStack for alerts was also simple. We configured heartbeat and uptime alerts, then set up escalation rules. The breakup with PagerDuty was the most painful, mainly due to rude customer support and aggressive sales tactics. They turned an eight-year customer into a hater, yet their product lacks any real competitive advantage. Switching was quick and easy—RIP, PagerDuty stock price.
3. Datadog
Migrating from Datadog required the most work. Previously, we used statsd to send metrics to Datadog. While BetterStack uses Vector (an Opensource project, acquired by Datadog) to support statsd sources, it didn’t behave as expected w/ BetterStack—particularly the “Counter” functionality (after a few emails with BetterStack customer support). We discovered that BetterStack is more log-centric. As a result, we switched to ingesting structured logs and converting them to metrics, which aligns more naturally with BetterStack’s architecture.
Here's how it looks like to use SQL to convert json logs into metrics to visualize on BetterStack:
Final Thoughts
In the end, we’re very pleased with our switch to BetterStack. Our new setup covers uptime monitoring, alerting, and public status pages at a fraction of the cost—and we’re confident it’ll continue to meet our needs as we grow.
If you’re a small business or a startup looking to simplify your monitoring stack and reduce expenses, give BetterStack a try. For us, it’s been a winning choice.
