We give away the product for free and charge for convenience. That sounds like a terrible business model until you realize we have 60,000 GitHub stars and every DevOps engineer on the planet knows our name.
I built Grafana as a side project because the existing dashboarding tools were ugly and inflexible. I open-sourced it because I thought maybe 50 people would care. Millions of people cared.
Netflix uses Grafana. NASA uses Grafana. Bloomberg uses Grafana. They all use it because it is the best visualization tool for time-series data, and they can run it themselves without asking us for permission.
Amazon can take any open-source project and offer it as a service. That is why we built the LGTM stack — Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir — as an integrated system. The value is in the combination, not any single tool.
We are fully remote with team members in over 40 countries. We did not become remote because of COVID. We were remote because the best open-source contributors are not all in San Francisco.
Datadog charges $31 per host per month. Our open-source stack is free. Grafana Cloud is a fraction of their price. We are not trying to out-feature Datadog — we are trying to make observability affordable for everyone.