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Solo developer running 14-year-old Rails app on Heroku seeks AI-powered observability stack to replace expensive Datadog ($600/month) and improve monitoring.
Hacker News · April 18, 2026
AI Summary
- •Developer recently adopted Claude AI for coding and bug fixes, dramatically improving productivity on mature Ruby on Rails application
- •Current monitoring stack uses Datadog logging (removed APM due to bloated buildpack increasing slug size from 250MB to 350MB) and recently switched from Bugsnag to Sentry to leverage AI capabilities
- •Main pain point: Datadog's per-line indexing pricing model discourages simple logging and combined with enterprise commitments creates significant overhead for solo operator
- •Tech stack includes Sidekiq, Redis, PostgreSQL, AWS Lambda/EventBridge, React/Preact, and Swift, hosted on Heroku with plans to eventually migrate off platform
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