How Listen Notes replaced three tools with one and cut monitoring costs by 90%
Listen Notes is a search engine for podcasts, with more than 3.5 million shows and close to 179 million episodes indexed, and over 2 million people using it every month. In December 2024 the team replaced Datadog, PagerDuty and Atlassian Statuspage with Better Stack. The migration took about two weeks and took annual monitoring spend from roughly $3,500 to $348.
- Industry
- Podcast search engine
- Products used
- Telemetry, uptime, status pages
- Switched from
- Datadog, PagerDuty, Statuspage
Paying enterprise prices for features they never used
Listen Notes has run on the same trio of tools since it launched in 2017: Datadog for infrastructure monitoring, PagerDuty for incident management and Atlassian Statuspage for telling users when something is wrong. The tools worked. The bill, and the surface area, belonged to a much larger company.
“Like many small businesses, we continuously review our expenses. We realized we were paying for a lot of functionality we weren't using, and wanted a more streamlined, cost-effective solution.”
The hardest part was metrics, not alerting
The team had been pushing metrics into Datadog with statsd. Rather than recreate that pattern, they looked at the Vector integration, talked it through with support, and decided to ingest structured logs and derive metrics from them instead. That matched how Better Stack is built, and it meant one pipeline instead of two.
Replacing PagerDuty and Statuspage took an afternoon each
For alerting, the team set up heartbeat and uptime monitors with their own escalation rules. For public communication, they built a branded status page on their own domain, listennotesstatus.com, in minutes.
“The breakup with PagerDuty was the most painful, but switching was quick and easy.”
What it costs now
Three subscriptions became one. Annual spend went from about $3,500 to $348, a cut of more than 90%, and the setup covers everything the team was actually using before.
“Better Stack has fast and friendly customer support. With big vendors, it's hard to reach a real person. When things break, you need quick help.”
Infrastructure monitoring, incident management and status pages in one platform.