Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch Service)

I have used Elastic a lot in the past and I really like it. This product was exactly what I was expecting and it worked well. What I didn't like was the $520 bill I got.

I was in disbelief. I messaged them that there must have been an error and I was told it was not. I contacted both Amazon and Elastic. Amazon says that if Elastic gives me a refund, it will be removed from my bill. Elastic says that they cannot remove the charge because it was "self inflicted."

I do not know what I did to incur this large of a bill. You can really spend a lot of money on this extension in only a few clicks and without being aware that you are doing so.

I started a free trial, then I used the service for a few days, making <25 requests to Elastic in entirety. Overall, I think that the content of the billing pages and the UX of the Elastic Suite is aimed to mislead its users which I find to be unfortunate.

For instance, their billing page (https://www.elastic.co/pricing ) says that Enterprise Search can be as low as $175 per month. I do not see how that could possibly be the case because I only had a test index with 4-5 documents in it and made <25 requests to the index in total and racked up a $520 bill.

I am almost certain there is a legal case to be had here if I cared enough and had the time to pursue one.

The Template provided by them isn't working at all. The "S3 error: Access Denied" is denying CopyZipsTemplate from creation. I have been trying to deal with it for hours but there is no solution for this issue.

As writing in other review, this product do not work properly.

First: you are forced to create an account (thanks, now I've 3 Elastic Cloud account, and you can't delete it)

Second: CloudFormation Launch Template do not work properly (multiple reason)

I spent 1 hour to try debugging yaml Launch Template (first time for me) and I waste my time.

As a result, I will buy a EC2 instance and run myself ES on docker...

Waste of time & money - don't try this. Read other comments & find another way to run ES

PS: 1 star because I couldn't put 0 star

The CloudFormation template seems to have a slight bug in it when you try to use it outside of us-east-1. That or there is an alternative bucket name beside the default I should be using. It was easy to work around in main stack, but the stack references templates for sub-stacks in an S3 bucket. I'm sure I could have grabbed the contents of the bucket, made my own bucket, made my own templates, and made it all work, but it bugged me to bill a client for time spent doing all of this to make a SaaS solution, which should save us time, work.

I've explained the issue to Elastic seven times in the last week. I even included snips of their problematic template, highlighted the offending lines, and suggested how they might fix the issue. But they won't help themselves or me. Instead, they seem terrified that I'm going to get free support out of them, and the free support has taken days to demonstrate that they don't know what I am saying. I still could have worked around this, but I fear it foreshadows what future interaction might be like if I did get cornered by an issue.

Two stars vs. one, because I've used the product under Docker Compose. Elastic Stack has issues, but it is generally an exciting and powerful product. I don't want to be stuck working with a company that acts this way and I believe that it is primarily the managed service they are offering that I am reviewing.

I wanted to check this product - choosing the trial version was a huge mistake. As now Elastic trying to take my money, despite the fact that I never used the product. At all. And no communication from the support or any billing support at all.
Why am I getting charged for the service I have never been able to use?