Arbitrary Pricing
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.
Unclear pricing is our reason to not move our infrastructure to AWS we can’t tell our investors we have no real world clue what services are going to cost. I have to say S3 is working really well for us though but anything that involves computing power will have to stay within our own infrastructure.
We’re glad to hear you’ve enjoyed using Elastic and have had a positive experience employing our technology. It’s unclear from your description exactly what may have happened. However, the number of requests or documents doesn’t drive charges. Instead, pricing is a function of how much capacity you have deployed. More information can be found on our licensing and pricing model at https://www.elastic.co/pricing.