[padelt]

Got a price slightly above that in EUR. A cluster of 1 to 5 nodes should go for ~24.000€ (customer would've been SMB non-IT enduser company). My gut reaction was: Insane. They do include infrastructure consulting, support and the premium plugins as part of that. So at least if you can grab lots of consulting that way I can see where they are going. Then again, needing lots of consulting is a problem in itself. And I guess operating Elasticsearch is not for the faint of heart anyway...

[beachstartup]

everyone wants competent 24/7 support, but nobody wants to pay for it.

smart people cost a lot of money, having them on call at any time of the day or night costs even more money.

[robalfonso]

Agreed, however, their model should include a base level of direct support for straightforward things. Like "my cluster is unresponsive" right now thats a forum post and seems a really poor experience.

[beachstartup]

"my cluster is unresponsive" is not straightforward at all. in fact it's the vaguest, most un-straightforward kind of problem you could have.

one of the interview questions i ask is "a customer calls in and said their system is unresponsive. what do you do?"

this will weed out a bullshitter 99% of the time, because the potential problem domain is the entire OSI stack, across the open internet, and also could be potentially on the customer side, which is most likely also a complex setup.

if you want someone who can actually fix the problem to help you, it's going to cost a lot of money. one of these people is six figures. now imagine a whole team of them, 3 shifts a day, every single day, forever.

[robalfonso]

You miss my point, I simply mean a forum post is not ideal for support. In my case I would want a ticket, something concrete I know can be sent and seen. A forum does not engender confidence my issue will be seen and also I would not want to put private info into a forum.

Also I gave a poor example. I run a Es cluster so my thinking is at the point of my cluster is unavailable i know it's all red and it's not between my service and the endpoint.

[beachstartup]

anything free or included will be abused by a certain % of the customer base.

if you feel that strongly about it, buy the support.

[karambahh]

I got a similar quote about a year ago. They now have a "startup" price which is lower [under nda]. Still too costly with regards to our usage/level of confidence in our own expertise but they are adjusting their pricing.

[notyourwork]

I have not priced Elastic or AWS offerings but wonder how that would compare to AWS.