[softwaredoug]

I think what most people miss for these and similar services is you’re paying for really good, on call, white glove Elastic support. In my experience they can often go as for as to replace having a search specific ops team. The cloud hosting isn’t really where the value is.

[Azeralthefallen]

I guess my issue is that we didn't want or need support. We just wanted x-pack features such as Auth and the Alerting plugins.

We were already hosting it fine ourselves on AWS, as we had devops people very familiar with ES. However the price they quoted us per year was insane for our cluster size for ~20 nodes.