Because I am pursuing a PhD and work under the university, my university has an agreement with AWS, which makes it essentially free and easier to use. In the AWS ecosystem, everything is connected and I can control everything without uncertainty about what is happening behind the scenes. However, when using Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch Service), I connected it to Google Cloud but I am paying separate receipts. Over the last two months in October and November, I paid two separate invoices that are not connected to Google Cloud, which I did not appreciate. Google Cloud has a nice interface that gives me full control of pricing and billing. I can see daily, weekly, and monthly breakdowns with bar charts, and I can track exactly how much I spent during any period. Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch Service) does not have such a tool for billing visibility. Since I am handling significant amounts of money and am responsible for this task within my company, I have high expectations for pricing and billing transparency. I would appreciate the ability to set a spending limit, such as uploading 200 euros, and receive notifications when reaching 50% of that limit. These notifications could appear on the dashboard, in the application, or via email. It would be valuable to see a timeline of my spending. I would characterize the pricing as somewhat expensive. I did not use competitors extensively, so I may have a bias about this. The pricing of large language models is not expensive—I use Anthropic's Claude or Google's Gemini, which are state-of-the-art models. However, I am uncertain whether I have a bias about Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch Service) pricing. It is not extraordinarily expensive, but when I compare it with the cost of using large language models or Google Cloud storage, it is quite expensive. A couple of days ago, the Elastic team reached out to me. We have been regularly using the service since April, and 10 days ago at the beginning of December, I deleted my hosted deployments because I did not like the idea of paying when I am not actively using Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch Service). They informed me that there is a serverless option available. Before Christmas, I want to try it to see how it works, as I am uncertain about the serverless concept and whether it will provide the same functionality that I use with the hosted deployment.
