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.
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.