Having contacted them to get a contract going for the non free license before I doubt they actually give a shit about Foss. They literally wouldn’t give me a price without knowing how many employees the company I was being outsourced to had. And we wanted to self host so it wasn’t even a matter of their costs they literally charge based on what you look like and the schemes were insane they would charge us for amount of active systems and their traffic when we were literally self hosting them
Enterprise licensing for self-hosted setups is priced per chunk of 64 GB of RAM in your cluster. I.e. if you run Elastic on 2 machines of 32 GB RAM each, you pay for 1 node. It sounds like there may have been some poor communication going on, because they definitely don’t base the pricing for self-hosted setups on the number of employees or anything like that.
They’re also not super uptight about you going over the licensing limit for a while. We’ve been running a couple of licenses short since we scaled our cluster up a while back. Our account manager knows and doesn’t care.
This company may be dogshit, but seat count is the standard licensing structure for most employee facing business software, including on-prem.
Most business software licensing/CRM tools requires that information to generate a quote, as price will be dependent upon several factors, including volume licensing tiers i.e. volume discounts.
Sometimes, licensing structures are simple enough that an employee or rep might be able to give you a quick ballpark without that information, but that would be the exception, not the rule.
And all of that is assuming that pricing is only based on seats, when there could be a whole lot of other variables that would be required even for their system just to generate single quote e.g. core count, support terms, etc.
To be clear, none of that means anyone should trust, or switch back to, elasticsearch. It’s just a minor peak into the mundane horrors of business software licensing.
Usually in the observability space it is primarily based on the volume of data and sometimes seat count. Especially if it’s freemium like elastic where users can get an idea of volume by running a POC of the free version. Companies do this because of small teams who deploy large infra that would make contracts unprofitable
Generally the elastic or usage/volumetric type billing structures are used on SaaS/cloud products, not on-prem.
Although it’s entirely possible that elasticsearch, and other vendors in the space use that pricing model for their on-prem customers.
Regardless, that’s even more of a reason why it would be very difficult to give a quote without being first having a presales meeting with a solution architect or knowledgeable rep.
