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.
How about instead of elastic customers moved to Redis or Postgres ?
Does the pricing/licensing suddenly change ? Hmm ?
Elasticsearch provides a different feature set than Redis or Postgres. I’ve seen apps that use all 3… but anyway.
It is a little weird to charge per-seat for a search database that is usually integrated into a product, and not used directly by employees. Usually that kind of pricing model is reserved for developer tools like Splunk (notoriously overpriced), or game engines like Unity/Unreal Engine.
