Maybe off topic, but why are these hosted search engines so expensive? $45/mo to start. Are there any $5/mo, low volume, machines for hobby developers?
Relevant to my interests. Founder of ES host Bonsai.io.
Echoing mrkurt, ES is indeed hefty to run.
Elasticsearch is going to require a hundred+ megs of RAM just to run an empty node. And then you'll want enough heap and CPU that you're not GCing yourself to death while importing data, or while churning through filter and caches. And then enough memory to run those fancy aggregations in Kibana. Times the number of nodes you want for redundancy, and for your master-role quorum.
It's possible to do long-tail low-volume ES hosting for hobby development. But to do so you need to dig in and consider ES hosting as a holistic system. We've worked hard at Bonsai to build a hobbyist-friendly hosting system. Our approach is to fork ES itself to introduce native multi-tenancy. That means everyone in the cluster is amortizing the overhead of all that JVM memory (and redundant data nodes, and master-node quorum, a load balancer and authenticating reverse proxy, and analytics... etc...)
The problem remains that ES, while easy to spin up, is still a pretty heavy system to manage at scale. So it's generally a lot easier to chuck some extra resources at it, maximize your isolation, and eat the higher entry cost.
I don't really understand the technical limitations too much, but the hardest selling point for me is that an ES Bonsai instance cost more than a Heroku dyno.
I couldn't get over the fact that I have to pay more for one feature in my app, than the entire cost of running the app...
I totally understand that the economics does not work out for you guys and that sucks. Hopefully things will change in the future.
Hmm. Considering Heroku dynos start at $0/mo for development, that may be an apples and oranges comparison here ;)
In the context of reasonable hobby/development costs, I our $10/mo plan fits well for that and is pretty popular. Pricing wise it compares well to a $7 dyno or $9 Postgres instance. And addons are prorated to the second, just like dynos.
It's not uncommon for databases to cost more than the rest of the app stack put together. If you're using Elasticsearch for a secondary feature, I can understand why it seems weird, but I think most companies spend more operating DBs than they do on the code in front of them.
Elasticsearch is pretty hefty to run in a basic configuration. Our pricing is a function of the resources we assign to cluster nodes, and a bare minimum Elasticsearch installation needs substantially more power than most non-JVM databases.
Because it's more profitable to sell larger accounts, even if fewer of them, than to sell many cheap accounts. One enterprise user at $100,000/year brings in the same revenue as 1,667 "hobby developers" at $5/mo, but requires significantly less babysitting.
Flip side is that you're less diversified and if you lose an enterprise client you feel it hard. There's more stability with lots of small users if you can make it work.
