OpenSearch and Elasticsearch Pricing Guide: AWS, Elastic Cloud, and Self-Managed Costs Compared

A detailed cost breakdown comparing four deployment models for OpenSearch and Elasticsearch: AWS OpenSearch Service (provisioned), OpenSearch Serverless, Elastic Cloud, and self-managed. Covers concrete pricing figures for instance types, storage, and subscription tiers, plus a side-by-side comparison. Key findings: AWS provisioned runs $800-1,200/month with Reserved Instances; Serverless has a ~$350/month minimum floor suited only for bursty workloads; Elastic Cloud costs $1,200-1,800/month for comparable production clusters due to tiered licensing; self-managed saves 35-50% on visible infrastructure but adds 1.5-3x in hidden operational costs. Includes seven actionable cost optimization strategies covering Graviton instances, data tiering, Reserved Instances, shard sizing, field mapping tuning, and right-sizing master nodes.