Elastic Cloud Serverless pricing and packaging: Evolved for scale and simplicity

Elastic Cloud has long been the best way to use the Elasticsearch Platform, offering a seamless experience for search, security, and observability at any scale. The launch of Elastic Cloud Serverless expanded Elastic Cloud with a new set of services built on the industry's first Search AI Lake, delivering a fully stateless, auto-scaling architecture that removes operational overhead.

Our pricing and packaging for Elastic Cloud Serverless were designed to be simple while offering increased flexibility, making it easier to use, forecast, and manage serverless deployments — and, has now been updated to drive greater cost-efficiency at scale.

In building the pricing and packaging for Elastic Cloud Serverless, we saw this as an opportunity to evolve our approach to better fit how you are using our solutions today. In doing so, we identified the following core objectives:

• Simple and flexible — solution-specific (Security, Observability, and Elasticsearch) pricing that is simple and easy to understand; flexibility to pay for just the Elasticsearch platform or for an Elastic solution that has Elasticsearch underpinnings
• Built with established business metrics — for ease of planning and budgeting
• Scalable, no required commitment — works for small and large customers; easy to try new solutions and/or features
• Competitively priced

Elastic Security Serverless utilizes usage-based pricing aligned with two distinct feature tiers, allowing security teams to scale threat detection and analysis efficiently. We are introducing updated volume tiers to drive greater cost efficiency for large-scale data ingest and retention.

Customers can further tailor their protection with supplemental add-on packages, such as Endpoint Protection to extend coverage to your hosts and specialized Cloud Protection add-ons for complete cloud visibility.

Usage-based pricing for Elastic Observability is tiered, covering both Observability Logs Essentials and Observability Complete. This structure now includes updated volume tiers that apply across both products for improved cost optimization.

Elasticsearch Serverless is priced based on Virtual Compute Units (VCUs) and Search AI Lake Retention, which eliminates the need to manage cluster sizing or capacity planning.

When we chose to introduce three new offerings as part of Elastic Cloud Serverless, we wanted to deliver dedicated experiences in the product as well as in the pricing model. Unlike our approach with Elastic Cloud Hosted pricing, which is based on provisioned capacity of a specific Cloud instance type, serverless is priced based on metrics that are aligned with the solution domain, making it simpler and easier to forecast usage.

Simplicity: For Security and Observability, this means pricing is based on the amount of data ingested and the size of the data retained in the Search AI Lake. This data is subject to our volume-tiered pricing structure for both Ingest and Retention, ensuring cost-per-unit decreases as volume increases.

Simplicity plus configurability: For Elasticsearch, pricing is based on Virtual Compute Units (VCUs). Think of VCUs as a vertical slice of a virtual host with 1GB of RAM and associated local disk and vCPU. You are charged for each VCU consumed for Ingest, Search, and Machine Learning. For the data stored in the Search AI Lake, there is a GB/month charge. The number of VCUs is automatically adjusted based on your workload, with changes in ingestion or searches affecting the number of Ingest or Search VCUs you use. Additional details can be found on the Elasticsearch Serverless page.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.