For us it was roughly 2x the cost for the same instance sizes. Granted you get a lot more functionality but in our case we didn't need it so it didn't make sens

For us it was roughly 2x the cost for the same instance sizes. Granted you get a lot more functionality but in our case we didn't need it so it didn't make sense for us to stay on elastic.co. I've been running 15ish ES domains on AWS (multiple regions) for the past 3 years. Our API is microservices based so we split up our elasticsearch clusters so we could scale each microservice independently. Yes it's a lot to manage but blue-green's are quicker with the smaller domains and once you automate snapshots and index cleanup it's not all that bad.