Exactly! I've used AWS' service, it's awful. Elastic's is better, and price is comparable or better in fact. But the point is they don't even have to compete on price if quality is superior!
If I'm spending $100k/mo on my logging stack, and it's falling over frequently (which in AWS-land means multiple days of back and forth, opening tickets etc), I'd way rather pay $120k/mo for something that actually works.
Have you never been burned by those awful blue-green deployments?
Of course, my company was willing to pay $100k/mo to log every SQL query in existence but wasn't willing to pay for AWS support (of course it would have required paying something like 1% of our TOTAL aws spend, not just aws elasticsearch, although we could have probably created a subaccount or something)...so maybe the experience is different if your tickets actually get answered.
What was bad about performance in particular? You were just seeing less throughput per dollar spent or what?
If I'm spending $100k/mo on my logging stack, and it's falling over frequently (which in AWS-land means multiple days of back and forth, opening tickets etc), I'd way rather pay $120k/mo for something that actually works.