Better quality is a better answer. AWS charges a big premium for Elasticsearch and I don't think they'd drop their prices to try to squeeze Elastic - for one, it would be unlikely to even work - but even so it's always best to differentiate on being the better quality/"value" than the lowest cost.
Having used AWS Elasticsearch, it has a lot of deep problems with it in its current state so Elastic can compete on value just fine.
In other news, I think the Elastic licensing change beyond being ethically a dick move (legally it's their right), is just horrible business strategy. I said on this site several days ago that Amazon was just going to make an Apache 2.0 fork and keep chugging along, and that's exactly what we're seeing.
> AWS charges a big premium for Elasticsearch and I don't think they'd drop their prices to try to squeeze Elastic
Your margin is my opportunity. (c)
Though AWS still growing too fast atm so they value quantity of services over quality. But once they have capacity they can squeeze out of business almost anyone.
Unfortunately lower cost will do nothing to get you in the door at an enterprise that has a committed spend with AWS. I'm sure Elastic has been finding this out the hard way.
