So if we assume the level of service is not much better, AWS is the more prudent choice, no? So trademark issues aside, AWS does ES better than Elastic?
To me that would depend on whether AWS Elasticsearch is actually profitable at that price point, or whether they are running at a loss to grab market share.
The quality of the service you get depends on if AWS makes a profit?
Also, do you think they make a profit on the bare EC2 instance? If so, why do you think that running a few management scripts that manage ES running on it would add up to more than $0.094/hour?
Raw EC2 costs: $0.156/hr or $112/month
AWS Elasticsearch: $0.25/hr or $180/month
Elastic's Elasticsearch: $0.3375/hr or $243/month (price stays about the same for 1, 2 or 3 nodes)