From previous threads, my understanding is Elastic is a pretty arduous enterprise sales process which turned a lot of small/mid customers away.
High vendor management overhead is a huge pain for smaller companies that don't have robust IT to manage those relationships.
The smaller/mid size startups I've worked at almost never acquire "enterprise" software and always leverage pay-by-credit-card type SaaS
Besides operational overhead there's also a much longer acquisition time (no one wants to spend 3-6 months working with a sales team to sign a contract on a project with 2-3 month timeline)
About this topic I'm going to say that at my company we had to choose a managed solution for logs, and there were several contenders. I strongly wanted to use the service offered by Elastic, the company, as we were already managing a lot of biggish clusters and we thought that going with the company behind it would be the best thing to do.
But they made it very difficult to try it out at scale (we generate quite a lot of logs) and at one point they only wanted to talk to the CTO instead of the persons in charge of the PoCs.
That move made them untrustable to me, and they were disqualified from the process. If they wanted to compete on selling the solution to non-technical people that told us all we needed to know about them and how support would be.
We ended up choosing managed Opensearch by AWS, which was a shitshow in several fronts. I wish we had given Loki a bigger chance at that time. We've ended up migrating to it anyway.
Totally and that goes back to their lack of execution as a managed service/SaaS offering because the GTM for those is different, more self-service. If you can't unwind yourself from selling a heavy weight legacy style enterprise software package, you struggle to execute in SaaS, you burden yourself to be understood by your customer as the opposite of modern.
High vendor management overhead is a huge pain for smaller companies that don't have robust IT to manage those relationships.
The smaller/mid size startups I've worked at almost never acquire "enterprise" software and always leverage pay-by-credit-card type SaaS
Besides operational overhead there's also a much longer acquisition time (no one wants to spend 3-6 months working with a sales team to sign a contract on a project with 2-3 month timeline)