IMHO - This is on Elastic itself. AWS is not the only place or mandatory place to run Elastic search. There are tons of other cloud vendors, on premise farms and what not. That was more than enough for Elastic to be profitable in polishing their offerings for everything minus may be the 3 big cloud players.

This also goes for Mongo. The pricing at least was not clear to me for a deployment, I clearly and precisely articulated the amount of data and already 3 node MongoDB Cluster we have but the sales rep continued to insist on jumping on a call.

Here's the thing - what is so difficult about pricing that you cannot write a one liner saying XXX dollars per YY nodes per ZZ period?

I vaguely remember, it turned about to be around about 2.5k USD per month whereas infrastructure cost was to be yet paid by us.