Elastic cost calculator: licence and Elastic Cloud
Tell us how much data you collect each day and how long you keep it. We will estimate the order of magnitude: the cluster resources Elastic needs on your own infrastructure, or the monthly cost of Elastic Cloud Serverless from the public price list.
Estimate your Elastic cost
Result
- Cluster RAM
- Data storage
- Data nodes (64 GB RAM each)
- ERU licence units
- Data ingest
- Data retention
- Total per month
- Total per year
We give the Elastic licence price for this option in a quote. It depends on the subscription level (Platinum or Enterprise) and the terms of the agreement.
We will copy the parameters into the contact form.
How we calculate
Own infrastructure
- We multiply daily data by the number of days, the number of copies (the original plus replicas) and an indexing factor. We use 1.0 to 1.4 for logs and 1.2 to 1.6 for SIEM. Elastic gives an average of 1.2.
- We add 25% to the storage for the disk watermark and a safety margin.
- The first 7 days (30 days for SIEM) stay on fast disks in the hot tier, and the rest goes to the warm tier. Elastic gives typical memory to data ratios of 1:30 for hot and 1:160 for warm.
- We add 16 to 32 GB to the data node memory for Kibana and the master nodes.
- An ERU licence unit is 64 GB of RAM allocated to Elastic components. We round the number of units up.
Elastic published its sizing rules in 2020, and newer versions can store logs more efficiently, so the result is cautious. A production cluster usually starts with three nodes. We set the exact size after a test on your data.
Elastic Cloud Serverless
- We charge for ingested data and for retained data. Elastic measures both before compression, so enter the volume without replicas.
- For logs and observability we use the Elastic Observability price list, and for SIEM the Elastic Security one. The lower bound is the Essentials tier and the upper bound is the Complete tier.
- The “as low as” prices apply to the largest volumes, so we add a 25% margin to the upper bound.
- We leave out metrics (which have lower rates), data transfer out, add-ons and paid support plans.
Prices from the public Elastic price list, checked on 11 November 2026:
| Tier | Ingest, USD per GB | Retention, USD per GB per month |
|---|---|---|
| Observability: Logs Essentials | 0.070 | 0.017 |
| Observability: Complete | 0.090 | 0.019 |
| Security: Analytics Essentials | 0.090 | 0.017 |
| Security: Analytics Complete | 0.110 | 0.019 |
Sources
- Elastic: Observability Serverless pricing
- Elastic: Security Serverless pricing
- Elastic: sizing a cluster for logs and metrics (2020)
- Elastic: licensing and ERUs in ECK
Elastic Cloud or your own infrastructure
Elastic Cloud takes cluster maintenance off your hands and is billed by usage. Your own infrastructure gives you full control over the data and the hardware. We compare both models in a consultation. See also: Elastic implementation and licences, log management in Elasticsearch and SIEM on Elastic Security.