Why ClusterNest
Boring infrastructure, priced honestly.
Three things decide whether an observability vendor is a good long-term bet: what it runs on, whether it lets you leave, and whether the price punishes you for succeeding.
One
Bare metal, not public cloud.
Clusters run on dedicated machines rather than shared cloud instances. That means storage that behaves the same on Tuesday as it did on Monday, no burstable CPU credits to run out of, and no neighbours competing for the same disk, which matters more for search and time series than for almost any other workload.
It also shapes the pricing. A vendor billing per gigabyte on hyperscaler infrastructure is passing on a cloud bill with a margin. Our cost base doesn't scale that way, so our pricing doesn't have to.
Two Standard nodes: 4 vCPU and 32 GiB each, a terabyte of storage across the cluster, Dashboards and coordinator nodes included.
$199.98 / month
Two
We picked the open side, and stayed there.
When Elasticsearch stopped being open source in 2021, we said publicly that it was a loss for the people who'd built on it. In 2022 we launched OpenSearch. In 2024 we retired our Elasticsearch service entirely and migrated the customers still on it.
That's not a values statement, it's a track record with dates on it, and it's the reason we can promise that what you build here isn't hostage to somebody else's licensing decision.
- 2021 Elasticsearch relicensed. We said so, in public.
- 2022 Managed OpenSearch launched.
- 2024 Elasticsearch service retired, customers migrated.
- 2025 Managed Prometheus, Terraform provider, new console.
Three
What you keep if you leave.
The honest test of a managed service is how cheap it is to stop using. Lock-in usually arrives as a format you can't read elsewhere, a query language that only works here, or backups you can't get at. None of those apply.
Open formats
Your data sits in OpenSearch indices and a Prometheus-compatible store. Not a proprietary column format, not a schema only we can read.
Standard query languages
PromQL, OpenSearch DSL, PPL and SQL. Nothing you write here needs rewriting somewhere else, and nothing your team learns is only useful with us.
Backups in your bucket
Snapshots go to S3 storage you own. If we disappeared tomorrow you would still have your data and a standard way to restore it.
An API with everything on it
The console has no privileged operations. Whatever you can click, Terraform and the REST API can do, including leaving.
What "managed" means here
Who gets woken up.
"Managed" is used loosely enough to be meaningless, so here it is concretely. You keep cluster admin credentials and full control of configuration. We take the operations.
- We get paged, not you
- Upgrades are ours to plan and run
- Patching happens without a change request from you
- Backups are taken and restore-tested
- Capacity is watched as your indices grow
Ten days, no card.
One Basic cluster, free for ten days. Long enough to point real traffic at it and see whether any of the above holds up.