I don't think of it that way at all. Nothing is free. The servers cost money. It costs money (resources) to manage servers. The cloud offerings appeal to us because we do not want to manage servers. AWS ES appeals to us because it is hard for us to sign contracts to buy software outside AWS. The trajectory of the software is definitely something we factor into the decision, but it is very often outweighed by the other factors. To me it is AWS Elastic vs Elastic Cloud vs hosting our own Elastic. Or use something else entirely.