I really like Elasticsearch. I run it myself hosted in a Kubernetes cluster using the Kubernetes Operator developed by Elastic, so I'm one of the people who uses Elasticsearch extensively without being a paying customer, but to be fair that is part of the reason why I opted for it. I think Elastic has become victim of its own success if I may say so. Running Elasticsearch self hosted is fairly easy, either on actual hardware or VMs or in a container cluster. Their documentation is exceptionally good and the wide adoption means that a lot of issues people might run into have already been solved or answered on StackOverflow and other online forums. If Elasticsearch wasn't such a great product then Amazon would also struggle more with providing a managed version in their cloud.

I think trademark violations are pretty bad and a real punch below the belt, but I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if that is actually happening. Amazon also offers Redis as a service, so does Azure. They both have Redis in the name. They also offer MS SQL as a service, however that has a proprietary license which the end customer pays for so it's an unfair comparison. I wonder if the monetisation strategy, which is basically Elastic Cloud, is the best option for Elastic. They are essentially providing a mini managed Elasticsearch cluster which is away from the rest of the infrastructure which development teams are already maintaining. Of course they will be competing with Amazon then and likely going to lose, since Amazon has so much more. Other OSS products have found more lucrative and less costly monetisation models than operating your own cloud hosting provider. I hope Elastic will find a way to sustain themselves in a way which makes the owners happy, because their product is really good.