🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Alright, team, gather ‘round. I’ve just finished reading the latest dispatch from our friends at Elastic, and I have to say, my heart is all aflutter. It’s truly inspiring to see a company so dedicated to… finding innovative new ways to set our money on fire. They call this a "significant" release. I agree. The impact on our Q4 budget will certainly be significant.

Let's start with this new feature, the Agent Builder. How delightful. They’ve given us a "no-code, visual way to build and manage our own integrations." Do you see what they did there? They've handed us a shovel and pointed to a mountain of our own custom data sources. We're not just paying for their platform anymore; we're now being asked to invest our own engineering hours to deepen our dependency on it. It’s a DIY vendor lock-in kit. We get to build our own cage, and it comes with synergy and empowerment. The only thing it’s empowering is their renewals team.

And then there's my personal favorite, DiskBBQ. I am not making that up. They named a core infrastructure component after a backyard cookout. Is this supposed to be whimsical? Because when I see "BBQ," I'm just thinking about getting grilled on our cloud spend. Let me guess what the secret sauce is: a proprietary, hyper-compressed data format that makes exporting our own logs to another platform a multi-quarter, seven-figure consulting engagement. “Oh, you want to leave? Good luck moving all that data you’ve slow-cooked on our patented DiskBBQ. Hope you like the taste of hickory-smoked egress fees.”

They talk about Streams and Significant Events, which sounds less like a data platform and more like my last performance review with the board after our cloud bill tripled. They promise this will help us "cut through the noise." Of course it will. The deafening silence from our empty bank account will make it very easy to focus.

But let’s do some real math here, shall we? My favorite kind. The kind our account manager conveniently leaves out of the glossy PDF.

• Sticker Price: Let’s call it a cool $250,000 for the new enterprise license. That’s the friendly, welcoming handshake.
• Migration & Implementation: Our engineers don’t learn DiskBBQ via osmosis. That’s at least two senior engineers for three months, tied up learning this new magic instead of building our product. Let's conservatively put that at $90,000 in salary and opportunity cost.
• Mandatory Training: Oh, you know they’re going to push their "Elastic Certified Professional" course. “To truly leverage the power of the platform, your team needs to be fully certified!” Add another $30,000 for a week-long webinar where they read the documentation to us.
• The Inevitable Consultants: Six months in, when we realize the Agent Builder isn't quite the "no-code" dream we were sold and our custom-built agents are setting the servers on fire, who do we call? The Elastic Professional Services team, of course. At $500 an hour, they’ll fly in on a cloud of jargon to fix the problems their own platform created. Let’s budget a light $150,000 for that little rescue mission.

So, the "true" first-year cost of this "free" upgrade isn't $250k. It's $520,000. Minimum.

They’ll show us a chart claiming this will reduce "Mean Time to Resolution" by 20%. Great. Our engineers currently spend, let’s say, 500 hours a month on incident resolution. A 20% reduction saves us 100 hours. At an average loaded cost of $100/hour, we're saving a whopping $10,000 a month, or $120,000 a year.

So, to be clear, their proposal is that we spend over half a million dollars to save $120,000. That’s not ROI, that’s a cry for help.

By my math, this investment will achieve profitability somewhere around the 12th of Never. By the time we see a return, this company will be a smoking crater. We'll be using the empty server racks to host an actual disk BBQ, selling hot dogs in the parking lot to make payroll. But hey, at least our failure will be observable in real-time with unprecedented visibility.

Dismissed. Send them a polite "no thank you" and see if we can run our logging on a dozen Raspberry Pis. It'd be cheaper.

Yours in fiscal sanity,

Patricia "Penny" Goldman CFO