🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, how wonderful. "Elastic wins 2025 Best Use of AI for Assisted Support." I’ll have a plaque made. We can hang it in the lobby, right next to the foreclosure notice. An award! I’m sure their marketing department is thrilled. It’s a lot cheaper to print a press release than it is to deliver a product that actually saves a company money without taking out a second mortgage on the server farm.

They talk about "assisted support" like some benevolent robot is going to hold our engineers' hands and sing them lullabies. Let's call it what it is: a synergistic, paradigm-shifting black box designed to do one thing—generate line items on an invoice. You see, I've read these proposals. They’re masterpieces of creative writing, full of promises about "reducing ticket resolution time" and "proactive issue detection." What they conveniently omit is the chapter on the true Total Cost of Ownership, a figure so horrifying it would make Stephen King weep.

Let's do some of Patricia's patented "napkin math," shall we? The kind they don't show you in the glossy brochure.

First, you have the sticker price. The "entry fee." Let's be generous and call it $500,000 a year for the "Enterprise AI Hyper-Growth" package. Sounds important, doesn't it? That gets you the license. It does not, however, get you a functioning product. Oh no, that’s extra.

Next comes the real fun. The hidden costs. It's a financial death by a thousand cuts:

• The "Seamless" Migration: They promise a smooth transition. What they mean is they'll hand you a 900-page PDF and a link to a community forum. Our entire data engineering team—all six of them, whose salaries I approve every two weeks—will spend the next quarter doing nothing but untangling our existing systems to feed the new AI overlord. That’s at least $250,000 in soft costs, assuming nobody quits in a rage.
• "Intuitive" Training: Of course, our people need to learn this revolutionary new platform. The vendor will graciously offer a three-day "certification bootcamp" for the low, low price of $10,000 per person. So we're another $60,000 in the hole just to teach our team how to ask the magic box a question.
• The Inevitable Consultants: Six months in, when the AI starts hallucinating and suggesting we solve a database lock by "offering the server a calming cup of chamomile tea," we'll have to call in the professionals. The vendor’s "Professional Services" team, or as I call them, the hostage negotiators. They charge $500 an hour to translate what their own product is doing. We'll need a $100,000 retainer just to have them on speed dial.

And my personal favorite, the pricing model itself. It's a masterclass in psychological warfare. They don't just charge for the software; they monetize your desperation.

"Our flexible, consumption-based pricing scales with your success!"

Translation: "The more you use the tool you're already paying for, the more we will financially penalize you." They charge for data ingestion. They charge for data storage. They charge for the number of queries. They probably have a surcharge for queries asked with a panicked tone of voice. Before you know it, our cloud bill looks like a phone number, and the sales rep is calling to "congratulate" us on our "increased adoption" and upsell us to the "Intergalactic Diamond" tier.

So, let's tally this up. The initial $500k license is now a first-year cost of at least $910,000, and that's before the metered billing starts punishing us for having the audacity to generate data. They claim this will save us money on support staff. Let's say it deflects 20% of tickets. For us, that might save one junior support engineer's salary. Maybe $80,000 a year, if we're lucky.

So we're spending nearly a million dollars to save eighty thousand. That’s not ROI; that's a cry for help. It’s like buying a Lamborghini to save money on bus fare.

This award for "Best Use of AI" is the perfect summary of the whole industry. It’s not about the best outcome for the customer; it’s about the most clever way to package a cost center as an innovation. They've built the perfect mousetrap. They make it so expensive and painful to integrate that by the time you realize what's happened, it's even more expensive and painful to leave. That's not a product; that's a long-term hostage situation with a recurring revenue model.

So, they can have their award. We'll stick with our current system. It may be held together with duct tape and hope, but at least it doesn't send me an invoice every time someone hits the 'enter' key. Mark my words, some poor CFO is reading this press release right now and signing a purchase order that will become the cornerstone of their company's bankruptcy filing in 2027. And I'll bet the AI will proactively detect that, too—and charge them extra for the notification.