How much does it cost to run the ELK Stack on your own?

With modern applications becoming increasingly complex, organizations need comprehensive log management tools. Although organizations have several choices, the “free” Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) has emerged as one of the most popular on-premise logging tools.

While managing an open source log management and visualization bundle like ELK can seem like a great way to save money, as your business scales, you will start encountering costs you might not have anticipated.

Despite having an extensive feature set and being open source, organizations are beginning to realize that a free ELK license is not free after all. Rather, it comes with many hidden costs due to hardware requirements and time constraints that easily add to the total cost of ownership (TCO). Here, we uncover the true cost of running the Elastic Stack on your own vs using a hosted log management service.