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WarpSearch vs Elastic Cloud Serverless (Elasticsearch Serverless)
Elastic's serverless Elasticsearch. Search projects bill compute (VCU-hours) plus retention. Observability and Security projects bill per GB ingested.
Looking for serverless Elasticsearch that bills per request? WarpSearch answers the Elasticsearch REST API, so your existing clients keep working, with no VCU baseline. Below is what Elasticsearch Serverless (Elastic Cloud Serverless) costs for four real workloads, line by line, next to WarpSearch.
The scoreboard
Price
Cheaper on 2 workloads
Monthly, list prices. Bars are drawn to the middle of a range.
How they bill
| WarpSearch | Elastic Serverless | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Per GB stored, per GB written, per request | Search: VCU-hours ($0.14 ingest, $0.09 search) plus $0.047/GB retention. Logs: $0.07 to $0.09/GB ingest plus $0.017 to $0.019/GB retention |
| Scale to zero | Yes, after 15 minutes idle | Ingest scales to zero. Search keeps a baseline, billed at a reduced idle rate |
Price
Monthly cost at list prices in US East.
1M text chunks with 768-dim embeddings, 7 GB of JSON. 1M queries a month spread through the day. 1 GB written a month.
| WarpSearch | Elastic Serverless | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | $0.56 (7 GB held x $0.08) | $0.47 |
| Writes | $1.00 (1 GB x $1.00) | Small (ingest scales to zero) |
| Search | $2.00 (1M requests) | About $100 to $210 |
| Data returned | $0 (about 40 GB, inside the free 100 GB) | $0 (50 GB free) |
| Minimum | $10 minimum applies (usage is $3.56) | None |
| Total a month | $10 | About $100 to $210 |
Estimate from Elastic's own examples: 2 GB for $24 to $27, 20 GB for $190 to $210 a month.
5M products with 384-dim embeddings, 10 GB of JSON. 50M queries a month (about 19 a second on average). 20 GB written a month.
| WarpSearch | Elastic Serverless | |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | $0.60 (7.5 GB held x $0.08) | $0.70 |
| Writes | $20 (20 GB x $1.00) | Small |
| Search | $100 (50M requests) | $200+ (VCUs per query not published) |
| Data returned | $18 (250 GB returned, 100 GB free, before compression) | $10 |
| Minimum | Cleared | None |
| Total a month | $139 | $210+ |
Estimate. Elastic does not publish how many VCUs a query uses.
Performance
| Test | Result |
|---|---|
| Keyword search, 2.8M docs (LoTTE) | 2.1 ms median, 3,700 queries/s |
| Keyword search, 10M passages (MS MARCO v2) | 2.4 ms median (5.4 ms with an exact total hit count) |
| Keyword search, small BEIR sets | 1 to 6 ms median |
| Vector search, 10M x 128-dim (BigANN SIFT) | 0.964 recall@10 at 6.2 ms median, 162 queries/s |
| Vector search, 1M x 1536-dim (arXiv) | 0.961 recall@10 at 15.7 ms median |
| Filtered vector search, 10M (YFCC) | 0.959 recall@10 at 10.4 ms median |
| Log filters, 22M events (http_logs) | 1 to 2 ms median |
| Log aggregations, 22M events | 190 to 430 ms median (sort, daily histogram, avg by status) |
| Ingest, short text | 63,000 to 97,000 docs/s |
| Ingest, logs (247M events) | 76,000 to 81,000 events/s |
| Ingest, 768 to 1536-dim vectors | 2,200 to 4,000 vectors/s |
| Time to searchable | Seconds, or immediate with commit=true |
| Cold start | Not measured yet. First query on a 2.3 GB index: 17 to 19 ms vs 2.7 ms warm (page cache only) |
Measured October 2026 through our Elasticsearch-compatible API, warm cache, client in the same region, single runs. Every test ran on deliberately minimal hardware, 2 to 4 CPUs (a 4 CPU container or an AWS i8g.large with 2 vCPUs), so these are the least favorable results we can produce. More hardware only improves them. Numbers exclude internet round trips.
Bottom line
Choose WarpSearch for
- Small apps: $10 instead of about $100 to $210, because Elastic search projects keep a baseline running.
- Drop-in for Elasticsearch, OpenSearch and Solr clients on one endpoint.
- Per-request pricing you can predict, instead of VCUs per query that Elastic does not publish.
Pick WarpSearch for search apps with modest or bursty traffic, where Elastic's baseline costs more than our usage.
Questions
Is Elasticsearch serverless?
Self-managed Elasticsearch and Elastic Cloud Hosted run on clusters you size. Elastic Cloud Serverless is Elastic's serverless version: no nodes to size, billed in VCU-hours for search projects and per GB ingested for Observability and Security projects.
How much does Elasticsearch Serverless cost?
Search projects bill $0.14 per ingest VCU-hour and $0.09 per search VCU-hour, plus $0.047 per GB retained. Elastic's own examples put 2 GB at $24 to $27 and 20 GB at $190 to $210 a month. Elastic does not publish how many VCUs a query uses.
Does Elasticsearch Serverless scale to zero?
Ingest does. Search keeps a baseline, billed at a reduced idle rate. WarpSearch scales to zero after 15 minutes idle, and an idle collection costs only its storage.
How much does Elastic Cloud cost?
Elastic Cloud Hosted starts from $99 a month (Standard) for a cluster you size. Elastic Cloud Serverless bills VCU-hours instead, as above. WarpSearch bills per GB stored, per GB written and per request, with a $10 monthly minimum.
Is there a serverless Elasticsearch alternative that bills per request?
Yes. WarpSearch bills per request with no compute hours, and serves the Elasticsearch, OpenSearch and Solr APIs, so you switch by changing the endpoint. See the migration guide.
Sources
- Serverless Search pricing
- Serverless Observability pricing
- Serverless performance on AWS (Jan 2026)
- Project settings and Search Power
- Cloud Hosted pricing
- WarpSearch pricing
Elastic lists rates as "as low as" without a region. Search-project costs depend on VCU use, which Elastic does not publish per query. Prices checked October 20, 2026. List prices in US dollars, before discounts. Estimates are marked. Tell us if something is out of date: contact us.