Pricing when running elasticsearch at a customer

I see that the pricing varies between $2999 and $7999. When looking at the Entrprise and Embedded versions, is the pricing based on one server or can we also use the plugin at servers owned by our customers? We have our own servers which have Elasticsearch, but also our customers have our software (using Elasticsearch) running on their servers.

Hello Laurens!

A PRO or Enterprise subscriber is entitled to download and use the Kibana plugin in as many servers/clusters/deployment they want, as long as the hardware belongs or is rented by the Licensee.

The problem arises when a PRO/Enterprise Licensee wants to use our technology to provide an on-premises solution to their customers.

If you only sell professional services of installing ReadonlyREST Enterprise/PRO, your customers should buy a license from us.

If you redistribute derivative work that includes any of our technology, need to acquire an Embedded license.

Because our Kibana plugins rely on our (GPLv3 licensed) Elasticsearch plugin, redistributing derivative work under a non-GPLv3 compatible solution would put the Licensee in breach of the GPLv3 itself.

In order for you to side-step the above limitations, as we own the 100% of the intellectual property on the code, we are able and willing to distribute our Elasticsearch plugin to “ReadonlyREST Embedded” Licensees a fully commercial license, so redistributing non-free products to third parties will be legally possible.

Our Embedded license does not set any limit to how many times you can sell the derivative work.

If you have any further specific questions, please feel free to contact us via email (support AT readonlyrest.com)

Dear Simone,

Thank you for your swift response. I think that our situation is inbetween Enterprise and Embbed. We are thinking about using the ReadonlyREST plugin at our own servers where we have have our own application + an elastic search environment. Besides that, we have customers that will have a server running our applications + an elastic search environment. In all the cases (our elastic search environment / the ones running at different customers) we want want to be able to install your elastic search security plugin. I’m not sure if this qualifies as embedding your plugin in to our software. We are merely using elastic search for retrieving search results, we have build our own application on top of elastic search.

Hello @laurens, are you using Kibana at all?

Dear Simone,

Currently we are not using Kibana. For now, we are only looking at different security plugings for Elasticssearch.And that’s the reason why I send another questions yesterday. If my questions is not clear enough, then please let me know :slight_smile:.

As far as I understand it, if you are selling a service over the network, you won’t need an extra license. But when you deliver your solution on your customers’ premises with ROR as a component, you would need the Embedded. I think it’s wise to get the embedded from the beginning because:

  1. you will unlock priority support in the integration/development phase
  2. when the first customer asks for an on premises installation you already have your commercial license and you are not slowed down by legal red tape.
  3. Should you need some custom development, you’ll get half price on that

Dear Simone,

That sounds interesting. Is the license fee annually?

Yes it is annual, but the best part is that it’s a flat rate (if you ship your ReadonlyREST powered product to 1,10,100K customers you subscription costs won’t vary).

Dear Simone,

That sounds really interesting. I think that we are going to do a test with your plugin somewhere this month.

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@laurens, for sure. We’ll be here for any questions :slight_smile:

Dear Simone,

I guess that the embeded version is not suitable for securing Kibana? The reason that I ask is, because our users which are running a local version of our software also want to have statistics. And we want to secure these statistics.

Hi Laurens,
Yes looks like you would need embedded + pro or enterprise. We can give you a discounted fee if you take both. Especially if we agree on a multi year commitment.

Dear Simone,

Will the pro / enterprise also be flat rate?

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Yes everything we sell is flat rate :muscle:
I.e. any number of nodes, any number of clusters.

Dear Simone,

While installing and configuring / testing the ReadonlyREST plugin, a colleague of mine informed me about the free security features for Elasticsearch (ELS 6.8 and 7.1). Could you explain to me which features your plugin offer which are not offered by the free security features from ELS?

Hi @laurens,

Yes sure, we discussed it here: