From previous threads, my understanding is Elastic is a pretty arduous enterprise sales process which turned a lot of small/mid customers away.
High vendor management overhead is a huge pain for smaller companies that don't have robust IT to manage those relationships.
The smaller/mid size startups I've worked at almost never acquire "enterprise" software and always leverage pay-by-credit-card type SaaS
Besides operational overhead there's also a much longer acquisition time (no one wants to spend 3-6 months working with a sales team to sign a contract on a project with 2-3 month timeline)
High vendor management overhead is a huge pain for smaller companies that don't have robust IT to manage those relationships.
The smaller/mid size startups I've worked at almost never acquire "enterprise" software and always leverage pay-by-credit-card type SaaS
Besides operational overhead there's also a much longer acquisition time (no one wants to spend 3-6 months working with a sales team to sign a contract on a project with 2-3 month timeline)