1) Procurement requires publicly posted compliance artifacts
- If the procurement process requires immediate access to publicly posted SOC 2 or ISO certificates and detailed subprocessor lists, expect to need direct engagement with the vendor or Elastic.
2) High-volume web crawling with strict per-page cost forecasting
- For large-scale page crawling where per-page cost predictability is required, vendors with per-page credit models may be easier to forecast and, in some cases, may offer lower costs.
3) Primary need is a managed vector database with enterprise controls
- If the primary requirement is storage, indexing, and serving with mature enterprise controls (SSO, audit logs, private networking), a dedicated vector DB provider may be a better fit.
4) Mission-critical support maturity is required immediately
- If the deployment cannot tolerate inconsistent support experiences, validate SLAs, escalation paths, and reference customers before committing.