I'm certainly not a Splunk expert and I'm CERTAINLY have no insight into the nature of our financial arrangement with them, but yeah it's expensive.
I think there's not much of a useful "flat rate" tier; you pay based on usage. People can accidentally spin up a ton of EC2 instances and get a huge surprise AWS bill, too. And yeah our logging needs are high and monotonically increasing but they're also relatively predictable at our scale.
It ALSO turns out though that Splunk is really really good at their job and matching their expertise would require tons of engineering effort and it's not like the disk space alone is THAT cheap if you want it to be searchable.
I think there's not much of a useful "flat rate" tier; you pay based on usage. People can accidentally spin up a ton of EC2 instances and get a huge surprise AWS bill, too. And yeah our logging needs are high and monotonically increasing but they're also relatively predictable at our scale.
It ALSO turns out though that Splunk is really really good at their job and matching their expertise would require tons of engineering effort and it's not like the disk space alone is THAT cheap if you want it to be searchable.