All this is good but again we talk tech guys, not my cousin that is born totally tech zero but is a premium merchant. He has no clue about i-click install or vps or.... But he is super also on economy and realize the trap with platforms like Shopify.
About hosted elastic search. I have only looked at their own cloud pricing and a setup with 2 Gb ram and 48 Gb storage cost 79 $ per month. Same time they state that less than 8 Gb is very bad