OpenSearch hosting, managed service or self-hosted?

For 95% of Magento stores, the answer is managed OpenSearch Service (AWS) or equivalent on your cloud. Self-hosting OpenSearch is a DevOps trap that costs more once you count the operational hours.

AWS OpenSearch Service pricing reference:

• t3.small.search (~$30/mo), dev / staging only; not for production.
• t3.medium.search (~$60/mo), production for <5k SKU stores under $200k GMV.
• m6g.large.search (~$140/mo), production for 5k, 50k SKU stores, $200k, $2M GMV.
• m6g.xlarge.search (~$280/mo), mid-market, 50k+ SKUs, $2M+ GMV.
• m6g.2xlarge.search (~$550/mo) + dedicated master nodes, enterprise tier, 200k+ SKUs.

Sizing rule of thumb: OpenSearch needs ~1.5GB RAM per million catalog documents (including all attribute permutations). Add 30% headroom for reindex bursts. Always run with at least 2 data nodes for HA in production.

When to self-host: Only when you’re on a Magento-native managed host (MageMojo / Nexcess) that includes a tuned OpenSearch in the bundle, or when you have a dedicated DevOps engineer who is going to keep an eye on cluster health weekly. Otherwise the “cheap” self-hosted t3.medium VM ends up being the most expensive line item in your stack when it fails on Black Friday.