Replacing Elasticsearch with ClickHouse : A 90% Cost-Reduction Migration

A practical guide based on shipping this for a crypto-derivatives platform — annual observability bill went from high six figures to ~$50K, with faster queries and AI-powered log search as a bonus. Why I'm writing this If you're paying mid-six figures for Elasticsearch and ~90% of your queries are aggregations (error counts, latency percentiles, service health), you're paying full price for a feature you barely use — full-text search. This post walks through how a crypto exchange replaced Elasti