"Available at a fraction of the cost of legacy databases, with a free developer edition"
So I guess there is some kind of licensing model even though you can download it and run it on your own servers.
Yes, perhaps there is a free developer edition, but for commercial deployment you have to use their cloud. That'd be a bummer..
Disclaimer: I work on Google Cloud
Yes it’s commercial but you can run it on any cloud or on prem.
"Free while in developer preview, check back in the future for pricing". Too weird for me.
After that you'll be able to pay for it for a year or two until they realize that running a business is a whole thing and then they'll just deprecate it and kill it off.