Cockroachlabs – Evolving our self-hosted offering and license model | Hacker News Reader

Cockroachlabs – Evolving our self-hosted offering and license model

cockroachlabs.com

There’s one problem with this model. Let’s say I’m running a pre-revenue startup and I want to use the self-hosted version of CockroachDB. The license allows me to do it for free until I get to $10M annual revenue. Well, that’s great and all but I’d like to know how much I’ll pay once I do reach those numbers. However, the pricing for self-hosted offering is a secret, it’s “pricing upon request” – I have no way to estimate these expenses and thus no way to estimate if CockroachDB is a reasonable choice for my startup in the long term.

Even if the price wasn't secret, maybe when you hit $10M revenue 3 years later, they'll have raised the price 300%. Maybe they've changed the license again and now its priced per-seat or per-cpu-core or per-employee-tooth. Maybe they've decided to focus on larger enterprises only, and they no longer want your business.

This is true but you’ll have these risks with any paid service/dependency that has non-zero migration cost. Startups still use such products all the time, assuming that a huge price spike is not that likely or that there’s going to be some viable alternative with a migration path. I’d say it’s quite different when you can’t even guess what your starting point is going to be once you hit those $10M.

But I do agree with the general argument that lock-in as this for your core technologies (a database certainly counts) should be avoided.

With a database I'd say it's especially risky and lockin is extra strong. Compared to, say, OpenAI where you're just using it to generate text and its behaviour is already unpredictable anyway

IIRC cockroachdb support about every Postgres client.

It “speaks” Postgres.

Not a ton of vendor lock in, since you could always migrate to another Postgres hosting service (although you’d lose some of cockroaches regional features)

Even if CockroachDB uses Postgres wire protocol, it doesn’t mean you can easily migrate all workloads supported by CockroachDB to Postgres. The scaling properties are different.

Further, simply emailing and asking for a quote results in them asking about your whole business model and infrastructure; likely so they can extract as much as possible from you. This was the point we stopped communicating with them and chose a different vendor.

Yes, and this is probably a common issue with these “pricing on request” schemes. Unpleasant, yes, but this unpleasantness can still be worth it if you’re running a big business and you need the database with the properties that CockroachDB has. But for an early stage startup, there’s nothing to even talk about. I doubt they are going to give you a quote for some hypothetical future where your annual revenue beats $10M.

Maybe they actually just don’t care about attracting startups, the whole “free license for small players” thing is just so that developers can check it out, not for actual use.

TL;DR

> With the introduction of version 24.3 in November, we are retiring our Core offering and introducing a new Enterprise licensing structure for self-hosted users, also applied to new patch releases of versions 23.1 and later. This new structure will provide all users with the robust database capabilities found previously only in the self-hosted Enterprise license. CockroachDB will remain entirely source code available. Note that there will be no change for customers of our cloud platform.

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