| Cockroach Labs Makes Enterprises Pay |
| Written by Kay Ewbank | |||
| Tuesday, 27 August 2024 | |||
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Cockroach Labs, the creators of CockroachDB, have announced changes to their licensing model aimed at making bigger users pay. CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database that is cloud native and offers horizontal scalability with no single points of failure.
The company has always had two versions, both of which can be run by the customer. These have been a free Core version designed to provide everything an individual user or startup would need to reach scale; and an Enterprise version that comes with a license fee. The Enterprise version includes features such as cluster optimization, disaster recovery, enhanced security, and support. The Cockroach team says that they've seen two trends emerge in the usage of the Core product. First, startups and other small businesses have often shown a desire to use Enterprise features not available in Core. And second, companies that should really be using the Enterprise version sticking with the free Core version. As Cockroach Lab's Spencer Kimball said in a blog post: "The irony of CockroachDB's state-of-the-art resilience is that as the product has matured, use cases can increasingly be run in production with minimal operator overhead and support requirements." The result of this is that Cockroach Labs is introducing a new licensing model. The new model aims to make sure that all users get the CockroachDB capabilities they need; that the organizations that should pay, do pay; and that individuals, students, and small businesses can continue to use CockroachDB for free. The team says this is an investment to help customers reach their full potential using an enterprise-grade product. A side aim is to keep the CockroachDB code "source available". The practicalities of how this is achieved start with the retiring of CockroachDB Core, replacing it with a new Enterprise licensing structure for self-hosted users. This will improve the features available to users who were until now using CockroachDB Core. The tier aimed at previous Core users is CockroachDB Enterprise Free, which is free for individual developers, students, academic researchers, and businesses under $10M in annual revenues. This license can be renewed annually and comes with community support. Customers with more than $10 million in annual revenue will have to pay a fee that is based on the number of CPUs or CPU cores within the server system where the database is deployed. The threshold will be "self-attesting", according to Cockroach Labs co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball. CockroachDB will remain entirely source code available and there will be no change for customers of the cloud platform.
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