Thanks for the feedback! Many dev-tools and infra products, specifically in the Postgres space are open source. Citus (my previous gig) is an example here. Customers still pay for these products because of 2 main reasons a/ operationalizing an open source tool to support production workloads requires good amount effort - ex: setting up HA, advance metrics/monitoring etc. and they want to offload it to by buying a paid offering that is more plug and play b/ they want to work with a team which can empathize with their challenges, are experts in the area and helps make them successful. With PeerDB, we are expecting something similar and are committed to make our customers successful.

On the pricing side, valid feedback. We are actively working with customers and are coming up with custom (reasonable) pricing based on their use-case and usage level of product. Through this process we are getting a ton of feedback. As mentioned in the post, a common concern we heard from customers is that the existing tools are expensive (pricing is black box) - they charge based on the amount data-transferred. We are thinking of ways to make pricing more transparent (see post on what our thinking has been so far). But haven't landed on the right strategy yet. We didn't want to rush through publishing any pricing.

Many businesses, big or small, are cheapskates. If the paid offerings don’t get you much over the free one, many companies will just take the open-source thing and make it work for them. Does the “Cloud” offering even get you any support?

We anticipate both groups of businesses. Considering we are building a product for ETL/data-movement which innately has multiple moving parts & fragile, we anticipate a good chunk of businesses preferring to offload the effort of managing to us!

They don't have to convert everyone, just enough to cover their cost(and pay back investors)