Cockroach Labs changes its self-hosting license to a single enterprise model – SiliconANGLE

Cockroach Labs Inc., maker of the distributed and resilient CockroachDB database, said today that it’s changing its licensing to better align with the needs of its customers, startups and scaled-up companies alike.

The company said today that it’s consolidating its self-hosted license under a single model that will provide smaller companies access to the tools and capabilities they need and encourage big companies to pay up.

With the upcoming introduction of version 24.3 on Nov. 18, the company said, it will retire its free Core offering and introduce a new Enterprise license structure for all self-hosted users. The new structure will remain free for individual developers, students, academic researchers and businesses under $10 million in annual revenues.

However, businesses grossing more than $10 million have to pay a fee based on the number of central processing units cores within their server system where the database is hosted. That means the larger the system that the database is deployed on, the higher the cost.

Cockroach Labs Chief Executive Spencer Kimball said the impetus driving the licensing change was how the two different types of customers – startups and large-scale enterprise firms – used the service.

“First, startups and other small businesses have often shown a desire to use Enterprise features not available in Core,” said Kimball. “And second, a growing number of scaled businesses are compromising on using the full capabilities of CockroachDB, eschewing the Enterprise license for free usage of Core.”

Kimball added that the company had created a product that can could be run in production with minimal overhead and support. That resulted in little need for large firms to buy into the paid-for enterprise versions.

The company said that this change will not affect the “source availability” of its product. This means that although the self-hosted product has a multitude of different source licenses attached to the codebase, the new Enterprise product will have a single license that the company is calling the CockroachDB Software License. None of these changes affect the current cloud-hosted product.

Users will be able to trial the new self-service Enterprise tier for 30 days for free, with community support, starting after the Nov. 18 date. After that, if they top the $10 million annual revenue cap, they will have to start paying the fee.

“In the past, splitting capabilities between Core and Enterprise inevitably compromised the experience of using CockroachDB,” Kimball said. “In consolidating to a single CockroachDB Enterprise offering, we are ensuring that all of our users have access to the full breadth and scope of our product, delivered through a streamlined trial experience.”

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