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.
