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Love Citus's technology, but once again $99/month is ridiculous for a "dev" plan. Small startups want to use the same database from the pre-MVP dorm room phase

Love Citus's technology, but once again $99/month is ridiculous for a "dev" plan. Small startups want to use the same database from the pre-MVP dorm room phase all the way through their Series A, and while your technology would theoretically allow that, your pricing closes a lot of doors. No one wants to switch databases once their product is doing well enough to warrant $99/month for a database, so you are scaring away a lot of potential customers such as myself. Once again I implore you to consider adding a "starter" or "hobbyist" tier for $20/month or even $5/month. If you want to really be competitive, your product should be free to use until you have more than 200mb of data stored in your database, at which point usage-based pricing kicks in based off of the number of rows used.

craigkerstiens 8y ago
It's helpful feedback, and something we'd love to work towards some day. The short of it is because of Citus architecture it does require multiple underlying nodes and there is some overhead that until you get to a larger scale Citus doesn't necessarily make sense. If you've only got 10 GB of data a single node instance on RDS should suit you just fine. We understand some of the costs of switching and have actively been working to build tools for you to plan to use something like Citus, but then migrate when the time comes. Libraries like activerecord-multi-tenant or django-multi-tenant ensure you're ready for Citus and work perfectly well on a single node Postgres database. Then when the time comes, which could be at $100 of RDS or $500 of RDS or larger, we have Citus warp [1] that allows you in a fully online way to replicate from RDS directly into a Citus cluster. Using it we've had customers with > 4 TB of data cutover with less than a minute of impact to their database. I know that's not as simple as starting on Citus and continuing to scale, so hopefully we can address this better in the future, but for now it's the best answer we have at the moment. [1]. https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/12/08/citus-warp-pain-free-migrations/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/12/08/citus-warp-pain-fr...
- sam0x17 8y ago
  You could, for example, offer a plan that starts out extremely cheap, uses usage-based pricing, and only has Citus technology kick in when you reach the relevant scale. So < 10 GB it would just be a normal PostgreSQL node. I would use this for everything if it was like that.
manigandham 8y ago
$99 is pretty good value for what it is, especially if you're using it for a scalable core database. For us the bigger issue is the steep jump in price for prod level plans and the lack of GCP hosting.
iKevinShah 8y ago
If price point for Citus cloud is a roadblock, you can easily set up Citus at your environment provided you have some server administration experience. I did the same while doing a PoC for the community edition and all it took was 3 minimal size servers, which would actually be around 20$ a month but can it be used till Series A, not sure, depends on the data. Also just a side note : The community edition is lacking some very important features like shard rebalance which is available in Enterprise edition to be fair.

craigkerstiens 8y ago

It's helpful feedback, and something we'd love to work towards some day. The short of it is because of Citus architecture it does require multiple underlying nodes and there is some overhead that until you get to a larger scale Citus doesn't necessarily make sense. If you've only got 10 GB of data a single node instance on RDS should suit you just fine. We understand some of the costs of switching and have actively been working to build tools for you to plan to use something like Citus, but then migrate when the time comes. Libraries like activerecord-multi-tenant or django-multi-tenant ensure you're ready for Citus and work perfectly well on a single node Postgres database. Then when the time comes, which could be at $100 of RDS or $500 of RDS or larger, we have Citus warp [1] that allows you in a fully online way to replicate from RDS directly into a Citus cluster. Using it we've had customers with > 4 TB of data cutover with less than a minute of impact to their database. I know that's not as simple as starting on Citus and continuing to scale, so hopefully we can address this better in the future, but for now it's the best answer we have at the moment. [1]. https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/12/08/citus-warp-pain-free-migrations/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/12/08/citus-warp-pain-fr...

sam0x17 8y ago
You could, for example, offer a plan that starts out extremely cheap, uses usage-based pricing, and only has Citus technology kick in when you reach the relevant scale. So < 10 GB it would just be a normal PostgreSQL node. I would use this for everything if it was like that.

manigandham 8y ago

$99 is pretty good value for what it is, especially if you're using it for a scalable core database. For us the bigger issue is the steep jump in price for prod level plans and the lack of GCP hosting.

iKevinShah 8y ago

If price point for Citus cloud is a roadblock, you can easily set up Citus at your environment provided you have some server administration experience. I did the same while doing a PoC for the community edition and all it took was 3 minimal size servers, which would actually be around 20$ a month but can it be used till Series A, not sure, depends on the data. Also just a side note : The community edition is lacking some very important features like shard rebalance which is available in Enterprise edition to be fair.