If memory serves, TigerBeetle is/was not free for production? I can't find the Pricing page, but I kinda remember reading about it somewhere (or it was implied) a while back.
The DBMS is Apache 2.0 and our customers pay us (well) for everything else to run, integrate, migrate, operate and support that.
For more on our open source thinking and how this is orthogonal to business model (and product!), see our interview with the Changelog: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr8Y2EYnxJs
I watched that but I don't see it as convincing. Let's take the AWS example brought up in the talk. The "compete on the interface, not (open source) implementation" idea I think misses (at least) the following points:
1. AWS will take your initial and ongoing investment in the implementation but they don't have to share theirs with you. Specifically, they will take your improvements but their own improvements (say some performance optimizations) they can keep to themselves. It's good business sense if it allows them to further differentiate their "improved" offering from your "vanilla" service.
2. Competing on the the interface in this case really means competing on related services like management, etc. So your thesis is that you will provide a better/cheaper managed service than AWS. Even if that's true (a big if), most of the time the decision which service to use will have little to do with technical merit. I.e. we already use AWS, have SLA painfully negotiated, get volume discounts, etc. Do we really want to go through all of this with another vendor just for one extra service.
Just a couple of thoughts that will hopefully help you sharpen your thesis.
> AWS will take your initial and ongoing investment in the implementation but they don't have to share theirs with you. Specifically, they will take your improvements but their own improvements (say some performance optimizations) they can keep to themselves. It's good business sense if it allows them to further differentiate their "improved" offering from your "vanilla" service.
In practice all I've seen from AWS is just to add integrations with their internal orchestrators and not much else. Back when I was at Redis Labs, AWS added TLS support to Redis and was dying to get that upstreamed (so that they wouldn't have to maintain the patch), except that as far as I understood nobody upstream wanted that code. In other words, hypothetical improvements by AWS (and other Clouds) are extremely overrated. When it comes to tigerbeetle, I would put the chance that they introduce bugs and vulnerabilities much higher than the possibility they add any meaningful improvement over what the actual experts (the tigrebeetle team) have already done.
> Do we really want to go through all of this with another vendor just for one extra service.
That's a great point, and in fact I've seen AWS purposefully offer insane (in Europe maybe we would say anti-competitive) discounts precisely to prevent Redis Labs from gaining market share. I'm sure they will try the same with TB once it becomes mainstream enough. What TB has that Redis doesn't have is the fact that it's a database designed for truly mission-critical stuff (i.e. counting the money) and maybe customers will be willing to go through the extra motions to ensure they get the best service they can (assuming TB will be able to provide that).
> In other words, hypothetical improvements by AWS (and other Clouds) are extremely overrated.
Interesting, in a recent thread (I think it was about Redis going back open source) an AWS employer was bragging about substantial concurrency optimizations they implemented in Valkey. At the time I thought it could have been a great differentiator to keep proprietary but perhaps they decide to sacrifice it to help make sure Valkey takes over the Redis midshare.
That's a special case for sure, given the new fight for supremacy between the two forks, that said you can see in all those threads antirez bickering with the AWS people over exactly who introduced what.
To be clear, we have no problem if all the hyperscalers decide to offer TigerBeetle as their flagship OLTP database. That builds trust and is a good thing for the ecosystem as a whole.
We also don't expect (or need) anyone to contribute improvements upstream to us. That's open source!
Finally, open source is not the same thing as product. There are thousands of companies around the world who make high quality products that people pay for. TigerBeetle is no different.
