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by tleyden5iwx 3542 days ago
It looks like RethinkDB is relying solely on revenue from training and support. Is that even feasible for a product like theirs?

I've never used their product, I've only looked at their website and was extremely impressed. I remember their bullet points were around clean architecture, testing, performance, etc, all the stuff that engineers/devops folks care the most about, so they can avoid getting paged in the middle of the night to rolling reboot every node in their ${name-of-distributed-database with-scaling-issues} cluster.

But, unfortunately, it seems like if you depend on revenue that derives solely from training and support, you're best bet is to make a product that has:

* Awful documentation (hence the need for people to pay for training)

* Full of bugs and performance issues (hence the need for people to pay for support)

Since from the looks of it, RethinkDB was pretty much the polar opposite of this, it seems like they were essentially a victim of their own perfection.

I wonder if any RethinkDB users out there paid for support just to try to keep RethinkDB alive?

Also, I wonder why RethinkDB doesn't change their revenue model if it's not working for them?

2 comments

They were trying to pivot to at least two additional revenue models during he last year, but it seems to have simply took too long (1. Custom closed code for enterprise customers, 2. Hosted Horizon). I have paid RethinkDB for support by the way, just to support them.
RethinkDB is not perfect there is tons of issues. For example it useing too much memory for the large volumes of data and then performance tends to degrade.