These guys need to add a cheap/freemium tier so small-time developers can scale up their services from nothing. $99/month for their trying-it-out/developer plan is a bit overreaching.
Using Citus on that small of a plan generally isn't ideal. If you're just starting out single node Postgres works great and there are a lot of options for single node Postgres such as Heroku, RDS, and now Google and Azure. Citus really starts to benefit you later on when you grow, hence our higher entry level.
As for trying it out, we bill based on usage just like if you were on any other large cloud provider so you only page for what you use. In that case trying out a dev cluster for a few hours would be just a few cents.
I appreciate your response, but my point is this: people are going to go with the service that they can scale up from $5/month to $28,000/month without any interruptions or switching of providers. It would be great to see you guys try to tackle this problem with that in mind, and I think you could do it really well. I just think you underestimate how many people want their infrastructure to cost nothing when they are in pre-launch mode, and will let their pre-launch infrastructure dictate their post-launch.
To reiterate: I get that your service doesn't start to scale well until the $99/month price point, but I don't care about performance until I'm at that price point anyway. I'd rather have the ability to start from nothing with OK/crappy performance, then have to switch services right when my product starts getting traction. It's about continuity and scaling up from nothing.
> I just think you underestimate how many people want their infrastructure to cost nothing when they are in pre-launch mode, and will let their pre-launch infrastructure dictate their post-launch.
Somehow, given Craig's history at Heroku, I imagine he understands this better than any of us ;)
This is not a bad advice overall, but I think that Citus has still a huge market to conquer before they go down this path.
Single PG node can handle easily 80k/s writes and reads and store up to 3TB of data safely. Wast majority of companies will never have to think about cluster as this is more than sufficient for most.
No matter if it's Citus or any other DB, horizontal scaling comes at cost and most companies should pay it. Citus helps to the ones that really have issues with performance beyond those levels (like us) and I think the Citus team is smartly targeting those kind of customers, at least for the time being.
I think that's exactly what people are asking for. A single PG node (or even a shared node) managed and monitored by competent people for a "hobbyist" price. You start your project on that, and when you outgrow it, click a button to upgrade to the real Citus Cloud.
Now it's entirely possible that the customer support and separate infrastructure maintenance doesn't make sense for Citus at hobbyist price points - but it would be a way for them to capture potential customers before they standardise on RDS, Redshift and other database scaling options.
I would add the caveat that it depends on your data heavily.
I supported a 20TB single-node DB, and it worked just fine. We had a lot of cold data though (about 10TB of it was solely for historical records, and 9.5TB of the rest was only accessed 4x yearly for massive reports).
The hardest part was never postgresql, mainly in numa related stuff.
How many products actually start getting traction? How many of those then need to scale beyond a single node? How many of those running on a $5/month plan will it take to make up for the dev and support costs?
I'm sure they can easily scale their plan down to the $50/month range with smaller instances but they're a business too and having a cost cut-off makes sense. The companies that need the scale will find them regardless, and they have the Citus Warp product as stated in the article to make migrations easy.
I will throw money at you if you set up a basic/crappy $5/month (or free!) node that can gradually get upgraded in-place to higher and higher plans to the point where it is using your sharding technology etc.
As for trying it out, we bill based on usage just like if you were on any other large cloud provider so you only page for what you use. In that case trying out a dev cluster for a few hours would be just a few cents.