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by ixf 2795 days ago
The frustrating thing with Neo4j is that they have two modes - a fairly neutered open source version, and a ~$35k/node enterprise version, with absolutely nothing inbetween. They're apparently doing a cloudy hosted enterprise version somewhere inbetween but that's some time out and not a self-hostable option.
4 comments

I hear you. We're working on it. I will note that we have a startup program where you can get Neo4j Enterprise for free if you're below 50 employees and also have several other programs for educational institutions, journalists, etc. And obviously the long term solution here is a DBaaS with grow-as-you-grow pricing. Watch this space! :)
There are a ton of use cases in bigger enterprises (1000+ employees) for smaller applications that are not worth the costs you are offering currently, so I'm glad you're working on it. Cypher is amazing (as is most of Neo4j). I've used Neo4j for many years, going back to pre 2.0 versions. The database has evolved massively since then.
yeah, my experience was the same. It's a really nice database to play with or for a small project but if you need a multi-node HA cluster, the price quickly becomes prohibitive.

I guess if I ever need a graph database again I will probably go for dgraph (although I haven't used it in any production environment) - https://dgraph.io or any other graph database that at least has HA setup without 100k/year bill :)

If you want to self-host Neo4j in cloud environments, that's doable today in a variety of different ways:

https://neo4j.com/developer/guide-cloud-deployment/

As others pointed out in other threads, this can be done for free for startups of a certain size (https://neo4j.com/startup-program/), and eval licenses are available (https://neo4j.com/lp/enterprise-cloud/?utm_content=aws-marke...)

All of this. It's impossible to run Neo4j out of the box in HA in a sane way. Not to mention, you can't even run a reliable backup of the datastore without shutting down the database entirely... unless you pay for their archaic pricing model for enterprise.