I deployed a few web apps running on gemstone based on their community edition starter license.
You can get a lot going just based on that and it really isn't as expensive as Oracle.
The Oracle example was more a kind of figure of speech regarding the kind of clients that are willing to pay for commercial Smalltalk, based on the listed customers use cases.
Well, I never got to needing a paid license so it never was a worry. I found the database size tended to grow more slowly than what I expected from past experience with MariaDB/MySql and PostgreSQL.
All and all I found the killer really was the ability to store situations where an exception was raised and being able to replay it later. It saved a ton of time for debugging.
How was your experience?