[pandoro]

Neo4j is a great DB but their license price is egregious for enterprise customers. A few years ago I was involved in negotiating a contract for a small/medium size kubernetes deployment (think around 25 cores) and the annual price was more than the salary of a senior SWE full-time equivalent. See this page for an idea of their prices in 2018: https://blog.igovsol.com/2018/01/10/Neo4j-Commercial-Prices....

[brabel]

Also embedding Neo4j is not possible, that seems to be the killer feature for YouTrackDB, they even shade dependencies so it’s like a no deps Java library for your application.

[danpalmer]

> small/medium size kubernetes deployment (think around 25 cores

That's ~1 machine. 1 SWE for a database isn't egregious, databases provide huge value, but for that little performance, that's crazy.

I can only assume as core count has blown up over the last 10 years, the pricing has somewhat diminished, but still, I'd be expecting a heck of a lot more capacity for 1 SWE.

[hobofan]

I can tell you from quotes that I've seen, that compared to the 2018 prices listed on the page, end-of-2022 pricing was slightly up per core.

We were already well on our way of dumping Neo4J due to performance/operational/architectural reasons at the point, but seeing the quote solidified it.

[adsharma]

There are several MIT/Apache licensed embedded graph databases available, including the one linked from my profile.

[fsuts]

Not just that, if a database company has both a community edition and enterprise then it’s likely the enterprise will get many new features that the community edition will never get.

Ongoing enshittification risk.