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RavenDB 4.0 Licensing & Pricing
Let us start with the biggest news. We are offering RavenDB 4.0 FREE for production usage for single node deployments.
In addition to that, the license for the RavenDB Client APIs is going to change from AGPL to MIT. We currently have clients for .NET, JVM, Python and Node.JS, with Go and Ruby clients coming (hopefully by the time we hit RC). All of which will be available under the MIT license. The server license will remain AGPL / Commercial, with a Community deployment option that will come free of charge. The Community Edition is fully functional on a single node.
You can use this edition to deploy production systems without needing to purchase a license, completely FREE and unencumbered.
We have also decided to do somewhat of a shakeup in the way we split features among editions, primarily by moving features down the slide, so features that used to be Enterprise only are now more widely available. The commercial edition will be available in either Professional and Enterprise editions. For our current subscribers, we are very happy that you’ve been with us for all this time, and we want to assure you that as long as your subscription will be valid, the pricing for it will stay as is.
Both Professional and Enterprise Editions are going to offer clustering, offsite backups, replication and ETL processes to SQL and RavenDB databases. The Enterprise edition also offers full database encryption, automatic division of work between the nodes in the cluster (including failover & automatic recovery), snapshot backups and SNMP integration among other things. Commercial support (including 24x7 production) will be available for Professional and Enterprise Editions.
Since I’m pretty sure that the thing that you are most interested in is pricing information and feature matrix, so here is the information in an easy to digest form.
|
Community |
Professional |
Enterprise |
|
|
FREE |
$749 per core* |
$1,319 per core* |
|
|
Cores |
Up to 3 |
Up to 40 |
Unlimited |
|
Memory |
Up to 6 GB |
Up to 240GB |
Unlimited |
|
Cluster Size |
Up to 3 nodes |
Up to 5 |
Unlimited |
|
Commercial |
Community only |
Available |
Available |
|
Versioning |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Backups |
Local full backups |
Full & incremental |
Full & incremental |
|
Full database snapshot1 |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Tasks distribution2 (backups, ETL, subscriptions) |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Highly available tasks3 |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Highly available databases & |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
|
ETL Support |
No |
SQL & RavenDB |
SQL & RavenDB |
|
Full database encryption |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Monitoring |
No |
Yes |
Yes, SNMP |
|
Client authentication via |
No |
No |
Yes |
* To save you the math, a 6 cores server with Professional edition will be about 4,494$ and Enterprise edition will be about 7,914$.
- Snapshots capture the database state and allow to reduce restore time on large databases, at the expense of disk space. Snapshots can work together with incremental backup to get point in time recovery.
- Tasks (such as backups, ETL processes, subscriptions, updating new nodes, etc) are assigned to specific node dynamically, to spread load fairly in the cluster.
- When a node responsible for a task goes down, the cluster will automatically re-assign that task without interruption in service.
Task distribution and failover is best explained via a concrete example. We have a database with 3 nodes, and we define an ETL process to send some of the data to a reporting database. That work will be dynamically assigned to a node in the cluster, and balanced with all other work that the cluster need to do. For Enterprise Edition, if the node that was assigned that task failed, the cluster will automatically transfer all such tasks to a new node until the node will recover.
The new model comes with significant performance boost, all the features that I mentioned earlier and multi-platform support. But we are not forgetting about newcomers, small enterprises and individual clients. For those we have introduced a Community version, a completely FREE license that should suit their needs.
Again, for all existing subscribers, we assure you that while your subscription is valid, its pricing will stay as is. In fact, given that we will grandfather all existing subscriptions at the current price point, and you can purchase a subscription now, before the official release of 4.0, you have a nice arbitrage option available now.
The beta release represent over two years of work by the RavenDB Core Team to bring you top of the line database that is fast, safe and easy to use. It is chockfull of features, to the point where I don’t know where to start blogging about some of the cool stuff that we do (don’t worry, those posts are coming).
Comments
"Let us start with the biggest news. We are offering RavenDB 4.0 FREE for production usage for single node deployments."
This this this, a 1000 times this: pretty darn impressive, and HUGE! Thanks!
This is great news indeed! I'm very much looking forward to building something with this (probably a new personal site).
I suspect you must get tired of requests like the one I am about to follow up with - but I figure it worth giving it a shot anyway: Would it, in any way, be possible to somehow allow for a single replica in the community license? With my recent projects I have been trying to challenge myself and in that sense dealing with distributed systems would be one of those challenges. I'm not really looking to be able to get more raw "power" than what the license offers here, as that is far beyond what I'd ever need, more from the technical challenges that distributed systems presents (both in terms of programming against them, but also from the Ops point of view) - I'd be extremely thrilled to be able to work with that in some form or another.
My use case here mainly revolves around simply having a cluster setup where I run some sort of chaos monkey to "kill" a server from time to time and I want to see my system continue to work even when this happens.
In either case - this is awesome news!
How about licensing for ISV (Server/Embedded)?
Kaare, We are going to have a dev mode, which will allow for multiple instances (in the same machine), which will allow you to test such scenarios.
Van, Still valid, yes. The details there aren't dependent on what kind of deployment you make, and what sort of support options you need.
Is it a yearly subscription? And do you still have the posibility to skip the support? By the way, do you buy 4 cores for 1 server, or can you split it to 2 cores for 2 servers (so is the license key given per server, or is it overall, per core)
XiniX00, These are the yearly subscription costs, yes. You don't have to purchase support. You can split the # of cores you have every which way you like (up to 32 on a single node for professional, no limit for enterprise).
The actual license is per server, but we allow to modify it (so splitting a 4 cores license to two 2 cores license, for example).
Vlko,
There is an option to purchase without support, just with the community assistance. Take into account that escalating from community support to commercial support is not something that we'll do without a qualification period (can't have a problem and then purchase support). And that most / all of the community support is going to be provided by the community, not the core team.
Cores mean the Logical Processors in task manager, or the result of this power shell script:
The pricing is for a yearly subscription.
Oren, thanks for the clarifications in the comments. I have one additional question - are the prices in the table without support? I.e. the support will cost additional 2000/6000 USD (current price)?
We currently use the Standard license without any extra features, costing us 399 USD/server/year. The servers have 4 cores so the price change from ~400 to ~3000 USD is pretty steep.
Andrej, Yes, the licenses are excluding the support price.
Note that your use case is likely covered with the community edition.
Oren, we do use replication (not clustering though) and local incremental export (not backup). I can't figure out whether this is included in the Community edition from the feature matrix. Could you please comment/clarify?
Andrej, No, that is not included, but you are included in the grandfathering for existing customers.
Thanks for answer Oren.
Just to make some constructive discussion: Basically we need two db servers in master/master scenario, where one is primary, one secondary doing data import/export and backup of data. Current costs for those two servers where 399$x2 per year. We don't have commercial support and we are fine with that, we were able to find out bugs, report, workaround them till now without any major issue (maybe twice we did downgrade or we turned off something in raven.config). There were cons, like no cluster support just master/master, RAM limits to 12GB, we have bare license without RavenFS.
Now with new license model (just in case we are new company, as we will probably purchase some 3.5 yearly licenses for spare) yearly price will increase from 798$ to 749x2x2 (2996$ for 2 cores servers) and 749x4x2 (5992$ for 4 core servers).
In raven 4.0 we have a lot of new things, like better performance, clustering, but it is still huge price increase, and a lot of starting companies will consider this to be too high. I understand that you put a lot of effort to create RavenDB 4, but lets say one year ago it will be too much for us and we should consider different technology. Even now we will probably buy less cores licenses as we expected not more like 3 times price increase.
Out of curiosity, will this have any effect on the pricing for RavenHQ (Azure in my case) as we are looking at using that for an upcoming project.
vlko, The reasoning behind this is that we need to be able to balance what we provide with the pricing. That is why we provide the community version, which should be able to handle most tasks.
When you move to replicate setup, you can go with a dual 1 core setup, which give you a cost that is equivalent to today (698$ x 2 vs 749$ x 2). Note that even with the one core, we are still more than fast enough to handle moderate traffic.
We are also offering discounts for new startups, so I think that this covers all the angles.
Do you have some numbers, what is meant by moderate traffic? Like some comparison of differences between 1, 2, 4 core license.
vlko, A raspbery pi can handle thousands of requests a second :-)
Does community also support custom server side plugins?
This is awesome news- congratulations!
One question - if I'm running the Community Edition in an embedded app and it gets installed on a machine with > 4 cores, will it limit itself to 4 cores or will I mean I've breached the licence agreement?
Great news. The Community edition makes RavenDB available back to us for smaller deployments or for our customers to try the technology and provides a very good path to evolve from free to pro or enterprise versions based on needs while still being able to go to production phase. That makes great RavenDB available to us as an option to be used for our development tasks. Great news, indeed.
The new lineup seems to be very well balanced.
Bruno, We currently don't have them in 4.0. Aside from analyzers, we are trying to see if we can replace all such functionality completely.
Sean, It'll limit itself to the 4 cores limit, but it will also limit the process in general.
Hi, could you give us more details about ISV licencing ? Will we be able to set up a small cluster for DR scenarios with it ?
Thanks!
Valerio, ISVs that wants to setup clusters will need to handle that separately. We have a distribution license for that, but the details aren't final. Likely this will be a flat fee.
Oren / RH,
before this blog post, one of the serious pain points for RavenDb takeup (IMO) has been pricing - which I've tried to highlight in the past. Part of this pricing problem has also been pricing with RavenDB under a SaaS model -> basically, using RavenHQ the pricing there has been ... well .. crap.
Now I know RavenHQ is not HibernatingRhino's and any pricing q's should be directed at them etc. BUT! Will there be some nicer pricing options - with the newer pricing plans - for services like RavenHQ or people wanting to start an equivalent SaaS product to help reduce their public-consumer-price?
TL;DR; Should it be easier for (sites like) RavenHQ to offer better pricing models in the future, based on new 4.0 Pricing?
PK, I'm going to the let the RavenHQ guys handle that question. I forwarded it to them.
Is Voron licence changed somehow in 4.0?
EQR, No, Voron is still under the license terms of the server.
Hello! I am a bit confused about licensing in distributed systems. Lets say there is such setup:
One Cluster with 3 nodes, in such case, license (professional) is purchased one for the cluster (4,494$), or for each machine (3 x 4,494$ = 13,482$)?
Merdan, The license is per node, in this case, you'll pay 13K
On the one hand, the Community edition is a welcome addition. On the other, serious sticker shock -- for a 6-CPU node, the cost is nearly SIX times higher. Wow.
Rob, Yes, that is why we have the community edition as completely free.
I understand. But it's a big change and adds a lot of uncertainty to our future planning.
Rob, We announced the new pricing several months ago, specifically so people would have time to take that into account.
I'm not talking about the timing, I'm saying that it's a dramatic change that makes projection very difficult. The 2x-6x higher price tag adds a huge amount of concern and uncertainty as we start to grow our non-free environments. When we chose Raven we hadn't expected to pay so much per CPU. On the other hand, I realize Raven 4.0 is more CPU-efficient than ever, and can run on Linux, so that should help to keep costs down. Hopefully it won't be an issue.
Hi Oren,
Two questions...
Kind regards,
Edward
...sorry, one more.
The 'Up to 32' cores limitation on the Professional license - is that per host or for the overall license? If it is the later I'm assuming this would restrict us to the Enterprise License for a 3 x 16 core cluster.
Kind regards,
Edward
Edward,
1) You take the per core pricing above (not per node) and multiple it by the total number of cores you have in your cluster. For example, if you have 3 nodes with 4 cores each, you have a total of 12 cores. Then you add 30% to that for the production support. 2) Yes, you can use the 4.0 license for 3.5 until the upgrade.
Edward, That is for the total cores in the cluster, but we increased that to 60
Have you decided how licensing for 4.0 works with Docker containers?
Rob, A docker instance is going to be licensed like any other. However, we moved from a per instance license to a per cluster license, so a single license can handle any number of instances in the cluster, up to the # of cores used.
Hi,
FYI: I'm preparing a RavenDB demo/pitch within my company (a Dutch web agency) because I would really like to start using RavenDB for our projects.
But the GDPR regulation (http://www.eugdpr.org) which will be enforced in de EU next year has complicated things. Basically it comes down to the fact that EU companies will be facing heavy fines when they don't secure sensitive customer/personal data in a decent manner.
This means that database encryption is an absolute must, but according the feature matrix it is only available for enterprise support. If that is indeed the case, then I'm pretty sure that my pitch will be D.O.A. :(
Kind regards, Erik
Hi Erik, The at rest encryption is indeed only available at the Enterprise level. When we did the feature segmentation it was one of the things that was very obviously mostly useful at Enterprises and is one of the reasons why we want to use the Enterprise edition. The cost is still much better than most of the other alternative, and I don't believe you'll be able to beat the ease of use and flexibility that RavenDB offers.
Hi Oren,
I understand what you are saying, and i respect that. Guess i will have to work extra hard to convince my colleagues/ manager that using RavenDB can contribute to the success of the company.
I know you didn't ask for my two cents but I'll tell you anyway :)
My expectation is that GDPR will (finally) cause the IT industry to perceive DB encryption (or at least thinking about encryption) a basic/fundamental practice instead of "something for large enterprises and financial institutes".
From my point of view, because of the GDPR regulation the Community and Professional editions are NOT a viable option for any company that will store personal data from EU residents. (unless they are 200% secure that a data breach cannot happen, or are willing to face the consequences). Whether it's an enterprise company or a single person startup does not matter anymore. The label "Professional" subscription even becomes a bit debatable for companies that also store personal data ;)
Having said all this, i really do hope that RavenDB 4.0 becomes a huge success.
kind regards, Erik
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