[_bpo]

> even for a small company, $8k/year is admittedly a small fraction of one engineer

This is certainly true, but overlooks the fact that many major products start out as experimental projects, and $8k/year is a significant investment for an experiment.

If there's a reasonable upgrade path from traditional databases like MySQL and Postgres this shouldn't be a big deal, but if the answer is "rewrite your app" it will probably be a friction point for adoption.