> The site makes it seems as if I can install CockroachDB on Mac, Linux, or Windows and try it out for as long as I like.

Therare limitations in terms of licenses [0].

[0]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/v25.1/licensing-faqs

Licenses are also yearly renewed. Its not like you get one license and can use it forever. No, you need to yearly enter the new license in your instance, if you do not, after 2 weeks it goes into cripple mode (as in, you can not run anything that is not a personal blog).

And those free-licenses have this dirty little clause that you are not entitled to a license, they need to APPROVE a free-license. Now that is even more scary.

They pull all this because people kept using the free-core version and people simply never upgrade/wanted more. That is why all these changed happened. Coincidentally, the buzz around CRDB has died down to the point that most talks about CRDB are these rare mentions here (even reddit is as good as dead). 98% of CRDB mentioning how great it is, is all origination from CRDBLabs. Do a google and limit in time range, and then go page by page, ... They are a enterprise only company at this point.

> Additionally, they claim CockroachDB Cloud is free for use "up to 10 GiB of storage and 50M RUs per organization per month".

Take in account, that the constant CPU/Mem/Query monitoring that CRDB does, eats up around 20 a 30M RUs per month. There are some people that complained as to why there free instances lost so much capacity. And those RU are not 1:1, like, you do a insert, its 1RU, oooo, no ... Its like 9 to 12RU or something.

Its very easy to eat all those RUs on a simply website. Let alone something that needs to scale. Trust me, your better of self deploying but then you enjoy the issue of the new licenses / forced telemetric / forced phone home, or spend 125$+ / vcpu (good luck finding out the price, we only know these numbers from people breaking nda offers). They are very aggressive in sales.

Its not worth it to tie your company to a product, that can chance licenses on a whim, that charges Oracle prices (and uses the same tactics). I am very sure that some of their sales staff is ex-Oracle employees. ;)

You can use official binary in production deployment - you just need to manage it yourself like you would manage Postgres.