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.