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Introducing Our New Pricing Model

Today, we're introducing a new pricing model for EventSourcingDB. Until now, it came with a single commercial license and little else: one price, the same for everyone, whether you were a solo developer with a side project or a company running it in production. That was simple, but simple and fair are not always the same thing.

So we've opened the model up. It still fits on a single page and still shows every number in public, but it now makes room for the whole range of people who build on EventSourcingDB: a genuinely free tier, a reduced rate for individual developers, quarterly terms alongside yearly ones, and special conditions for startups, non-profits, and larger scale. Here is what it looks like, why we shaped it this way, and a quick way to tell which license is yours.

The Trouble With a Single Price

Until recently, EventSourcingDB came with exactly that one commercial license: 2,500 EUR per instance, per year. Once you needed to store more than a small number of events, that was the price – and it stayed the same whether you were one person with a side project or a team running EventSourcingDB across a fleet of services.

There's something to like about that. It's easy to understand, there's nothing to negotiate, and you always know exactly what you'll pay. But a single price is a blunt instrument. The same figure that feels reasonable to a well-funded engineering team can feel steep to an individual developer paying out of their own pocket – and a full year is a lot to commit to when you just want to try an idea for a few weeks.

So we kept the parts that worked and built out everything around them.

What the Model Looks Like Now

The new model is small enough to hold in your head, and you can place yourself in it in about a minute.

The free tier is genuinely free. As long as an instance stores fewer than 25,000 events, you can run EventSourcingDB without a license key at all – in development and in production alike. That's enough room for evaluation, for personal projects, for testing, and for plenty of smaller commercial systems. No account, no key, no expiry to keep an eye on.

And it isn't a trial. There's no thirty-day clock and no stripped-down feature set – it's the same EventSourcingDB, with the same capabilities, simply run below the event threshold. If an instance never crosses 25,000 events, it never costs a cent, and nothing about it degrades to remind you that you're on the free tier. In practice, that also means the instances you run locally for development and testing usually stay free on their own; a license is for the instances that actually cross the threshold, which is typically the ones in production.

Above that threshold, you need a license, and this is where the new options come in. The commercial license stays at 2,500 EUR per instance per year, and now also comes as a quarterly license at 750 EUR – three months at a time, for when a full year is more commitment than you want to make up front. Both terms renew automatically, and both are, as before, tied to a single instance: if you run several instances, each one needs its own license.

For individual developers, there is now a dedicated license at 360 EUR per year, or 120 EUR per quarter. It unlocks exactly the same functionality as the commercial license – technically, the two are identical – but at a fraction of the cost. It exists for one reason: a person building on EventSourcingDB in their own time, out of their own pocket, shouldn't pay the same as a company.

All prices are net and quoted per instance. The current figures, along with the details on VAT, always live in the licensing documentation – that page is the source of truth, and this post is the story behind it.

Why We Priced It This Way

Every decision in this model comes back to one idea: you should be able to understand what EventSourcingDB costs without talking to us first.

That's why the prices are public and fixed. There's no "contact sales" wall in front of the common cases, no per-seat arithmetic, no quote that quietly depends on how much we think you can afford. You read the number, and the number is the number.

The prices are not just public, they're predictable. We charge per instance, and only per instance – never per seat, per core, or per event written. What you pay follows the shape of your system, not its success: it doesn't climb because you hired three more engineers or had a strong month for traffic. Once an instance is licensed, its event count stops mattering – the price is the same whether it holds thirty thousand events or three hundred million. And how many instances you run, including whether each service gets its own or they share one, is an architectural decision you'd weigh regardless of what we charge.

It's also why the individual developer license exists at all. Charging a solo developer the same as a company was never fair – and "just stay on the free tier forever" stops being an answer the moment a real project crosses 25,000 events. A separate, lower rate is the straightforward fix, and it unlocks the full product rather than a cut-down version of it.

And it's why the quarterly term sits next to the yearly one. Not every project wants to commit twelve months ahead. Three months at a time lowers the bar to getting started without locking you into a year you're not yet sure about. If the project grows, the yearly term is right there; if it doesn't, you were never overcommitted.

It's worth saying plainly why EventSourcingDB costs anything at all. An event store is the backbone of whatever runs on top of it – it has to be there, correct and maintained, for as long as those systems live, which is often measured in years. We would rather fund that with a clear, sustainable price than with the familiar free-until-it-isn't playbook, where the tool a business was built on gets acquired, hollowed out, or quietly shut down the moment its growth story stalls. We've been working toward this since we founded the native web in 2012, and the pricing exists to keep EventSourcingDB around just as long.

There's one more decision that matters more than any of the prices, and you only see it when a license comes to an end.

When a License Ends, Your Data Stays Yours

Pricing is ultimately a question of trust, and the moment that trust gets tested is when a license lapses. Some systems treat that moment as leverage: miss a payment, and your data disappears behind a paywall.

EventSourcingDB doesn't. When a license expires, the database drops into read-only mode, and all of your data stays fully accessible. You can query it, replay it, and read every event you ever wrote. What you can't do is write new events beyond the free tier's threshold until you renew. Nothing is silently switched off, and nothing is held hostage – the system stays as transparent and predictable as it was the day before.

The same spirit runs through how licenses are checked in the first place. A license is simply a key file that you point EventSourcingDB at; there is no online activation and no phoning home. EventSourcingDB never contacts an external server to verify your license, which is exactly what you need in an air-gapped network or a high-security zone. Your database doesn't depend on our servers being reachable – or, for that matter, on us being around at all.

Startups, Non-Profits, and Serious Scale

Three situations don't fit neatly into a fixed price, and for those we'd rather have a short conversation than make you force-fit yourself into the wrong box.

If you're running EventSourcingDB at real scale, across many instances, volume licensing brings the per-instance price down accordingly. If you're a startup still finding your footing, or a non-profit or a similar organization where every euro is already spoken for, reduced terms are available on request. None of these hide behind a form and a waiting period – they're just a matter of asking.

If any of that sounds like you, write to us at hello@thenativeweb.io and tell us a little about what you're building. We'll work out something that fits.

Which License Fits You?

If you take away one practical thing from this post, let it be this short walk through the options. Start at the top and stop at the first line that describes you:

  • Storing fewer than 25,000 events? Use the free tier. No license, no key, nothing to buy.
  • Building as a private individual, with no company of your own? The individual developer license is yours, at 360 EUR a year or 120 EUR a quarter.
  • Working as, or on behalf of, a company or team? That's the commercial license, at 2,500 EUR a year or 750 EUR a quarter.
  • Running many instances, or at large scale? Ask us about volume licensing.
  • A startup or a non-profit? Ask us about reduced terms.

The line most worth reading twice is the boundary between the individual and the commercial license. The individual developer license is meant for natural persons, with the invoice made out to you personally. The moment a company is involved – including a single-person GmbH, a UG, or a registered sole proprietorship – the commercial license applies, even if you work entirely on your own and think of yourself as an individual developer.

A Price That Meets You Where You Are

We opened by admitting that a single price, however simple, was never quite fair. The point of this new model is to keep the simplicity and fix the fairness – to make what you pay match the way you actually build. The prices are on the page, in public, with no contact form and no sales call in the way. The free tier is real. The individual rate exists because charging a solo developer like a corporation was never right. And if your situation is genuinely unusual, the door is open – you just have to knock.

If you want the exact figures, the VAT details, and the fine print all in one place, the licensing documentation has every last bit of it. And if you're not storing 25,000 events yet, there's nothing to decide at all: install EventSourcingDB and start building – the pricing question can wait until you actually need to answer it.