Did RethinkDB ever actually attempt to get people to pay for it? The massive, gaping hole at the heart of this analysis is "maybe we failed because we gave our product away for free as open source"?
Yes, my company paid for RethinkDB over a year before they shut down. They sold support to us for $100, and of course their engineers did far more than $100 of bug fixing for us. The reality was that RethinkDB was a very difficult product to create and when you pushed it hard in production it had some serious bugs. The other core issue is that pretty much the same unique problem RethinkDB solved for us (data storage and changefeeds) could be much better solved using a different architecture and better database (PostgreSQL with LISTEN/NOTIFY). https://blog.cocalc.com/2017/02/09/rethinkdb-vs-postgres.htm...
A support contract for $100 !!! Wow, I thought I'd heard it all but that one is new. Even cheap consultants I know won't sell you only $100 worth of time.
