We're open to paying once we're rolling. It's more that you've so far only said "basic is $400" and it isn't clear what that means or what will drive people to "more than basic." It's hard to get suprised, and then be waiting for the "fool me twice" pricing to come. I've been a fan of your work since Typhoeus and that's part of why I was happy to bet on you making influx amazing. I just didn't see the pricing risk coming (maybe I should have). For our perspective, the pricing issue is scary because a load test can be high volume without the normal correlation to "really big enterprise business" that makes it a good way to price.
That will be released and documented with 0.12, which should be in April.
What I meant by basic was that it would be a highly available cluster but not have other features that we have planned. It'll have recoverability, hinted handoff, anti-entropy for eventual consistency and a management and monitoring UI. It will most likely be limited by the number of cores.
Other features like role based access control and other applications we haven't started building yet will be in other pricing packages.
We haven't yet figured out the pricing for scale out clusters and those other features.
And when it comes time to scale out you still won't be able to afford the commercial version?
Or you could write your own sharding proxy or layer in your application.