Why Crowkis refuses to meter you
A cache exists to make costs predictable. Metering the cache would be self-defeating. So Community is free and Enterprise is flat per cluster — priced on a call, not a meter.
There's a quiet absurdity in the market: cost-reduction tools billed by usage, so the more they save you, the more they cost. A metered cache puts a tollbooth on your savings and re-introduces the exact anxiety — variable, traffic-coupled spend — that caching was hired to eliminate. We find this philosophically embarrassing, so we don't do it.
Crowkis pricing has two shapes only. Community: free, forever, full engine, no license file, no sign-up, capped at a scale (3 tenants, 100K entries) where charging you would cost more goodwill than it earns. Enterprise: flat per cluster per year, settled in one conversation. Your millionth lookup costs what your first did — nothing marginal, ever.
The wall is enforced before the invoice, not discovered on it.
Flat pricing also changes how you build: no one architects around their cache's billing meter, no one rations lookups, no finance review flags the cache line item growing with success. The component fades into infrastructure, which is the highest compliment infrastructure can receive.
The bottom line
The model is borrowed from the self-host greats — license file, offline verification, predictable renewals — because it aligns the vendor with the customer: we profit when you renew, and you renew when the thing quietly works. Meters align vendors with your traffic. We'd rather be aligned with your success.