Why Community is actually free: the honest economics of our free tier
Full engine, production use, no license, no meter, no time bomb. Here's why giving the small end away is the rational structure, not a teaser.
Free tiers earn suspicion because most are traps: crippled engines, trial clocks, or usage meters that detonate at success. Crowkis Community is none of these — all seven intelligence systems, every protocol, real production use, capped only at 3 tenants and 100K entries. The cap is scale, not capability. A solo developer or small team can run it forever and owe us nothing.
The economics are honestly self-interested. Below the cap, you were never going to pay — charging you would only shrink the pool of people who know the product works. Above the cap, you're an organization with compliance needs, unlimited tenants, and a procurement process — and you'll arrive at that conversation already running Crowkis, already convinced by your own dashboard.
Four doors in, one cache, and the model only sees genuinely new questions.
The structure also disciplines us: Community users churn instantly if quality slips, so the free tier is a standing quality gate on every release. We can't ship a bad version and hide it behind a sales process. CockroachDB and Sentry proved this model builds better software, not just bigger funnels.
The bottom line
So take the free tier at face value, in production, indefinitely. The only thing it costs is that one day, if you grow past three tenants, you'll already know exactly who to call.