Would be far easier to recommend CockroachDB if it were more competitive with Planetscale.
The project called for a minimum of 4 replicas and likely 8 vCPUs per, so right off the bat that's close to $60k/year before you even do anything. Plus the unwelcome addition of "license anxiety" to the whole development experience, and being forced to make a big decision up front.. it's not how I like to work or what a startup needs.
In my understanding, last time I talked to sales it's approximately 3x worse (because Planetscale offers 1 primary + 2 replicas) with CockroachDB you'd have to triple the CockroachDB license fees to even be competitive to achieve the same HA .... on hardware you purchase and run yourself.
For example, planetscale charges 3x as much per gb of storage if I read the pricing correctly.
I remain curious about the perception that cockroach is a meaningfully more expensive product. Where does that idea come from?
weather it's a good idea to commit to it if you might not want to afford it once your revenue went up is another matter
and 10M$ annually is not little but also no absurdly huge, I mean a ~80 person company probably will struggle to be profitable with that revenue (if it's 80 good paying jobs like software developer).