Umur from Citus here. Our goal is to make CitusDB an enabler for your growth by making scaling out simple for you and your dev, ops and analyst teams. If we've made it a tax instead and haven't saved you significant time, effort and complexity in the process, we're not doing our job.

At a practical level, we offer several ways to accomplish this: - We provide free, open-source extensions on standard PostgreSQL (pg_shard, cstore_fdw) - We provide a free community edition of CitusDB for added functionality (e.g. massively parallel analytic queries, distributed joins) - For enterprises, we provide a sitewide, unlimited license of CitusDB Enterprise. For smaller projects there, we provide support and a per-node license. - For start-ups, we provide a flat rate of CitusDB Enterprise irrespective of your data volume.

The right approach depends on the company and the use-case. Either way, and given the quick time-to-deployment, any of the approaches should end up as a major cost saver.