· launch · offer · product
Why your first database is free — for life, not for fourteen days
By David Klippel, founder of dbexpertAI
Every database tool gives you a free trial. Fourteen days, thirty if they’re generous — enough time to configure the thing, not enough for your database to have an interesting incident. Then the countdown pressures you into a decision based on a demo dataset and a hunch.
We’re doing something different, and I want to explain the reasoning plainly: your first connected database is free. For life. Not a trial, not a tier with the good parts removed — the full product: every detection path, the full 90-second cadence, complete diagnoses with root cause, evidence, and resolution steps. On one database, forever, at no cost.
Why this makes sense for us
The honest version: dbexpertAI demos itself better than we can demo it.
Our pitch is “connect a database, wait 90 seconds, see real issues found.” That pitch has a property most B2B software doesn’t: it’s falsifiable in two minutes. Either the diagnosis that comes back tells you something true and useful about your production system, or it doesn’t. No slide deck survives contact with that test — and no slide deck is as convincing as passing it.
A time-boxed trial fights the product’s actual adoption curve. The trust that matters gets built the first time dbexpertAI catches something real before your team did — a starved autovacuum, a plan flip, a replica quietly losing its oplog window. That might happen in week one or month three; databases break on their own schedule. Free-for-life means the product is still there, still diagnosing, when your database finally does something interesting.
And when it does: you have other databases. That’s the business model. The first one earns the rest at $50/month each, self-serve — a number that only feels fair after you’ve watched the product work, which is precisely the point of the offer.
What “the one that pages you” means
Advice we give every new signup: don’t connect your tidiest database. Connect the one that pages people — the one with the recurring mystery slowdown, the one nobody wants to be on call for.
Two reasons. First, that’s where the diagnosis has the most to find, so it’s the fastest honest test of whether we’re worth anything. Second, the free database isn’t a loss-leader we hope you’ll ignore — the detection paths run identically on free and paid databases, and a hard case exercises them properly.
The fine print, which is short
One database instance, connected via the standard read-only on-prem agent — same security model as everything else: your data never leaves your network. Free means free: no card required, no cadence throttling, no “insights held back for premium.” If you disconnect it and connect a different one, the new one is your free one. We reserve the right to feel silly about this offer someday; databases connected before we do stay free.
Claim it on the contact page — tell us which system you run (any of the five SQL systems) and what hurts. You’ll be reading your first diagnosis shortly after.