I have to agree with everything @vanilla has said, it is really not easy for a small company to engage with Couchbase, the ecosystem is geared to corporate clients who will have access to multiple developers creating native mobile applications, small companies like myself that choose technology stacks for hybrid development in order to minimize costs are not adequately catered for. My company used Ionic which in turn uses the cordova plugin which when I last looked was helplessly out of date and the documentation around it was archaic.
@papa-n1ql asked what features should be prioritized for CE and mentioned internal discussions around this. The fact is that small companies need to start with the CE edition to save costs but they need to deploy a live production ready platform in order to onboard customers. Once they have customers they will be able to invest in licenses.
For me the answer is very very simple … enable small companies with the CE edition to be able build platforms that can be seemlessly migrated to the Enterprise edition when the platform starts to become successful.
For me this means -
1 - Always have latest update of CE in line and to the same quality as EE and always provide patches and updates to CE at the same time as EE - If my application is not robust and bug free, I won’t get customers and I won’t reach the point where EE becomes commercially viable
2 - Couchbase lite encryption is required for CE - If I approach a client and they ask if my databases are encrypted and I say no, then for a lot of clients this is a show stopper
3 - Robust and fully up to date, tested and certified plugins for hybrid frameworks - This would really really help
I agree with @vanilla that couchbase is a brilliant database and that is why I want to use it. If you could just remove the chicken and egg situation for small businesses and allow them to start small and grow seemlessy to become EE customers.