alt Hacker NewsThe thing that worries me the most about Turso is that rather than the small, stable team running SQLite, Turso is a VC backed startup trying to capitalize on the AI boom. I can easily see how SQLite's development is sustainable, but not Turso's. They're currently trying to grow their userbase as quickly as possible with their free open source offering, but when they have investors breathing down their necks asking about how they're going to get 100x returns I'm not sure how long that'll last. VCs generally expect companies they invest in to grow to $100 million in revenue in 5-10 years. If your use of their technology doesn't help them get there, you should expect to be rugpulled at some point.
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Yeah, that's not a good environment for this kind of engineering. You need long term stability for a project like this, slow incremental development with a long term plan, and that's antithetical to VC culture.
On the other hand, Rust code and the culture of writing Rust leads to far more modularity, so maybe some useful stuff will come of it even if the startup fails.
I have been excited to see real work on databases in Rust, there are massive opportunities there.
I was excited about this for a second until seeing your comment.
Unless you are Amazon which has the resources to maintain a fork (which is questionable by itself with all the layoffs), you probably shouldn't touch this.
Some lessons about the modern distaste for copyleft here IMO
Completely agree, I'm looking at pretty much all software this way nowadays.
We've all been around long enough to know that "free" VC-backed software always means "free... until it's in our interest to charge for it". And yet users will still complain about the rugpull in 2026, no matter how many times they've been through it. "Fool me once, shame on you"
I too am weary of VC incentives but:
1) It's MIT licensed. Including the test suite which is something lacking in SQLite:
https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso
2) They have a paid cloud option to drive income from:
https://turso.tech/pricing