CrescoDB is small and new. Before you put a client's project on it, the fair question is what happens to that project if we are not here in two years. This page answers it, in the order that actually matters.
Most of the answer is not a promise. It is how the thing is built, and you can check it yourself today rather than taking our word for it.
This is the part people assume is the same as every other platform, and it is not. If CrescoDB switched off tonight, here is what happens to a deployed app:
What you would lose is the control plane: scheduled backups, the restore checks, alerts, and the dashboard. That is real, and it is the part you pay for. None of it is load-bearing for your app staying up.
Compare that honestly against a hosted backend where your data lives in their cluster. There, "what if you shut down" has no good answer. Here it is a change in service, not an outage.
You do not have to trust the paragraph above. Run this now, on day one, before you have committed anything to us:
That writes a folder containing your project, your schema, every row of your data as plain SQL, the engine packaged into the folder, and a Dockerfile and compose file that run it. Then:
Your API is live, with no CrescoDB account and no connection to us.
Two things worth being precise about, because a promise you have to squint at is not worth making:
And underneath even that: data.sql is plain SQL. Not a snapshot only our software can read. psql, mysql and sqlite3 all load it, and so does anything else that speaks SQL. If you decide to stop using CrescoDB entirely, your data leaves with you and you need neither our permission nor our software to read it.
Full documentation for cresco eject.
The two sections above cover your app and your data. This covers the engine itself.
The commitment. If CRESCO AI LTD ceases operating, the source code of the CrescoDB CLI and database engine will be published under the Apache License 2.0.
What triggers it. Any one of the following:
What is covered. The CLI and the database engine: the code that runs your project. That is the part you would need to keep going.
What is not covered. Customer data of any kind, and the credentials and keys belonging to the Cloud control plane. Publishing other people's data or the keys guarding their servers would be a breach, not a courtesy, and nothing here will ever do it.
It is not open source, and we are not going to describe it as open source, because the difference is the whole point. CrescoDB is closed source and privately owned, and it stays that way for as long as it is running. This clause is insurance against the one case where there is nobody left to own it.
We are also not claiming this is generous. It costs us nothing while we are alive, which is exactly why we can commit to it and mean it.
Because the fear is reasonable and it is specific. Developers have watched free tiers get removed, watched projects get paused, and watched platforms disappear with their data inside. "There is no sustainability guarantee for these platforms" is a fair thing to say about us too.
We cannot promise you we will still be here in two years. Nobody honest can. What we can do is make sure the answer does not depend on it.
If something here is unclear or you want it in writing for a client, email hello@crescodb.com.