During the current month plus one full month after creating a node without a license, everything works: backups and restores (both manual and automatic), all monitoring and maintenance tasks, AI advisors and more. After that, basic monitoring continues to work, along with manual operations such as backups, restores, copying databases and more. The databases you create using 123cluster are your databases, your data, your business. Everything continues working as normal: we don't change network settings, users, passwords or anything else that would keep you from using your databases.

If your license expires, access to the automatic platform features will be restricted. You can still run manual tasks and access your databases as you did before, with no disruption.

If any node in a cluster has an expired license, the other nodes continue working as usual. We suggest performing a manual switchover so the leader is a licensed node, enabling automatic backups, monitoring, AI advisors, and other automatic tasks on the leader.

No — there's no platform-imposed limit on the number of nodes you can create with or without a license. In practice, the number is limited by your own infrastructure capacity. Just make sure to follow our sizing chart for the size of the 123cluster server that holds the nodes' configuration and monitoring data.

Yes, you can. While licenses are automatically coupled to the newest nodes you create, you can move a license from one node to another using the configuration page / license manager. The only limitation is that licenses can only be moved between nodes of the same database type and infrastructure: for example, from one Postgres node on a VM to another Postgres node on a VM.

No. License cost is affected by the database engine, infrastructure, monitoring, AI add-ons, license duration and number of nodes.

123cluster currently supports PostgreSQL and MongoDB on Proxmox, VMware, your own VMs, AWS EC2 instances and Azure compute nodes.

A node is a single VM or Kubernetes/OpenShift container running a single database instance.

The 2 data nodes (primary and secondary) are counted as 2 licensed nodes, regardless of their size, CPU or memory. The arbiter is not counted toward licensing.

Yes, standbys and replicas are monitored and maintained like any other primary or standalone node and are licensed accordingly.

PayPal: license is sent immediately after payment. Credit or debit card: license is sent immediately after payment. Bank transfer / quote-based payment: we send you a quote, you pay and send us proof of payment and we send the license key.

Unfortunately, no. Once you've received a license key, we're not able to alter it technically.

Monitoring history, backup retention, export retention and other node-related data are maintained according to the cluster size settings on the configuration page. If your database node goes out of license and you later purchase a new license, all of the above information is retained as if the node had been licensed the whole time. Note that during the unlicensed period, there are no new automatic backups, exports, AI advisory reports or monitoring data generated.

Yes, discounts are built into the price calculator. Try different numbers of nodes and durations there to see exact pricing.

No difference: running without a license behaves the same way whether you're in the initial trial window or have simply chosen not to license a node long-term, as described in Q1.

Licensed nodes are covered by our support during business hours, 8 AM–5 PM, via email to support@123cluster.com or by opening a ticket at https://www.123cluster.com/support. We encourage using the support portal over email, since it's better monitored and keeps a precise record of the request. We currently do not offer 24×7 support.

We currently do not support taking over an existing node or database instance. This is because when we create a database node, we build a full management environment around it, including a dedicated user, database parameters, the 123cluster schema and more.