I really hope they’re more lenient than that. Having a database go offline because their telemetry servers are down, slow, or unreachable seems inconvenient.

I guess this is fine for a free _trial_, if you can host it in some separate firewalled-off subnet where it doesn't touch your real customer data.

The issue here is that if you're an org with less than $10M turnover, you're currently on the Core plan and don't want to negotiate the full "Enterprise" licence (which is presumably priced towards larger users than you anyway), then you can't use the thing at all anymore unless you agree to telemetry and some vague disclosure of personal data thing that will get your lawyers in a spin (especially if you serve states in which GDPR applies).

EDIT: oh, and PCI-DSS requirements if you want to take credit cards? That's going to be fun.

Sure, but I'm not sure why they wouldn't just use a signed license file with a start- and stop-date in this case. Lots of companies, especially enterprises, run air-gaps and telemetry just won't work there. And they should know that... it's their target market after all...