Funny story: I worked at a place which spent millions annually with Oracle. They had a couple hours downtime every day because they couldn’t afford the online backup product.

This was an Ivy League university with an endowment in the tens of billions.

This is not true. There is no separate licensing for archivelog mode (the single thing that is needed for online backups).

That may be the case now but it was either different back then or neither their Oracle-trained DBAs nor their Oracle consultants was aware of it.

I was working with an even worse Oracle product (Hyperion) which had a convoluted homegrown script restarting all of the services on a number of servers to work around their inability to reliably handle database connection failures lasting more than a short interval. Before do that, they’d tried to get rid of the backup window but were told that wasn’t possible unless they could come up with a large amount of money for the license.