Enterprise licenses for on premise Neo4j are certainly for a specific customers with specific needs, but there is always the DBaaS (https://neo4j.com/cloud/aura/).

Or if you absolutely need on premise and are small there is the startup program for free enterprise licenses (https://neo4j.com/startups/)

Neo4j's entire pricing model, even in cloud, is built around the idea that you'll have one centralized very large graph.

Many companies, like the one I'm at, have the opposite use case -- many, geo-distributed, tiny graphs and multiple (read: 3-5) pre-prod environments. They simply don't have a pricing model that supports customers like us.

They wanted to charge us something like 10% of our ARR for something that was just a component of one microservice.

"Many tiny graphs" seems like an interesting use case for Postgres or even SQLite, seeing as it also supports recursive query.

tiny compared to the scale they're looking to sell but not exactly small. Also network-isolated.

A graph db is the right tool for this use case. Just not really theirs, although it could if they could understand how to sell it to us at a fair price.

I don't think you're actually supposed to use CE in a production environment, it's more there for learning and teaching, which is why it's free. If you want production grade then use the cloud offering.