This is a big change in pricing approach. Previously the licensing was $5k/year and still is for on-prem. Although you could run datomic for free for 1 year and longer as long as you never upgraded it.
https://www.datomic.com/get-datomic.html
Now they are offering an approach where one can at least start at $1/day (Every time you scale out this goes up? What is the cost of support?).
The cheapest way to get started is probably still to run what is now called "on-prem AWS" (for up to 1 year), which there is already cloudformation for.
https://docs.datomic.com/on-prem/aws.html
Cloud is definitely the preferred way to get started if you are on AWS. When running the On-Prem version you also have to manage (and pay for) storage. Cloud also puts less load on DynamoDB, which can dominate your spend.
Now they are offering an approach where one can at least start at $1/day (Every time you scale out this goes up? What is the cost of support?).
The cheapest way to get started is probably still to run what is now called "on-prem AWS" (for up to 1 year), which there is already cloudformation for. https://docs.datomic.com/on-prem/aws.html