[HN Gopher] Baserow.io - Self-hosted Airtable alternative
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Baserow.io - Self-hosted Airtable alternative
Author : punnerud
Score : 721 points
Date : 2021-03-13 19:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (baserow.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (baserow.io)
| thedays wrote:
| Looks great. I suggest you get rid of the decimal point and two
| decimals in the pricing so it's simpler to understand, especially
| for people outside Europe that use commas in numbers differently.
|
| EUR4 per user / month
|
| is much easier to read and understand for most people than
|
| EUR 4,00 per user / month
|
| The comma made it look a bit odd and like EUR400 initially when I
| glanced at it and it just seems like an unnecessary level of
| precision to include the two decimal points when they are both
| zero anyway.
| sickmate wrote:
| A perfect use case for Number.prototype.toLocaleString.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
| remram wrote:
| "From EUR 1.000 p/m" is even worse. I was not even aware of any
| locale using ',' for decimals and '.' for thousands.
| Kiro wrote:
| Probably German.
| gog wrote:
| Majority of European countries use a decimal comma.
| cornzsty wrote:
| Finns use a space. It's best to use some library, built-
| in or otherwise to make sure it's the correct one.
| remram wrote:
| I'm French, where we use a comma for decimals, but a
| space for thousands.
| jsilence wrote:
| +1 for excellent Cloudron support!
| abinaya_rl wrote:
| I just literally searched for Web GUI client for Postgres and I
| was going through the Google Search results. Just in time noticed
| this awesome tool came up in HN. Really great man. I would like
| to become a paid customer once it's live.
| steve_taylor wrote:
| Did you come across BaseDash? It was announced on HN a few
| months ago.
|
| https://www.basedash.com/
| chaps wrote:
| Can who's who's used this share their experiences with this?
| Sounds interesting, but it's going to be a hard sell for
| collaboration work with airtable already.. on the table.
| iampims wrote:
| The documentation is excellent. It's so rare to see such well
| written documentation with just the right learning curve.
| tylermenezes wrote:
| I am so excited for this software. I have used Airtable
| extensively, and it's a pile of garbage. Here are just a FEW of
| the "features" Airtable charges $24/user/mo for:
|
| - Reliable 1-5 hours a month of downtime. There are months where
| it's literally 1 nine of uptime. Their status page was actually
| down for a while (I think they forgot to renew it?)
|
| - Simple and obvious bugs in the official API clients have not
| been fixed for years (for example, Promises in the official JS
| library throw the string `[object Object]` for all exceptions.)
|
| - The API has no way to query the structure of a table, you have
| to infer it from the first few records. (The auto-generated API
| documentation is actually wrong if you don't have a fully-filled-
| in row somewhere in the first few rows.)
|
| - You can't modify a table configuration by API... except you can
| _sometimes_ by adding a parameter which is documented to try to
| convert dates, but actually modifies field definitions for a
| number of fields. Documentation for which fields is entirely in
| scattered forum posts from users.
|
| - Booleans in the API are `true` or `undefined`. Seriously.
|
| This is all /barely/ worth it because Google Docs doesn't work
| when you need a large structured database with many
| collaborators. But man is it bad software.
| wdb wrote:
| Yeah, most SaaS solutions have this problem. GitLab wants you
| to pay $80/user/mo to be able to get dependency scanning or
| vulnerability scanning. While Github gives you that for free.
| They could at least include it in their $20/user/month tier.
| maigret wrote:
| At some point you have to pay a price to maintain a
| competition in the ecosystem. We all know what happens when
| there is only a player left. Microsoft can just sink billions
| in side games like Teams and GitHub at the moment.
| wdb wrote:
| Personally, I think these two features should be part of
| the $20 tier and not the most expensive one. I don't
| understand why I have to pay $60/user/month more to get
| some UI integration which I can also get when paying for
| GitHub Enterprise for similar price as GitLab's $20 tier
| tthun wrote:
| Try force.com (fully featured developer account is free with
| limits), very stable and fully featured PaaS with long tail of
| features. On a quick review Airtable as a slick/modern UX on
| less sound architecture than force.com, probably shipping
| features in a breakneck pace.
| throwaway86310 wrote:
| Can't say if I just got rick-rolled.
| andrenotgiant wrote:
| salesforce.com? can't tell if you're making a joke,
| recommending SalesForce, or there's another company called
| force with a different TLD.
| tthun wrote:
| Not a Joke. I am recommending Salesforce.com's PaaS
| offering (used to licensed as force.com, now called
| "platform" [0]). Expensive, but it is IMHO the best low
| code cloud platform there is that has got every aspect
| (Apps, Identity, Security, ACLs, Workflows and Triggers,
| APIs) right.
|
| [0] https://www.salesforce.com/editions-pricing/platform/
| zwily wrote:
| I have never used a Salesforce app that was not terrible.
| I'm sure it provides lots of value to the business who
| use it, but it is awful awful for end users it is thrust
| upon.
| atonse wrote:
| My experience with Salesforce is exactly the promise of
| low code. Because you can get a lot more done without
| needing to be a software engineer, it empowers a whole
| extra set of people to build software without having to
| think in terms of reusability, performance, scalability,
| or a coherent data model. And you see the results of
| that.
|
| I think as a platform it's really powerful. (I've arrived
| at that after years of looking at it with disdain). But
| it's problematic from our perspective exactly because it
| throws out anything we consider good habits of software
| development.
| the_duke wrote:
| Just hearing Salesforce should make you run as fast as
| you can , if you value your sanity as a developer.
|
| Salesforce is unbeatable in marketing and sales strategy,
| but the products are horrible.
| tthun wrote:
| > sanity as a developer Low code is targeted at app
| building experience for non-developers/citizen coders.
| Curious if you have personal experience with the
| Salesforce platform and can provide details on some of
| your biggest gripes with it. I have used it with great
| success in building simple "textbox on database"
| applications that are easy to maintain and change.
|
| > hearing Salesforce alone What do you think about
| heroku?
|
| I am genuinely interested in alternatives that is cheaper
| and don't charge per user.
| sporkland wrote:
| Force.com used to be a dedicated domain for salesforce's
| easy to use enterprise development platform, which is quite
| popular. Seems like they've rolled it back under
| salesforce.com as a page.
| grioghar wrote:
| I'm so glad it's not just me.
|
| I have been unimpressed with the over-complication and
| the...lacking API.
| alexashka wrote:
| Just curious - what do you use airtable for exactly?
|
| When do you need a structured database with many collaborators?
|
| Airtable and the like strike me as a database tool for dummies
| who want 'anyone change anything anytime', which is just a
| recipe for no one knowing who the hell is changing what and
| when anymore.
| chrisdone wrote:
| It's my understanding that the main selling feature of
| AirTable is the hard coded views that they offer; calendars,
| kanban style planners, things like that. The slightly more
| structured nature of relational tables over spreadsheets lets
| you implement those fairly reliably.
| xupybd wrote:
| Yeah it's common in business. Normally it's in a spreadsheet
| on a shared drive, so this is a step up.
|
| Businesses change fast and don't always have internal
| development resources to create an application to do this
| sort of thing.
| auxym wrote:
| I use the free tier as a collaborative Kanban board for a
| tiny 5 person team.
|
| Airtable allows me to define arbitrary fields for the Kanban
| cards, which happens to be a premium/paid feature in all the
| actual Kanban saas tools (Trello, etc).
| sofixa wrote:
| It isn't on Jira if you're <10 users, but Jira is a whole
| lot more than just Kanban and a huge beast.
| auxym wrote:
| JIRA would not just overkill but a bad fit for us,
| potentially requiring extensive configuration.
|
| We're an academic research lab that also happens to do
| contractual work for other labs (mostly internal to the
| university), mostly designing and building mechanical
| prototypes and testbeds for other researchers.
|
| It took like 5 minutes to set up an airtable base to
| track our WIP and all information we use for billing our
| "customers": hours, material purchased, internal budget
| reference, etc.
| onetom wrote:
| It sounds like https://notion.so can do that too, besides
| being a real-time collaborative document editor, wiki,
| spreadsheet, etc etc
| sporkland wrote:
| Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes (and to a lesser extent
| SharePoint) both had these characteristics and are quite
| popular for the long tail of business processes that aren't
| covered by dedicated vendors. The only problem is the tech
| tends to age and it becomes hard to migrate the 1000+ bespoke
| "apps" that live inside the enterprise.
| elwell wrote:
| I agree that Airtable is expensive, but I've found their custom
| app development experience to be quite nice.
| Vmody2 wrote:
| > - Booleans in the API are `true` or `undefined`. Seriously.
|
| But why???
| unixhero wrote:
| Because they are not real boolean datatype, just strings
| probably.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Wonder what they use underneath; don't most relation dbs
| implement as int?
| aidos wrote:
| When you're doing dynamic structure in relational dbs
| (traditionally) options include storing a wide row with
| all the data types and you choose which column to use, or
| storing as lowest common denominator (string) and casting
| in and out at runtime. These days you can work around
| this stuff with json / schemaless models.
|
| Airtable allow switching data types on a column (from
| memory). Maybe they store everything as string and then
| the column definition is for display and allowed
| operations.
|
| Hubspot do this (poorly) so they're forever giving you
| back things like dates as string of a number representing
| a date.
| steQ wrote:
| Self hosted and open source alternative is https://directus.io/
|
| They switch from PHP to Node recently
| dehugger wrote:
| I loaded up the demo and am impressed with what you'e achieved.
| However I cannot find any way to add column restraints, or
| mention of how to do so in any of the documentation.
|
| Is there really no way to mark a column as "not null" or make a
| unique id that auto generates, or say a date column that gets set
| on insert?
|
| I don't think these are very advanced features to ask of a SQL
| database and am confused why they appear to be missing.
| chrisblackwell wrote:
| I will be using this, and dropping a lot of my paid AirTable
| bases...and let me please explain why.
|
| Airtable makes it VERY hard to collaborate with people outside my
| organization. We are a team of 7 people. No longer a scrappy
| 1-person startup, but not an enterprise client by any-means.
|
| If I want to add a single person to an Airtable base, that's $24
| a month please. I have one client with 12 people that want to
| collaborate on the base by posting comments. I can't justify $288
| a month just to keep the comments for all time.I contacted
| Airtable about this and was told the "Enterprise Plan" would be a
| perfect fit. Minimum $15k a year commitment.
|
| Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be
| either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there
| is nothing in-between?
| tyingq wrote:
| It does seem odd for those "low code" tools to not have a way
| to deal with "external users". For example, it would be logical
| to create a tool for accepting job candidates. The internal
| facing piece would be limited to some reasonable number of
| users, but the outward facing piece would have to allow anyone
| to submit a record.
|
| I do know that knack.com has a pricing model based on number of
| records instead of number of users. Might be an option for you,
| depending on how many records you have.
| PebblesRox wrote:
| Airtable does allow you to create a publishable form view so
| that anyone can submit a new record.
|
| You can also add read-only users to a base without having to
| pay for them. But giving them any kind of edit access (even
| just the ability to add comments to records) requires a full-
| fledged user account.
| ig1 wrote:
| There's a few factors at play;
|
| 1) There's customers who will pay 15k for the exact same
| users/features as you're willing to pay <3k for. If they
| offered a cheap package then those customers wouldn't pay for
| the expensive package.
|
| 2) Sub enterprise customers are a pain, they're often as
| expensive as enterprise customers (acquisition, support, etc)
| but with significantly less revenue and higher churn. When a
| company decides where to focus it's going to go where the money
| is.
| social_quotient wrote:
| I'm small'ish agency and we have clients with lots of
| stakeholders often that just need to be added to artifact
| systems like this for formal reasons but they aren't active
| enough to justify the costs.
|
| I totally get that they need to make money to keep making a
| good product and stay alive. It's a difficult problem.
|
| One idea - If small clients are a pain (because of support)
| then support should be a specific thing that can dialed in a
| bit. AWS is fantastic here. Noisy people are gonna pay for
| it... but if I'm small, yet not noisy, then I don't get hurt
| and can continue to drink the koolaid.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| The simple answer is to charge for support like every
| enterprise company does
| loceng wrote:
| "Why is this happening in the SasS world???"
|
| It's the VC-finance industrial complex expecting a drive
| towards an IPO to exit while offloading the risk and
| unsustainable fees to the general public via misaligned stock
| brokers buying/selling to get fees vs. only benefitting long-
| term if their picks earn profit.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| Are your tables large enough Office 365 can't handle it for a
| reasonable price?
| auxym wrote:
| Do you mean excel, or has Microsoft come out with an airtable
| clone?
|
| Excel is a really poor substitute for airtable.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| I mean Excel, and specifically for GP's use case.
| zokier wrote:
| MS has also PowerApps and Power BI. I have never touched
| them, and I hope I never need to. But they seem to play
| remotely in the same area.
| jasdine817 wrote:
| SharePoint Lists is designed to compete with Airtables.
| azernik wrote:
| Price discrimination is a hard problem! There's a conflict
| between soaking your customers for as much as they're willing
| to pay, and making your product accessible to customers that
| won't pay that much. Finding a feature set that the first set
| of customers absolutely needs and will pay extra for, but the
| second set can live without, is hard.
| donmcronald wrote:
| The problem is that pricing is expected to be the opposite of
| what it really should be. Companies with 10k users expect a
| discount, but the reality is they should be paying a lot more
| because building a product to serve 10k users is much harder
| than building a product to serve 10 users.
|
| On the flipside, why should I, as a small user, share in the
| cost of things like scalability, HA, SLAs, etc.? I don't need
| those things.
|
| Based on what I've seen in larger businesses, those things
| can be paper features. It doesn't matter if the small
| business edition has the same scalability and HA as the
| enterprise edition. Large businesses will still pay for the
| enterprise edition because they need to be able to show they
| paid for HA, etc. to cover their own asses if anything every
| goes wrong.
|
| Charge for scalability and reliability, not features IMO.
| sofixa wrote:
| Hard disagree. Scalability and reliability, and SSO[0] are
| basic features any piece of software should have. Even a
| one-person startup shouldn't have to accept a tool being
| down for a month or all of their data lost due to a fire in
| a datacenter. Charging extra for any of these is a very
| shitty business model.
|
| 0 - sso.tax
| donmcronald wrote:
| How much scalability does one person need? And no HA
| doesn't mean "down for a month". It means I have no issue
| with enduring a few hours of downtime here and there. And
| HA and backups aren't even related, so...
| sofixa wrote:
| One person could still require significant capacity -
| imagine an API with flight info, and your one person SaaS
| that does some magic with it by getting the data real
| time for all flights around the world.
|
| > And no HA doesn't mean "down for a month". It means I
| have no issue with enduring a few hours of downtime here
| and there
|
| No HA means downtime is expected and frequent ( baring
| crazy luck, but let's not base business on hope). If your
| invoicing, or project management, or note taking or
| whatever SaaS is down and you need it now to do something
| for a client of yours, how many hours of downtime can you
| accept?
|
| > And HA and backups aren't even related, so...
|
| You said scalability and reliability, good backups are a
| part of reliability. If a SaaS cheaps on backups and HA
| for small time clients like one-person companies or small
| startups, and then a fire burns it all ( but not
| entreprise customers, because their backups are
| replicated to another DC), is it OK because they were
| small?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Is it 1000x times harder to server 10K users?
| higeorge13 wrote:
| In some cases yes. I worked for a b2b company, which was
| not designed as multi-tenant and all their customers were
| under the same db and the same service. Now imagine
| response time for small business vs enterprises (yes they
| had a few of those paying premium, lol), sometimes the
| later was infinite.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Why is this happening in the SasS world?
|
| Because it works for them. I mean, they likely have customers
| for that $15k plan. And if they do, why would it be worth their
| time discussing <$24 plans that require extra dev time with
| you? (I don't mean it as a complaint - just awareness that for-
| profit companies will do for-profit things)
| markfer wrote:
| That's ridiculous. Collaborating with clients should almost
| always be free.
|
| Just out of curiosity, what kind of collaboration are you doing
| with clients? I'm the CEO of a platform specifically for
| businesses and their clients, and we loosely compete with
| Airtable.
| jerieljan wrote:
| > Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to
| be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think
| there is nothing in-between?
|
| The in-between for some software out there is "Guest access".
| Services like Notion, Miro and Mural have this figured out, but
| it is very disappointing that most do not.
| [deleted]
| donmcronald wrote:
| > Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise.
| Do they really think there is nothing in-between?
|
| Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or two
| issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level prices.
| $240 / year for idle users that barely participate? No thanks.
|
| And they have the same tone deaf solution; upgrade to Ultimate.
|
| Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because
| they have unlimited money to work with.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| Ah $240/year, I wish it were that cheap. If you want the
| security goodies is $1200/year/user. You have to make the
| impossible choice of getting everyone involved with the tool,
| or getting all the features. Because you can't afford the
| features AND the users.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality
| because they have unlimited money to work with.
|
| Disagree. The issue is that they don't _want_ cheap users. It
| lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation, and
| usually cheap users are the most demanding to support in
| relation to their revenue. A user that pays $50 /year and has
| 5 questions to support us very different than 5 questions
| from a user posting $5000/year
| Aeolun wrote:
| The problem is _getting_ those 5000 /month accounts if
| nobody wants to use your product before they get there.
| Swizec wrote:
| You'd be surprised. Those users come from sales more than
| self serve. Very different business model.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Who is going to buy your high touch sales offer if they
| see no one uses your product?
|
| Is this a thing where all the YC companies buy each
| other's stuff to prop up the revenue numbers until IPO?
| Swizec wrote:
| Have you tried buying from salesforce? Very high touch,
| very expensive, very unfit for small businesses, hugely
| successful and widely used.
|
| Different audiences, different approaches.
|
| Many successful businesses are such that none of us have
| ever heard of, but are making millions, sometimes
| billions. We haven't heard of them because we're not the
| target market and talking to us is a waste of resources.
| donmcronald wrote:
| I see the support excuse all the time, but I don't
| understand why it needs to be that way and I don't really
| believe it to be honest. Sell me a small business version
| that includes per-incident support. If someone has a
| problem and balks at the idea of paying fair value for the
| support they need, then I agree they're not worth having as
| a customer.
|
| If the goal is to ignore or be actively hostile towards the
| bottom 80%, I guess a lot of SaaS companies are succeeding.
| To me though, they're building poorer quality products that
| aren't going to capture enough up and coming businesses and
| the long term impact is going to be a bunch of bloated
| garbage with a ton of half baked features where everyone is
| competing for the "enterprise" dollars.
|
| > It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation
|
| To me, that's what it's really about. It's pump and dump
| quality SaaS that's built for an IPO, not for the users.
| Swizec wrote:
| > If the goal is to ignore or be actively hostile towards
| the bottom 80%, I guess a lot of SaaS companies are
| succeeding.
|
| Yes, that is the goal. When an org decides to target
| primarily enterprise, the whole business model changes.
| You go from self serve to sales, from support chat to
| SLAs, etc.
|
| You literally become unable to support small customers
| cost effectively and they are not worth your time.
|
| Happens a lot in the B2B SaaS space when companies
| realize how much easier it is to have 10 users for
| $10,000 than 1000 users for $10. Some companies decide to
| keep focusing on small businesses and indies, which is
| great.
|
| Ultimately there's room for both business models in the
| world. But as a business, _you_ have to make sure you
| work with businesses where you are [still] the target
| market.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Significantly damages your brand to do this and you'll
| defacto turn into a consulting company. Plus places
| incentives on your org to force things to be incidents
| since that's what pays. You'll get stuck in a local
| minimum of being a small-time consulting company.
|
| Or maybe you won't. But that's the reason I wouldn't want
| to do it.
|
| Besides, there's no way you can only access the no-
| support users. Google, for instance, offers one of these
| for their email product and are able to make the product
| free. In their case, they got brand awareness quite fast.
| But even though Google has Google One in the US if you
| want paid response, this forum frequently decries the
| lack of support.
|
| The problem is the users who occupy the no-support space
| cannot be selected as consumers. When you try to do that,
| you will get an army of users who want to not pay but who
| _do_ want support. They think they want no-support but
| they don 't, and they will retroactively rebrand their
| reasons to be more than money.
|
| That isn't bitterness or anything (I've always dealt with
| B2B software) but it's the reality of the thing as I can
| see.
| donmcronald wrote:
| I deal with a lot of small businesses and to me it feels
| like that entire sector of the industry is being
| abandoned. Most small businesses owners are practical and
| will pay for things when they need them, but they're
| fairly price sensitive and they expect good value for
| their money.
|
| Take MS365 as an example. Most small businesses I deal
| with would be way better off with Exchange than with
| their current shared hosting email providers, but the
| value just isn't there for a lot of them. Microsoft
| thinks they're selling all this awesome stuff like
| Exchange, OneDrive, Teams, etc. in an ultra valuable
| bundle, but all small businesses see is Exchange plus a
| bunch of other bloat they're never going to use but are
| forced to pay for. They just want Exchange.
|
| Plus, at least for the ones I've dealt with, the partner
| exclusively interacts with the customer, so bad support
| gets labelled as having a bad partner, not as Microsoft
| being bad. That also means Microsoft isn't incurring any
| cost to be the first point of contact either. In fact,
| the only time I've ever dealt with MS support for
| something Exchange related, they sucked. I ended up
| solving my own problem and closing the support issue by
| telling them what was wrong. Reputationally, we're the
| one that recommends it, we're the first point of contact
| for support, and we're the ones that take the reputation
| hit if something isn't working. At least that's my
| experience.
|
| I see lots of small businesses that have 50 mailboxes for
| $60 / year at a shared hosting provider. That's $.10 per
| month per user. Guess how they react when you tell them
| moving to MS365 will be $5 per month per user? Now I'm
| not saying MS365 isn't worth more, but it's a HARD sell
| to tell a small business they should pay 50x for
| something that's currently working fine as far as they're
| concerned. Then you add in things like backup solutions
| changing per user per month and all of a sudden you're
| telling a small business they should pay 75x for the same
| feature matrix their shared hosting provider is selling
| them. They don't care about all the stupid value adds. In
| fact that stuff is negative value because it's unneeded
| complexity which results in frustration and increased
| support costs.
| ab_testing wrote:
| I think you answered your question right there. Microsoft
| does not want the business of a company where 50
| mailboxes cost $60 for the whole year. They are happy to
| leave that market to other lower cost providers
| donmcronald wrote:
| It wouldn't have to be that cheap though. If they sold
| Exchange only plans for $1-2 / user / month I could
| probably convince 10x the users it's worth it. And they
| never deal with the customers.
|
| It's MUCH easier to sell someone another product at that
| point too. That's literally the strategy (cross selling)
| Ballmer used to increase sales so much that he ended up
| owning part of MS.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Meanwhile MS and Google have thousands of satisfied
| customers with millions of users paying the $10/mo/user.
| ta988 wrote:
| Google is making money with users' emails contents and
| ads displayed in their interface, so that's not like they
| are doing that for free. In the case of airtable, I'm not
| sure non paying users are bringing them anything that can
| be monetized (I may just not be aware of vicious
| monetization ways though)
| jwitchel wrote:
| That's not quite right. It's not the support. It's the
| churn metrics. A guy who uses your system episodically can
| give the appearance of a high churn rate. This is very bad
| and if you're raising money can imply that your system
| isn't sticky which lowers your valuations. If you're in the
| fundraising game that's actually worse than a few extra
| dollars of revenue.
| social_quotient wrote:
| Goodhart's law - When a measure becomes a target, it
| ceases to be a good measure.
| ta988 wrote:
| We need another law here... When everybody maintains bad
| measures despite knowing they don't work. Impact factors
| in science are another example of that. You can say it is
| broken and proove it, your jury for grants or positions
| will still ask you to put the numbers next to your
| papers, and if you don't they'll do it themselves...
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Sell me a no or very limited support plan then (or charge
| extra for the support when it's needed). At least
| personally, if your docs are halfway decent and I don't run
| into any major bugs I will almost never make a support
| request.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > Just like GitLab. If you have users that might post one or
| two issues a year you have to pay for them at dev level
| prices. $240 / year for idle users that barely participate?
| No thanks.
|
| Google Form linked in your readme, done deal.
| spoonjim wrote:
| 80% of the software revenue in the world comes from a few
| thousand companies. The big software vendors don't give a shit
| about chasing that last 20%.
| Joeri wrote:
| An enterprise IWMS system I worked on solved this by charging
| only for enabled accounts. An admin could enable or disable
| accounts, and every month a report would show how many unique
| accounts were enabled that month and determined the billing.
| That shouldn't be that hard to implement for airtable or any
| other SaaS, so it is puzzling why that option isn't offered.
| eb0la wrote:
| I remember Qlikview (reporting/data discovery software) had a
| per minute license for this.
|
| There are a lot of inactive users in reporting apps. A lot of
| people just log in once a month to see a single report and
| this was a useful way to get more users onboard.
|
| It looked scary at first because you didn't knew beforehand
| how many minutes you should buy.
|
| Mising standard and by minute license worked great, though
| Exuma wrote:
| Hourglass on pricing tables makes no sense. I'm not a moron and
| after scanning the page I have no idea what this means... the
| only thing I can assume is some kind of feature not ready for
| production yet?
| bram2w wrote:
| It means that those features have not been created. I agree
| with you that it has to clearer. We will add a small
| description what the hourglass icon means soon.
| Exuma wrote:
| I would just write "coming soon" and make it very clear. a
| tiny legend is going to be only marginally better, when it
| should be clear at the expense of slightly fancy looking.
| rovr138 wrote:
| And would just add complexity for people using a screen
| reader.
| mikeg8 wrote:
| This is good UI advice baserow team.
| nojvek wrote:
| Something that would be really cool is if there was an open
| source - self hosted version of notion.so.
|
| I like notion because it's a hybrid of wiki, table/database,
| calendar, kanban. You can do a lot more than just tables.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Check out anytype.io
| bram2w wrote:
| We are going to add Notion like features to Baserow in 2022.
| You should then be able to create similar documents within the
| same tool and it is going to work well together with the
| databases and tables that you already have.
| gustavohoa wrote:
| This sounds a lot like getoutline.com
| hypermachine wrote:
| You can try us out when we launch, though for us it is more
| "assemble your own Notion tool like Lego" rather than an out-
| of-the-box Notion clone.
| bram2w wrote:
| Hello everyone, I am Bram Wiepjes, the founder of Baserow.
| Baserow is an open source, soon to be open core, no-code database
| tool and Airtable alternative. Easily create your own relational
| database in a user friendly way without technical experience.
|
| - Unlimited rows.
|
| - Released under the MIT license.
|
| - Uses popular frameworks like Django and Vue.js.
|
| - Uses PostgreSQL as database backend.
|
| - It can be self hosted.
|
| - Designed to be performant with lots of data, handles 100k+ rows
| per table easily.
|
| - Headless and API first.
|
| - Supports plugins.
|
| If you have experience with Django and Vue.js, we are hiring full
| stack developers. More info: https://baserow.io/jobs/experienced-
| full-stack-developer
|
| Repository: https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow
| sequoia wrote:
| > EUR 4,00 per user / month
|
| In the USA and I think all English speaking places we use dot
| rather than comma to separate decimals from whole number, and
| comma for thousands, millions etc. So at a glance (before
| looking closely) this looks like four _thousand_ euros per user
| per month. I looked a second time and realized that was
| incorrect but consider fixing for EN- 4K /user/mo is quite
| shocking to read! :)
| presentation wrote:
| better use the user's browser locale + Intl to format the
| currency for you :)
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Easier and better to just omit the decimal part: EUR4 per
| user per month.
| archon810 wrote:
| "Eerly premium"
|
| FYI, a pretty big typo on the front page.
| avinassh wrote:
| I noticed this in your job listing:
|
| > Challenge: Potential candidates will be asked to do a coding
| challange by picking up a small issue from the open source
| backlog
|
| The candidates who are fixing the issues, get paid? If so, I
| think this should be clarified.
|
| Also, there is a typo in the word `challange` should be
| `challenge`
| oreille wrote:
| Hey, some things I'd love to see in Baserow:
|
| - Join fields from related table (currently we can only see the
| id from the joined table field)
|
| - Multi-line select, multi line update.
|
| - Schema support
|
| - Saving views (sort/filter option, hidden fields, joined
| fields)
|
| I also have a question, are Kanban and Calendar view available
| in the free self hosted version?
| kennydude wrote:
| Nice to see this using Django and VueJS! :D
| mekster wrote:
| Any plan for proper mobile support? Couldn't find a ticket on
| GitLab.
| fatsdomino001 wrote:
| Incredible work!
|
| Would Baserow be a good fit for using as database of
| subscription-based website? E.g. storing users, etc. You could
| have just static front-end and use Baserow as the database?
|
| I'll definitely be looking further into it.
| swyx wrote:
| I made a sample database and found it hard to look up the API -
| you could make that discoverable/easier from the main UI.
|
| i was surprised to find the field ID's are named like
| "field_48664" - are you globally autoincrementing your fields??
| this is going to be bad news, no?
| decentrality wrote:
| Had me at "self-hosted"
|
| Following the repository now, and tried an online demo account.
| Looks promising but now quite ready.
|
| Will be switching from Airtable when:
|
| 1. More field formats are supported ( like Currency,
| Collaborators, Multiselect )
|
| 2. Kanban views are supported
|
| 3. Automations are supported
| ybalkind wrote:
| Another alternative (not self-hosted or open source) is Fibery.io
| More powerful than Airtable, and has some Notion-like
| capabilities.
| jsilence wrote:
| I'm really fond of retool. Is Baserow aimed in the same
| direction? That would be absolutely great!
|
| Here's a 4min demo video of retool:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkcwNwPy7RI
| ericcholis wrote:
| I think retool is so much more than Baserow. You could
| conceivably build an entire CRM in retool. Or, flesh out a
| headless API with an interface in retool.
| artemonster wrote:
| What is the market for that? What can it do that good ol excel
| cannot (or, if so really desired, ms access)
| mekster wrote:
| I really never like selling my data to third parties. I usually
| don't consider using online services unless there's absolutely
| no good alternatives.
| [deleted]
| 40four wrote:
| Well, among the many answers you might get to this question,
| the one that sticks out the most to me is Excel spreadsheets do
| not have a built in REST API and Websocket service out of the
| box.
|
| Sure you can pay up for Access or Sharepoint, or whatever
| offerings Microsoft has that _do_ give REST APIs (I'm honestly
| not familiar with them). But this is free and open source, and
| anyone can put it on a web server and start jamming :)
| mrfusion wrote:
| This seems ideal for a FOSS project.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Open source is great. But it's hard for me welcoming something
| that is almost a 1:1 copy of a concept that somebody else worked
| on for many years.
| treve wrote:
| You mean things like Linux, LibreOffice, Any browser?
|
| The things that they are copying are themselves also copies of
| earlier products. Airtable can be traced back to MS Access,
| DBase and I'm sure there's even older examples.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| I just said I'm not welcoming it. But I also distinguish
| between copying in terms of implementing the same
| protocol/standard and copying an innovative product that is
| unique (or was unique when it came out). I don't think in
| this discussion there is a right or wrong but I think that if
| you put 10 years of thinking into a concept and another
| person just copies it it's just not fair.
| tthun wrote:
| Low-code database builders have been around for a long time
| , Airtable did not come up with this concept, just a slick
| UX/ implementation of one.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Domino
| tomerbd wrote:
| What is the benefit of using such a solution rather than a
| standard database like sqlite or posgresql perhaps with some
| automatic api on top?
| OmegaPG wrote:
| If I use the self hosted software now, how to keep it up to date?
| Also if they start charging, how will it be different than
| AirTable? I get the privacy aspect of self hosted solutions but
| there is a huge overhead cost of maintaining it and updating it.
| I am not even sure self hosted is safer than SaaS.
| bram2w wrote:
| It depends a little bit on how you are going self host it.
| There are updating instructions at the bottom of
| https://baserow.io/docs/guides/installation/install-on-ubunt...
| and https://baserow.io/docs/guides/installation/install-on-
| cloud... We are going to make it much easier to self host and
| update in the future.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| You lost me when there wasn't a docker image. I'd strongly
| encourage having one that can be dropped into a docker-
| compose config.
| bram2w wrote:
| There are going to be production ready Docker images soon.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| You know (probably) that the binary you download and self host
| will always run. You can avoid updates, and avoid future paid
| requirements too.
|
| It's more work, but if you host something on LAN you eschew
| many security concerns. You can more easily track what it's
| pinging and who it talks to. If it's open source, you can audit
| and adjust the code too.
|
| It's all about priorities.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| You update the software. If they start charging, you don't
| care, because you can keep your free copy. I don't know about
| the "huge overhead cost" of running an update now and then.
|
| ...but, the data is yours, the software is yours, the solution
| built on it is yours. Noone can raise the prices, noone can
| give unrealistic/stupid limits (eg. how many queries can you do
| per month in your paid/free package,...), and noone can take
| your data away.
| chaps wrote:
| "I don't know about the "huge overhead cost" of running an
| update now and then."
|
| Clearly you've never had to go to hours and hours of change
| management meetings for a minor release.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| If the 'frontend' stays the same (and i literally mean all
| frontend, from GUI to APIs), then noone cares.
|
| If something changes, you atleast can delay the change,
| until you fix other components (or maybe even not update,
| if it's some internal stuff), because with SaaS, you have
| no say about it.
|
| Even if the project becomes unsupported, you can still run
| the old version, until you find 'something new' (or again,
| keep runing the old for internal stuff).
|
| If you build anything around a SaaS provider, they alway
| have yu by the balls,... be it with ever changing pricing
| or killing the project, "just because" [0]
|
| [0] https://killedbygoogle.com/
| chaps wrote:
| The moment that a major security bug is discovered in
| your app, you will need to upgrade it. It's not as simple
| as just saying that you can still run the old version.
| That's just one issue of many. There are many, many more
| hidden costs than you're giving free software credit for.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Of course... if it's outside facing... internal stuff can
| be delayed (and often is).... but again, that's why you
| pay admins for. Usually feature updates (api changes) and
| security updates are kept separate (unless you waited
| with the feature update, until there was a security
| issue).... but again, the thing is still yours.
|
| it's like a taxi vs a free car + free parts, and all you
| need is gas and time to do service.
| chaps wrote:
| "but again, that's why you pay admins for"
|
| Yes, that's the exact point I'm making. You have to pay
| someone to manage something like this. The point (edit:
| okay, not _the_ point) of this sort of software is to try
| to minimize those costs, but at the end of the day you
| still have to pay for them, and often even more.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| You still need an admin, even if you use SaaS... someone
| has to make the SaaS work... this just adds an aditional
| update every now and then to their workload.
| decentrality wrote:
| One great way to get this into the mainstream would likely be to
| clone and adapt `feathers.js` support for `Airtable`:
|
| https://github.com/jonascript/feathers-airtable
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| "Eerly premium" should be "Early premium" on the front page.
| bram2w wrote:
| Thank you for notifying me of that typo. We will update that
| soon :).
| ochronus wrote:
| Or "eerily premium"
| igammarays wrote:
| As a person who literally works on the Airtable API for a living,
| and founded an Airtable-based startup, I knew this was coming.
| Airtable deserves to be replaced by a good open-source
| alternative, for the way they've treated their customers. They
| built a great product that people love, and then made the pricing
| inaccessible to small business, ignored the API for years (I've
| been developing on top of the API since 2015, barely any
| improvements since then), piled on shit that no one asked for
| (Apps/Blocks) instead of working on the API that everyone asked
| for, made certain essential features like the metadata API
| invite-only, and are generally self-centered and obnoxious in
| their messaging (just see their blog post describing the launch
| of Airtable Blocks/Apps - "A half billion apps are about to be
| created.") Yes, those half-billion apps on top of Airtable will
| be made, but not on the original Airtable platform, because
| they've closed their software down and made interoperability a
| pain, and hid basic features like apps and record colouring
| behind a paywall. Meanwhile, they don't know how to build an app
| that can handle more than 50,000 rows and there are feature-
| request threads that are literally years old. LISTEN TO YOUR
| CUSTOMERS, dammit.
|
| Airtable could've easily been the next Excel if they had just not
| been so tight-fisted, protective, greedy and aloof. There are
| plenty ways to monetize such a great product if they had just
| allowed people to use it. I have a feeling like their leadership
| was inspired by Steve Jobs, but they blindly applied Apple-esque
| walled garden philosophies to a domain where it makes no sense,
| because no one can actually use a cloud product without a proper
| API (operating systems are a different story).
|
| I complain even though my life literally depends on Airtable.
| Shameless plug: I'm the founder of Fintable.io, a bootstrapped
| startup that syncs your bank accounts to Airtable, and I have no
| other source of income. I love Airtable, but I'm just sick and
| tired of their shitty castrated API that can't even stay up
| reliably. Maybe this is the trigger that will cause somebody over
| there to wake up, because it isn't too late for Airtable to win
| at this game (and I hope they do).
| ricklamers wrote:
| I really like this trend of self hosted apps that make it
| possible to avoid shipping sensitive data to third parties.
|
| Baserow looks so polished, very impressive for such an early
| stage project. Loved how easy it was to get the auto generated
| API working too!
| agustif wrote:
| Looks promising will try out.
|
| Glad to see competition in the space.
| dbrereton wrote:
| There's an interesting trend of open source clones of popular
| products. Most recent one that comes to mind is Athens [0] which
| is an open source clone of Roam Research.
|
| The business model is always that people who really want it for
| free can self host, and people who don't want to deal with the
| hassle will pay for hosting. Seems like a reasonable strategy to
| me.
|
| [0] https://github.com/athensresearch/athens
| toyg wrote:
| _> an interesting trend of open source clones of popular
| products_
|
| Well, it's a "trend" as old as dirt, really. The "Linux
| desktop" was, for years, little more than a series of clones of
| closed-source Windows apps. Arguably even the original GNU
| programs started as clones of existing Unix tools. It's
| unsurprising that this would later happen for web-based
| services too.
|
| _> The business model is always that people who really want it
| for free can self host, and people who don 't want to deal with
| the hassle will pay for hosting._
|
| Again, pretty old news - Wordpress is almost 20 years old at
| this point.
|
| The problem of this setup, though, is that the commercial
| version will typically set the roadmap and priorities, while
| the open version will end up lagging.
| knubie wrote:
| I'm reminded of Jonathan Blow's rant about open source software
| at the beginning of this video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLVjSeusPYg
| elyobo wrote:
| That video's oddly edited; is there some context which makes
| him seem less... nuts?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Blow is a great programmer but his criticism makes no sense
| to me. "It's elitist and undemocratic that someone gets to
| decide whether they want to ship you code". what??
| nuggien wrote:
| he was criticizing the idea of pull requests. You could
| spend a lot of time adding code and submit a pull request
| and the maintainer of the project gets to decide whether
| they want your code or not. If they don't, then you just
| wasted all your time.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| I think it's great that it's happening. Sure (for example)
| Baserow will never be as awesome as Airtable... but for users
| with extremely small use cases, hobbyists, or tiny startups -
| it works out. They aren't the niche Airtable wants and they
| can't afford it either.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I wonder if there's a business model of paid hosting of other
| companies open source alternatives...
| shagie wrote:
| That sounds like Bitnami - https://bitnami.com . For example
| - https://bitnami.com/stack/redmine
| mikkom wrote:
| You mean AWS?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Yeah, something like that. But for all these SaaS apps.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Heroku?
| e12e wrote:
| Sandstorm kind of tried that (https://sandstorm.io).
| viraptor wrote:
| AWS is a few layers below that service. You can't tell AWS
| "give me a domain with baserow installed". Or at least not
| without going through the layers of describing how it's
| mapped to actual compute resources and how is deployed.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Yea, but you _can_ tell AWS "give me a domain my (MySQL
| | Postgres | Elasticsearch | ...) installed, which I
| think was the parent poster's joke
| dopeboy wrote:
| This was the promise behind sandstorm.io
| flylib wrote:
| anyone know of a GitHub list of open source clones of popular
| products?
| ianwalter wrote:
| This is kind of close to that: https://github.com/awesome-
| selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
| edjrage wrote:
| I wasn't aware of Athens, thanks! There's also Logseq:
| https://github.com/logseq/logseq and a few others, but I forgot
| their names.
| mkl wrote:
| More info on Athens and alternatives in this discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316793
| hanniabu wrote:
| I've noticed this as well and I really think there's a market
| for a simple self-hosted cloud server. Many people aren't
| comfortable with managing a server and all the tech aspects
| that come with it. What I envision is a bring-your-own server
| solution that provides recommended specs (or buy from the
| company as a funding source) and similar to the app store you
| can download containerized app, let's say from docker, with 0
| technical knowledge. Just a nice UI and all the functionality
| automated so the user doesn't have to do anything but click a
| button and maybe a settings page for really basic stuff. There
| can be an open library that just links to docker hub or
| whatever other platform as well as a curated library. It should
| all be encrypted and secure by default. It should all serve on
| localhost with an option screen to specify UI or hookup your
| own domain to access remotely. Again, UX is key here to
| abstract everything away from the user and make it stupid
| simple to use. From what I've seen, people would love to host
| their own services but either don't have the technical know-how
| or don't want to deal with managing their own server or AWS or
| whatever other droplet solution.
| mappu wrote:
| You may be interested in https://sandstorm.io/
| oezi wrote:
| Is Baserow on Sandstorm.io already? That would be awesome.
| popinman322 wrote:
| Isn't this the PaaS model?
| hanniabu wrote:
| Sort of but not really. On thinking about it some more for
| the average user, you'd really want to sell a ready-to-go
| unit so they don't even have to deal with the initial
| computer setup and platform download/install because I know
| that's still way more than a lot of people would want to do
| or feel comfortable doing. They want something that they
| own, with good privacy, that just works, and is maintenance
| free.
|
| I imagine this company selling a visually appealing unit
| similar to how xbox and playstation aim to be more of an
| elegant accent piece than a clunky electronic box. This way
| when the user gets the product they just open, plug it in,
| create an account and password, wait for it to initialize,
| and then you're good to go and can start immediately
| downloading apps. Then just download an accompanying app on
| your phone/desktop/computer and connect to your own
| personal cloud where you own all your software and data.
| Could even sell upgradeable units for a premium that have
| an easy access panel to just swap or plug in additional RAM
| or SSD modules.
| loulouxiv wrote:
| Such a system would be considerably preferable over cloud
| for things like backup of your phone files and photos
| (bandwidth), direct sharing of voluminous files
| (bandwith, no need to wait for upload to complete),
| videoconferencing (latency)
| ta988 wrote:
| Sounds a bit like what synology is offering. The only
| problem is maintenance of that. You now have millions of
| boxes that will fail randomly for various reasons (bug,
| bit flipping, hardware error). And now you have a furious
| user that can't restore from a broken backup and doesnt
| know how to repair (if even possible)...
| crucialfelix wrote:
| https://cloud.google.com/marketplace
|
| Google cloud marketplace allows you to launch all kinds of
| open source solutions with a click. This includes the setup
| for databases.
|
| Though it's not a place that a non technical user would think
| to go, and I expect it's not really as simple as it promises.
| The devil is always in the details.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > Though it's not a place that a non technical user would
| think to go, and I expect it's not really as simple as it
| promises.
|
| Exactly and you also don't own the data or have any
| expectation of privacy.
| dexter89_kp3 wrote:
| There is also Obsidian, which does not compete with Roam
| Research directly on all features (but comes pretty close), but
| is locally hosted. Great option for those seeking privacy of
| their notes and thoughts.
| ncallaway wrote:
| The thing I love about Obsidian is it's just a directory of
| markdown files. Still totally useful if Obsidian disappeared
| tomorrow.
|
| I also just setup a cron job to daily check for changes, and
| if there are git commit and git push and now I can access my
| notes from any device with a browser.
| zwayhowder wrote:
| I work at a university, we are legally not allowed to host a
| lot of our data outside of our country. While I'd love to use
| tools like Airtable & Roam we can't. As those vendors aren't
| interested in hosting in a small backwater country like
| Australia </sarcasm> an open source alternative I can host
| myself is amazing.
|
| But I'd gladly pay more to have someone else manage hosting...
| sevencolors wrote:
| I think it's a smart way to make money with open-source
| projects. Charge for hosting and premium add-ons. For me Gatsby
| comes to mind. The framework will always be free but they have
| a build, CI and hosting platform that makes it easy. And i
| don't mind paying money for.
| piggybox wrote:
| Open source as a marketing tool
| tjbiddle wrote:
| Plus, some occasional free development from PRs.
|
| The number of times where I would be HAPPY to work on a
| project for free to fix an issue or add a feature I want - I
| couldn't count.
|
| Instead, it's always reaching out to support and "Thanks for
| your feature request - it's not currently on our road map,
| but I've added it to our list."
| tangjeff0 wrote:
| Hey! Founder of Athens here, we just launched on HN 2 weeks
| ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316793
|
| Agree with your comment. What we've found is that most people
| don't actually want to self-host, even technical users who can.
| But they all want the _optionality_ to self-host, which you don
| 't have with most SaaS's like Notion or Roam. This is doubley
| important for "second brains", apps where you brain dump your
| closest thoughts.
|
| As Balaji has said, given the choice, "you'd always pick open
| source over a _comparable_ proprietary equivalent. "
|
| https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1365212646945923074
| high_byte wrote:
| Self hosted Always free
|
| I like that pricing model
| jeffgreco wrote:
| Though they're already laying the groundwork for "premium"
| features like admin tools, role based permissions, kanban and
| calendar views which would be paid subscriptions for self-
| hosted options too.
|
| I always worry that essential features for tools like these
| will get bumped into one of those paid tiers.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The benefit of having the self hosted always free option is
| your data isn't locked into the service.
|
| Price is important, but data sovereignty more so imho. If a
| vendor is no longer meeting your needs, or the deal becomes
| less fair (you know the whole "raising prices once your
| business relies on them"), you can export and bounce.
|
| More of this _chef kiss_
| clusterfish wrote:
| Right... That's why the vast majority of people using self
| hosted open source don't pay for it. It's about the money
| for most people.
|
| You can export and bounce from airtable too, you know.
|
| Even when the service itself does not provide easy export
| there's often a free third party tool or browser extension
| to enable data export.
| high_byte wrote:
| exactly. I get the point that corporations tend to "extort"
| users by offering supposedly-core features only under
| premium, but on the other hand this one is a startup and
| gotta make ends meet somehow. so far I'm fine with that
| boomskats wrote:
| In their defense, their upcoming 'premium' features are
| clearly labelled on the Feature Roadmap. I really like that.
|
| Great job OP!
| elwell wrote:
| After trying it out, this is unabashedly a clone of Airtable, but
| I couldn't find any apps/add-ons (yet?). To me, the apps,
| automations, and ability to create custom apps are what make
| Airtable so powerful. I did see mention of support for third-
| party plugins on the info site, but not when I tested it out; too
| early I guess.
| gervwyk wrote:
| A nice API might be all that you need. That and maybe something
| like https://lowdefy.com to easily put a UI in front of it.
| mjthompson wrote:
| MIT licence? Haven't they learned from others' mistakes? This
| sort of stuff should be AGPL licenced.
| f430 wrote:
| What does airtable do that excel can't? curious as to what makes
| airtable appealing and where this self hosted has advantages
| johnchristopher wrote:
| A few years ago there were many Airtables articles on HN and it
| seemed to me it was promoted as a table/database management of
| some sort for non-technical people.
|
| But now I see Airtable is used a lot in marketing departments and
| I caught a glimpse of a screen the other day and my marketing
| colleague's Airtable dashboard looked like a mix between Trello
| and messaging.
|
| Can someone explain to me how Airtable is being used by non-
| technical people ?
|
| And can Baserow fill that role too or is it a database thingy
| first and foremost ?
|
| edit: does it have anything to do with templates ?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| The MMX cad team, is keeping track of some 10.000 parts used in
| a marble machine instrument being build by Swedish musician
| Martin Molin.
|
| You can see some clips at the linked timestamp where they use
| air table. Looks really cool.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYFdNwXXcac&t=782s
| tylermenezes wrote:
| It does a lot more, now, too! We're even tracking all the
| community suggestions and ideas made in Discord in Airtable
| now.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| With regards to the airtable question, it has the potential to
| replace almost any CRUD app in a company. Internally we needed
| to drastically extend our ERP implementation to handle a large
| custom project and instead of dedicating a dev team to working
| on it we were able to build the needs out in airtable and then
| add a few API hooks here and there to the ERP. It was a great
| success and probably took 1/20th the time since the people that
| needed to use it were moderately technical and could define and
| build the workflow as they went. Now less technical people are
| being onboarded onto it which has, for the most part, worked
| well. I think the growth areas are going to come from things
| like stacker.app that make it easier to wrap Airtable databases
| up in a simple UI.
|
| In general, you can think of it like a better realized version
| of Access, it brings relational databases into an Excel like
| view that semi-technical people can understand, then wraps it
| up with a few excellent built-in views like a kanban board, a
| simple form, and a calendar that non-technical people can
| understand. It has definite limitations but an easy to use API
| to expand upon it when you need it.
|
| I'm really bullish on it after the project and have moved a
| bunch of personal stuff that was using external services onto a
| single airtable instance (contact management/CRM, personal
| project tracking, etc.)
| PebblesRox wrote:
| I do bookkeeping and office backend administration for a small
| sales company. I use Airtable as a semi-technical person to
| automate processes we used to drive by hand in a google
| spreadsheet - the main one being commission calculation.
|
| I was able to put this together in the 10-15 hours per week
| that remains after I finish my core job responsibilities.
|
| I want to learn how to do things the 'real-code' way but the
| learning curve is steep! Low code tools like Airtable let me
| use the limited time I have available to get something up and
| running. I can add improvements incrementally as my skills
| expand.
|
| When I first set up the Airtable, I was importing data manually
| from our CRM and from our accounting software. Now I have an
| awful Postman collection rigged up that does the importing for
| me (but I have to click a button everyday to run it).
|
| I discovered Pipedream a few months ago and have used that to
| set up an email system that queries the Airtable database and
| returns relevant records. A sales rep enters an opportunity and
| gets an email with a list of leads tailored to that particular
| opportunity. This incentivizes the reps to add their data to
| the system.
|
| My next project is to set up emails to notify our new freight
| coordinator when a load needs to ship, that will query multiple
| related records and give her all the info she needs in one
| email, plus cc'ing the sales rep on the deal so they can
| coordinate.
|
| Our CRM almost does all of these things but there's always some
| limitation that holds us back, if we're just trying to use the
| out-of-the box tools.
|
| As someone who aspires to be a developer but is not there yet
| skill-wise, I really appreciate the low-code tools that let me
| stitch together horrible Frankenstein monsters of Javascript to
| let me automate some of the monkey work that I would otherwise
| be doing by hand.
|
| This then frees up my time to expand my skill-set and learn
| better ways of doing things. (Such as node.js on a Heroku
| server so I can put my javascript all in one place instead of
| scattered throughout all the little places you can put code in
| Postman.)
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Gorgeous landing page. Is it a template or did you handroll that?
| Kudos either way.
| bram2w wrote:
| Thanks! It is not a template, I designed it from scratch.
| rochak wrote:
| That's impressive. Baserow feels like a labor of love. Will
| definitely try contributing.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| nice project.. Will add it to my open-source alternatives list
| gourav.io/clone-wars ps: any particular reason for not choosing
| GitHub?
| revskill wrote:
| The core of a sustainable software to me is in the ORM layer.
| This is where Ruby on Rails or similar framework failed terribly.
|
| One classic example is: How do your ORM/libraries provide you
| tool to define a calculable "name" field, which is equal to
| "firstName + lastName", with option to store it as a database
| field ?
| mhd wrote:
| How good is it at recreating the DabbleDB demo?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY
| samblr wrote:
| Looks like Airtable took a lot of 'inspiration' from DabbleDB!
| faichai wrote:
| DabbleDB was way ahead of its time.
| mhd wrote:
| Yup, and it was built in an interesting way, if I remember
| correctly. Using the continuation-based Smalltalk Seaside
| framework.
| bfm wrote:
| A quote by Avi Bryant regarding continuations in Drabble DB
| "... in Dabble we essentially don't use continuations
| although we do use Seaside"
|
| You can read the whole interview on
| https://www.infoq.com/interviews/bryant-smalltalk-dabbledb/
| garduque wrote:
| I love Airtable but not the monthly invoice that comes with it.
| Signed up for your email newsletter so please do remind me when
| you get further along. Things like csv export and all of the
| pending field types are a necessity before I could even consider
| switching even my most basic bases.
| rvz wrote:
| Good. We really need more self-hosted open source alternatives
| like Baserow.
| high_byte wrote:
| Open-SaaS!
| nine_k wrote:
| Does "SaaS" read as "Self as a Service"?
| high_byte wrote:
| It's both open-source and software-as-a-service if service
| is required. but it's still open-source if you just want to
| self host. I see people did not get that.
| [deleted]
| showerst wrote:
| FYI if anyone from baserow is reading this, I tried following
| your docs at https://baserow.io/docs/guides%2Fdemo-environment
| and can't clone your git repo -- I'm getting permission denied.
|
| Once I looked up the HTTP url it worked fine, so I think you may
| have a permissions issue in gitlab.
| bram2w wrote:
| Thanks for notifying me. I was not aware that it is not
| possible to clone the repo that way without being signed into
| GitLab. I will change the url in the docs to
| `https://gitlab.com/bramw/baserow.git`.
| showerst wrote:
| No problem! FYI the rest of the demo worked fine, pretty
| slick!
| juliend2 wrote:
| This is very cool. I love airtable and I'm pretty sure I will
| install Baserow soon just to try it out.
|
| Shameless plug: I just did a quick blog post listing that kind of
| products open source alternatives:
| https://www.juliendesrosiers.com/2021/03/13/open-source-self...
|
| It's becoming more common these days to see serious businesses go
| open source from the start and gaining significant traction. Like
| Plausible, Gitlab, Bitwarden, etc.
| mekster wrote:
| Plausible looks way too simple to be GA alternative.
| aszen wrote:
| Is there any application that provides similar features but can
| be integrated into an existing web application. We want our users
| to be able to do similar things for their internal reporting
| within our own application. The kind of integration I'm looking
| for is an iframe embedded into the application ui and APIs for
| readily accessing common data
| rnapoles wrote:
| Hi nice job, If you could integrate OAuth2 into it, it would be
| quite comfortable. I hate having to register manually.
| aschampion wrote:
| See also https://seatable.io/
| kennydude wrote:
| Seatable doesn't appear to be open source, and for some reason
| the website is incredibly janky on Firefox
| mekster wrote:
| Server component seems proprietary but you can easily run it
| via docker.
|
| https://github.com/seatable/seatable#license
| mekster wrote:
| I never see a mention of this even at any of the "awesome"
| lists but this is really well built and has more features than
| baserow.
|
| Baserow's mobile support is quite poor but Seatable does it
| very well and I've been using it for several months and love
| it.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| This is self-hosted but I'm pretty sure it's not Open Source
| (or even available source) like Baserow
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