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Launch HN: BaseDash (YC S20) – Edit your database with the ease of a spreadsheet

191 points by maxmusing 6y ago

Hey everyone! I'm Max from BaseDash (https://www.basedash.io https://www.basedash.io). BaseDash is an internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of a spreadsheet. It's like being able to use Airtable to manage your company's internal operations. I was working on a side project a few years ago that required a lot of manual data management. I was using Django Admin which was fine, but wished I could just set up a two-way sync between my SQL database and Airtable (without any crazy Zapier workflows). After building a quick prototype as an internal tool, I realized that there was a space missing for a product somewhere between an admin panel and a database client. Something with an amazing interface that's usable by both engineers and non-technical users who need to access data within their company (e.g. customer support, operations). From there, I built BaseDash with a strong focus on expanding upon existing tools I love, with extra care and polish. The resulting product is a polished, opinionated internal tool, with all the functionality most companies need out-of-the-box. Being a web app, there are some great features that BaseDash enables for cross-functional teams. BaseDash keeps a full edit history of all changes made, makes it super easy to share access to teammates, and enables Google Sheets-like real-time collaboration for editing data. We currently support most SQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redshift, SQL Server, MariaDB), with support for MongoDB and Firestore on the roadmap. We offer a hosted version, or you can host it yourself on-prem. We're still in early access but happy to invite the Hacker News community to try the product out. We're currently focused on small-to-medium sized software companies, with a combination of engineers and non-technical users. Try it here: https://www.basedash.io https://www.basedash.io and let me know what you think!

switz 6y ago
I've been ruminating on this exact problem for months. I'm consulting at a company where we have a lot of non-engineers who own several major processes w/r/t data sources of truth. Engineers need up-to-date programmatic access to that data, and the non-engineers need a way to keep that information accurate. This is awesome. I was considering building it myself, but it's always a pleasure to see someone else deliver a working product on an idea you've been bouncing around. Good luck, this is a relatively 'simple' product with a huge market.
- maxmusing 6y ago
  Glad to hear you like the product! Would love to hear your thoughts after trying it.
MattGaiser 6y ago
How does this differ from something like DBeaver? Our QA Analysts (semi-manual testers) use that for making tweaks to our databases, both production and otherwise. Developers also use it because it is frequently easier than the command line when we do not know all the table and column names. Is it basically a less intimidating version of that?
- maxmusing 6y ago
  Yes, it's meant to be much easier for non-technical teammates, plus has more collaborative functionality built for teams (easy to share access, team-wide edit history, real-time collaboration). I tend to think of tools like DBeaver as being built for individual, technical users, while BaseDash is built for cross-functional teams.
- AdmiralGinge 6y ago
  Huge shout out to DBeaver by the way, it's one of the most useful applications I use on a daily basis.
ron22 6y ago
You can track changes and see comments as to why each change was made, that's really cool.
- itachicomment 6y ago
  They should use this as their main selling point.
interactivecode 6y ago
could we self host this for DIY/home use?
taylorwc 6y ago
I'm really bullish on this concept. I learned how to code coming from a finance background, and the mental shift from Excel to relational database felt natural enough, but the lack of Excel-like ways to interact with those databases has always felt like white space to me. Well done!
- joparisot 6y ago
  Hey Taylor, You should check out actiondesk (disclaimer: I'm the founder)! We're complementary from basedash (not doing the writing to the database, but focusing on viewing and analyzing your db data in a spreadsheet)
  - maxmusing 6y ago
    Actiondesk is awesome. We share a couple customers.
darkhorse13 6y ago
How big is the "spreadsheet as database" market? I mean don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of spreadsheets. But it seems like there are many products and companies trying to compete in this space.
- maxmusing 6y ago
  We're more so positioned as an internal tool, so competing with products like Retool and Internal. Main difference is that BaseDash gives an opinionated interface rather than a UI builder. We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    > We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves. Yes! If you add to this [0] a managed database offering of your own (ala airtable) and make it tres simple to (ab)use, then that'd be something. All the best. [0] database is the app?
    - maxmusing 6y ago
      We actually had a 1-month-long pivot to managed database hosting early on in development, but it was super janky. Might look into this again in the future.
    - brainless 6y ago
      I actually liked this idea when it came up in my customer conversations and I have this in the roadmap of my product. This space is definitely going to get more mature and I feel Airtable is a big inspiration for me. Making it easy for non-technical teams to add new Tables and do complex queries (I mentioned in separate comment here) is what I feel will be a differentiator for me.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  There is no way that my current organization would buy this, but it would free up a lot of developer hours if customer support or even operations analysts could do this instead of needing a dev every time they wanted to run a custom report.
codetrotter 6y ago
Gotta hand it to you, this looks really slick. Also, the call to action at the bottom was well made; > Skip the waitlist, this week only > We're opening access to BaseDash for the next week during our Hacker News launch. Usually when someone is like “act now” I’m like “yeah right”. But in this case, whether it really matters or not that I sign up exactly this week, the fact that you put some effort into connecting the text to the HN post made it feel more genuine and was sufficient to instead make me go “alright I’ll do it”. I don’t immediately have time to use it but I can tell that this product is useful so I’m making a mental note to log back in in the future and check it out more. For now I was happy to see that in addition to the UX niceties that were mentioned on the landing page, you guys make it possible to configure a connection with SSH between your servers and the db servers of the user. That is very encouraging to see :) I think on top of that it would be neat if you also offered users to configure connections that go through Wireguard, as I run Wireguard on my personal server and I know other people do too. I guess one guy asking for Wireguard is probably not going to convince you to add it. But who knows, maybe others will request it too ;)
- maxmusing 6y ago
  Thanks! We thought it would be best for HN to have direct access (we didn't do this for Product Hunt). I'll keep Wireguard in mind :)
randtrain34 6y ago
$50/user/month seems a bit steep to me, you can easily get something like https://retool.com/pricing/ https://retool.com/pricing/ for $10/user/month. Granted it's a bit of a different market, but it does a lot more in addition to having editable/searchable/filterable DB tables.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  It seems to be the same as the retool pro version with audit logs.
- Twisell 6y ago
  For me the pain point is that, like many others, they want to charge the same price for editors and read-only users. Do the math with me to feel the pain: -I use the product $50/month great -My team use the product $300/month (6x50€) bearable if product really fit our need -My team want to share access in read-only mode with the whole department 2500$/month (50x50) acceptable only if it's a core unavoidable product Almost everytime there is no real technical difference between hosting service for use case 2 and 3. So I get that the business model intend to milk as much money from large organisations that shit gold and can't do basic math. But in the process you are cutting yourself from all small/medium company that just seek to pay a fair price. To keep it simple I believe the basis should be that read only are always free or linked to paying (like get 50 read-only license for each paying editor licence). This better reflect real world situation.
  - maxmusing 6y ago
    That's a good point, I'll look into reducing the pricing for read-only users. We haven't had many companies with read-only users so it hasn't come up, but I think it makes sense.
jadbox 6y ago
The pricing model is a little strange to me. I would like to see a minimal free tier and then a micro pay-as-you-go query cost than a large set monthly cost.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kanobo 6y ago
Congrats and looks great, I like the tracking history/change. If everything is tracked is there a feature to rollback to a previous state? If so, why not also advertise it as a innovative backup + edit solution? That would be be a bigger deal than just the spreadsheet part since people already use DataGrip or TablePlus.
- maxmusing 6y ago
  We only track changes made through BaseDash, so we don't have full snapshots of your database to revert to. We'll definitely add a feature to rollback individual edits though.
danpalmer 6y ago
The main question I have with tools like this is around safety. The reason we typically don't directly edit production data like this is because of application level concerns or validation. I think it's important that any tool like this allows a way to replicate that safety in some way, otherwise it's as risky as using a GUI client directly. Access control (which this does) addresses security and starts addressing safety, but there's a lot more necessary to get to the safety that is often enforced at the application level. There's an argument that the validation should be in the database, and that's nice when it's possible, but it's often not. For any application using Rails/Django, anything else along those lines, anyone interacting with the database mostly via an ORM, will typically not be putting this sort of validation in the database in _all_ cases – thinking about enums, fixed slugs, relative dates, timezone support, etc.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  > The main question I have with tools like this is around safety. "Your app's data is never stored on our servers with the exception of edit history which lets you audit all changes to your data" from: https://www.basedash.io/pricing https://www.basedash.io/pricing Not the most convincing sell but not that they did not address this concern at all.
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    I think that's a different thing. If we think about a field that is an enumeration (in some form), this might need to deserialise to a language-native enumeration option in the application, or need to have one of a small set of values. If someone puts a typo into that field with this tool that could cause issues in production. Yes an audit log may help you notice these and fix them, but that's probably not going to be enough for anyone running a product in production off this database.
  - penagwin 6y ago
    He's talking about operational safety - your application applies validation to inputs to the database. This ensures that only valid data is stored. What happens if you have a field that's supposed to be 0-9, but it's an int field and someone types in 22 on accident? Sure it might be valid for the database, but it's not valid for the application. There's certainly different ways to take the problem, but it needs to be considered.
nrudrapp 6y ago
We use dbeaver internally (and we hate it). But it is free and our engineers get by with most of what's required from tool like it. And dashbase looks like a well done product for a new project - what does you stack looks like frontend and backend ? And have to agree with others that dashbase is pricey though! It will be nearly impossible to convince management to pay $600 per year. Can you tell about usecases of your early users who are paying for this ?
- fortydegrees 6y ago
  I'm CTO of a very early stage startup and $50/mo to allow my CEO to read and edit the database is an easy decision.
  - nrudrapp 6y ago
    In a startup, are you sure you like to spend 600 bucks on a db edit tool - what stage is your startup ?
  - nrmitchi 6y ago
    This is a half-joke of a comment, but I would pay $50/month to a product that could explicitly prohibit the CEO from editing the production database.
    - iKlsR 6y ago
      I saw this immediately after submitting my comment above and I was like why would you want to give such access to someone who is more than likely non-technical. I can't see any pros from this unless it's locked to read only mode but then at $50 you're just paying for an excel view into your app.
  - iKlsR 6y ago
    I disagree, speaking on production data, if your CEO is technical enough they should be able to do this (for whatever reason they have). If not, you need some sort of admin interface (could be a couple forms) to address this properly so invalid data can't be plopped in OR any changes should be documented and sent to someone technical even if it's a typo fix. It seems fun and easy but production data isn't something you should wrap in an excel interface and give to any and everyone. $600 a year so your boss can update names and dates is kinda hard to justify as well.
skunkwerk 6y ago
Congrats on the launch. Have wanted something like this for years - most admin tools aren't easy to use like Airtable, and Airtable itself isn't designed to be a backend for your apps. Would love to see a lower-priced tier for just a single user (no collaborators).
- maxmusing 6y ago
  Thanks! We'll probably add a cheaper plan for individuals soon. If you're interested, we can set something custom up now. Shoot me an email: max@basedash.io
kkotak 6y ago
Any plans to support NoSQL?
- maxmusing 6y ago
  Yes! MongoDB and Firestore are first on the roadmap.
contrarianmop 6y ago
Here is a feature i would like to suggest: a mechanism for change reviews, so that any non tech person can make DB changes, but have them reviewed by peers (much like a github review) and approved before having them applied. Can save a lot of headaches.
bikamonki 6y ago
TLDR: Giving non-IT users direct edit access to the production DB will most likely break stuff. I wrote something similar to BaseDash ages ago, I called it dAgent (for database agent). I had it running for many different clients from all sorts of trades (I do custom development). The GUI built itself from reading the DB schema. My initial motivation was to cut dev time since dAgent would automate the coding of CRUD interfaces. However, the use of dAgent in production ended up being quite limited: maybe only used to edit catalog data (i.e. add a city to the cities table). The reason for this limited usage is no mystery: one can easily break things. In particular non-IT users can break things. Allow me to use an example. You have a CRM with a customers table. On that table there is a field called status. For that field, dAgent would load a select input using the related table statuses, there was no risk to break integrity. However, in the business logic of this CRM, changing the status of a customer is the result of running a process. That process not only sets the status of a customer to a new value, but also writes a history log, sends email notifications and perhaps triggers an invoicing process. Now, imagine a non-IT user changing the status field of a customer using a tool such as BaseDash. Now you have a customer in status active who is able to login to your paid SAAS but has never being invoiced. Many such nightmares can happen when users can directly edit a DB. For this reason, in production, dAgent features where limited to CRUDing simple catalog tables. It did help, but was not the silver bullet I had hoped for. On the other hand, IT users would never adopt dAgent since the DB engine provided a much more robust and feature-rich admin GUI. I was not in the business of competing with PHPMyAdmin, so I eventually dropped the project.
itachicomment 6y ago
Look Good from the description.However i know this is not a very necessary feature but consider adding google login, its easier and quick especially for people who want to test the product before committing.
shreyas-satish 6y ago
Product looks great, congrats on the launch. I would reconsider the positioning of the product if I were in your shoes. As danpalmer said, I suspect it might be tricky to ensure data integrity if non-technical people are bypassing app-level validations. That said, while I may not use this for my mission-critical data, I do think there's a lot of potential in using this as a headless CMS. I'm currently using Airtable, and its API limits make it unusable for anything apart from light workloads. Also, doesn't have webhooks. But, if I can use BaseDash instead as my CMS and have my marketing team handle the data through a familiar interface, while design + dev source the data into Figma & a static site through an API respectively, I see myself paying for this.
- maxmusing 6y ago
  Absolutely, we have a couple customers using BaseDash as a headless CMS. Edit history is especially nice here because you can always look through past iterations of content.
asavinov 6y ago
The real power of such kind of tools is determined by its ability to derive (infer) new data from multiple tables, particularly, by linking tables and aggregating data (using these links). Airtable had an interesting approach to this problem (yet, not perfect imho). Here I do not see how can I derive new tables or columns from already existing ones except for using SQL. If BaseDash relies on SQL then the question is what are its USPs which are directly related to data?
- maxmusing 6y ago
  We have the ability to join tables along foreign keys in a couple clicks through the UI. Definitely looking into adding aggregated data & computed columns soon!
pratio 6y ago
The product looks cool but i seriously doubt if something like this can fly in any of our production services where changes can be made directly to a production database without an audit trail. Even the example on the website where the account credit is being increased is something that I've yet to see in a production system. To safely use it on a production system internally it would have to be deployed on premise. In addition to that, the TOS clearly wash their hands if something goes wrong. I use airtable extensively in my personal projects and at work which seems to work fine. One more thing i observed about the company structure is that they're based in Delaware in a virtual office. Now, i know that as startups go, this isn't unheard of but trying to get this past legal would be nightmare. Congratulations on the launch though.
- maxmusing 6y ago
  We have edit history which acts as an audit trail for changes; view logs are coming soon too. We offer on-prem, and expect a good portion of SMBs to use it over our cloud version. Good catch on the virtual office! We're actually based in Canada, that's our US company's legal address.
  - pratio 6y ago
    I have several clients that are startups and i usually recommend them JetBrains Datagrip which has yet to disappoint. It also makes it easier to access the databases directly behind a VPN. Is there a limit to the number of databases a single user can access on a startup license? The reason i am asking this is that even a small startup can have multiple databases in production. A single license of DataGrip might sound more beneficial in that case.
secboy 6y ago
I just asked my CISO, about this product. He said, "For small, and really small companies they already have the talent to deal with the database directly because that's how they handle most of their problems because they don't have a "console" interface. So this would be just another product for them, and the technical staff wouldn't find it terribly useful because they already know how to interact with the database. For medium to large companies it doesn't fit because those companies spend all of their time trying to limit direct access to the database, so buying a tool that makes it easier is counter productive. However, it's a cool idea and looks like it was well implemented." Oh, I forgot to add that he said "Allowing a 3rd party web site to connect directly to a production database for the purpose allowing direct database manipulation will only happen with companies that don't have a security department, or their "security person" is just in name only. There are so many things that can go wrong that is just not worth doing. Even if this could run on site, is runs against basically all Information Security and IT operations best practices."
- knubie 6y ago
  > For small, and really small companies they already have the talent to deal with the database directly because that's how they handle most of their problems because they don't have a "console" interface. I feel like small and really small comparies are the primary market for this tool. A sort of stepping stone until they can build out a large enough engineering team to support more specialized internal tooling. A lot of small companies store most / all of their business data in spread sheets anyway, BaseDash just gives them a more robust backend (SQL) that allows them to transition more seamlessly into custom back office software. > So this would be just another product for them, and the technical staff wouldn't find it terribly useful because they already know how to interact with the database. The technical staff would find it tremendously useful because they can focus on building a solid data model on top of a SQL database without having to spend time building out clunky admin interfaces. And from the other direction they don't need to build out migrations from legacy spreadsheet data into a SQL database. > For medium to large companies it doesn't fit because those companies spend all of their time trying to limit direct access to the database, so buying a tool that makes it easier is counter productive. Maybe, but if BaseDash offers robust enough validations and permissioning, this shouldn't be as much of a concern. The flip side is that without BaseDash, if some data needs to be tweaked that isn't possible to do using the clunky ad hoc admin interfaces that were built, someone on the engineering team would need to make those changes in the database manually, or ops would need to wait for engineering to build out a feature to allow them to make those changes.
benoror 6y ago
Any plans for an API?
smt88 6y ago
> internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of a spreadsheet I've worked at companies with pgAdmin or something similar that allowed people to edit prod. It was a catastrophe. As others have said, non-tech people shouldn't have access to prod data, where they may not understand the schema well enough to edit it. Tech people already have GUIs. Using something like Airtable and syncing it with prod using a thin layer of code is much more viable.
nojvek 6y ago
I started on a similar thing a couple of months back but didn’t make it to YC. I talked to a bunch of folks and demoed then an MVP, but couldn’t get any paying users. Covid-19 hit and I had to find a paying job to make ends meet after many months on it. I open sourced my work to make something out of it. Not as polished as BaseDash or popsql. It’s MIT licensed. https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin Congrats BaseDash on making it to YC and getting this far. I wish you best of luck. Even though I’m a bit jealous.
- langitbiru 6y ago
  Don't feel bad. I was in your situation in the past. Don't give up. I have finally been able to launch a quite successful product (being used by a significant people daily). I plan to apply to YC this September. I don't want to put my product here because I don't want to steal thunders from BaseDash.
- maxmusing 6y ago
  I believe a majority of YC founders apply multiple times, often across multiple companies. Personally, I started 2 companies, applied 4 times, interviewed 2 times, across 4 years before getting in with BaseDash. Definitely try again, YC is worth it.
solrflow 6y ago
How does this compare with Prisma Studio? (Prisma framework specifically Prisma 2). Our company is graphql based and uses Prisma Studio as our visual gui for our db
rbobby 6y ago
A few folks mentioned repositioning so I thought I'd suggest a possibility. Medium/large companies do want to restrict access to production databases. Especially sysadmin level access. Maybe your tool could help companies with this. A coder/dba/support person can author an SQL "workbook" against their favorite dev db (thinking something like Jupyter Lab). They then submit the workbook for execution against a test or production db (with specific set of permissions like readonly, update X,Y,Z tables, etc). Make sure everything run against production is audit logged (who did what, what data was viewed, what changes were made). Also a bit of a front end workflow around getting access to production (dev submits request for access, some sort of production supervisor grants access, limited access (workbook requires review), or declined. Anyways just some random thoughts. (very slick website and feature walk throughs. impressive stuff)
brainless 6y ago
Hey there! Fellow founder in the same space here. I deeply understand what you are trying to solve cause I am doing the same. I am sure you are trying to differentiate from Jet Admin which is also in YC. ReTool is more mature (also YC). Then there is Forest Admin and Macro is coming out soon. On top of this, in my early customer validation talks, people ask me if my product is like Metabase or Chartio etc. So yeah it is a crowded space, but I feel this space is huge. Like every business wishes not to invest money in internal tools but they have to. I am still trying to figure out my MVP. I am currently working on complex (JOIN and aggregates) queries without any SQL knowledge. That is what I am going to launch as MVP soon. 2 levels of tables and people really struggle to get out what they want. An example query I am throwing around is "Show me Orders from Red Shoes". This already means Order, Product and Product Category table. This is a real pain for non-technical people and I believe solving this is becoming critical to encourage and enable every business to be able to ask questions about their Business without needing Engineering. I am going to go the UI/UX approach to solve this in my MVP and then go for an NLP based approach if things go well. Like if you could type that in a search box and get data, without knowing anything about databases or without needing any Engineering help, that would be real solution to Businesses. Cheers, and best of luck! Sumit from dwata.com
- brainless 6y ago
  Oh and also adding Actiondesk to the list of YC funded products, I see Jonathan is here in the comments. Hey!
- prostodata 6y ago
  > I am currently working on complex (JOIN and aggregates) queries without any SQL knowledge One way to process data without joins and groupy in multiple tables is to use Prosto toolkit: https://github.com/prostodata/prosto https://github.com/prostodata/prosto It is an alternative to SQL, MapReduce and other classical approaches by radically changing how data is processed
  - brainless 6y ago
    Thanks, I will take a look, although I prefer to stay with relational algebra, Python and R but make them all available through an easier UX. That might be a core selling point for me.
gregwebs 6y ago
This is a well known concept sometimes called a SQL editor. There's definitely a need for a great implementation of the concept though. There was a really good one called Wagon years ago that of course got bricked after the team was acquired and I still haven't liked any that I have tried since. The emphasis on editing production here is a bit odd since there is a lot of value that can be delivered read-only to analysts or to editing development for developers. I have a war story about editing production with one of these tools. Someone used such an editor to edit a MongoDB database value. The ORM schema said it was a float, but it was entered as an int. This somehow broke production for a lot of users. SQL editors * PopSQL * TeamSQL * DataGrip * https://www.beekeeperstudio.io CLI tools * [usql](https://github.com/xo/usql/releases) * [dbcli](http://www.dbcli.com/)
- infinite8s 6y ago
  What were your favorite parts of Wagon that haven't been replicated?
- bfelbo 6y ago
  We use Postico and are pretty happy with it. It's better for our use cases than e.g. PopSQL. That being said, we'd drop Postico any day for a smooth editor with 100% Postgres typing support.
SniperOwl 6y ago
I under stand this is for internal use, but will there be an on site deployment option?
ramraj07 6y ago
Cool tool, how are you guys different from forestadmin?
reportgunner 6y ago
Do I understand correctly that I am supposed to give you write access to my PROD database just so i can edit my production database with the ease of a spreadsheet in a web browser ? What happens when BaseDash is down ? Do I have to go back to using code again ?
cpursley 6y ago
This looks really useful! Not sure how it would handle business rules and callbacks, but these days I'm doing much of that directly in the database anyways after years of fighting inconsistencies at the application level (Rails, cough cough). For admin type dashboards that need customization I've been using Hasura + React Admin (nice replacement for Rails ActiveAdmin). Combine Hasura (automatic GraphQL on top of PostgreSQL) with React Admin (low code CRUD apps) and you can build an entire back office admin suite or form app (API endpoints and admin front end) in a matter of hours. This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql
elitan 6y ago
Nice product, nice UI, nice onboarding experience. Good job!
epost1 6y ago
I would like to give this a test drive against an Oracle cloud database? Possible?
akrymski 6y ago
Max - congrats on the launch! Looks very slick, I'd love to replace AirTable with something more performant. Can I edit the schema yet? Would be great to have a sample database when I login for the first time so I can see the UI in action.
- bfelbo 6y ago
  Yes, a sample DB would be amazing! I'd love to try this out, but wouldn't give access to one of our DBs w/o setting up a specific role for BaseDash etc.
physicsAI 6y ago
Great product, solving exact pain point we have right now: non-technical team members glued to Django Admin all day long and waiting days to get much-needed data from engineers, who cannot find the time to write simple views with relevant SQL queries. I have signed up and started testing your product. Looks great so far. If things check out, there is a good chance we will sign up for real and pay. Congrats on the launch!

191 points by maxmusing 6y ago

switz 6y ago

I've been ruminating on this exact problem for months. I'm consulting at a company where we have a lot of non-engineers who own several major processes w/r/t data sources of truth. Engineers need up-to-date programmatic access to that data, and the non-engineers need a way to keep that information accurate. This is awesome. I was considering building it myself, but it's always a pleasure to see someone else deliver a working product on an idea you've been bouncing around. Good luck, this is a relatively 'simple' product with a huge market.

maxmusing 6y ago
Glad to hear you like the product! Would love to hear your thoughts after trying it.

MattGaiser 6y ago

How does this differ from something like DBeaver? Our QA Analysts (semi-manual testers) use that for making tweaks to our databases, both production and otherwise. Developers also use it because it is frequently easier than the command line when we do not know all the table and column names. Is it basically a less intimidating version of that?

maxmusing 6y ago
Yes, it's meant to be much easier for non-technical teammates, plus has more collaborative functionality built for teams (easy to share access, team-wide edit history, real-time collaboration). I tend to think of tools like DBeaver as being built for individual, technical users, while BaseDash is built for cross-functional teams.
AdmiralGinge 6y ago
Huge shout out to DBeaver by the way, it's one of the most useful applications I use on a daily basis.

ron22 6y ago

You can track changes and see comments as to why each change was made, that's really cool.

itachicomment 6y ago
They should use this as their main selling point.

interactivecode 6y ago

could we self host this for DIY/home use?

taylorwc 6y ago

I'm really bullish on this concept. I learned how to code coming from a finance background, and the mental shift from Excel to relational database felt natural enough, but the lack of Excel-like ways to interact with those databases has always felt like white space to me. Well done!

joparisot 6y ago
Hey Taylor, You should check out actiondesk (disclaimer: I'm the founder)! We're complementary from basedash (not doing the writing to the database, but focusing on viewing and analyzing your db data in a spreadsheet)
- maxmusing 6y ago
  Actiondesk is awesome. We share a couple customers.

darkhorse13 6y ago

How big is the "spreadsheet as database" market? I mean don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan of spreadsheets. But it seems like there are many products and companies trying to compete in this space.

maxmusing 6y ago
We're more so positioned as an internal tool, so competing with products like Retool and Internal. Main difference is that BaseDash gives an opinionated interface rather than a UI builder. We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  > We're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI themselves. Yes! If you add to this [0] a managed database offering of your own (ala airtable) and make it tres simple to (ab)use, then that'd be something. All the best. [0] database is the app?
  - maxmusing 6y ago
    We actually had a 1-month-long pivot to managed database hosting early on in development, but it was super janky. Might look into this again in the future.
  - brainless 6y ago
    I actually liked this idea when it came up in my customer conversations and I have this in the roadmap of my product. This space is definitely going to get more mature and I feel Airtable is a big inspiration for me. Making it easy for non-technical teams to add new Tables and do complex queries (I mentioned in separate comment here) is what I feel will be a differentiator for me.
MattGaiser 6y ago
There is no way that my current organization would buy this, but it would free up a lot of developer hours if customer support or even operations analysts could do this instead of needing a dev every time they wanted to run a custom report.

codetrotter 6y ago

Gotta hand it to you, this looks really slick. Also, the call to action at the bottom was well made; > Skip the waitlist, this week only > We're opening access to BaseDash for the next week during our Hacker News launch. Usually when someone is like “act now” I’m like “yeah right”. But in this case, whether it really matters or not that I sign up exactly this week, the fact that you put some effort into connecting the text to the HN post made it feel more genuine and was sufficient to instead make me go “alright I’ll do it”. I don’t immediately have time to use it but I can tell that this product is useful so I’m making a mental note to log back in in the future and check it out more. For now I was happy to see that in addition to the UX niceties that were mentioned on the landing page, you guys make it possible to configure a connection with SSH between your servers and the db servers of the user. That is very encouraging to see :) I think on top of that it would be neat if you also offered users to configure connections that go through Wireguard, as I run Wireguard on my personal server and I know other people do too. I guess one guy asking for Wireguard is probably not going to convince you to add it. But who knows, maybe others will request it too ;)

maxmusing 6y ago
Thanks! We thought it would be best for HN to have direct access (we didn't do this for Product Hunt). I'll keep Wireguard in mind :)

randtrain34 6y ago

$50/user/month seems a bit steep to me, you can easily get something like https://retool.com/pricing/ https://retool.com/pricing/ for $10/user/month. Granted it's a bit of a different market, but it does a lot more in addition to having editable/searchable/filterable DB tables.

MattGaiser 6y ago
It seems to be the same as the retool pro version with audit logs.
Twisell 6y ago
For me the pain point is that, like many others, they want to charge the same price for editors and read-only users. Do the math with me to feel the pain: -I use the product $50/month great -My team use the product $300/month (6x50€) bearable if product really fit our need -My team want to share access in read-only mode with the whole department 2500$/month (50x50) acceptable only if it's a core unavoidable product Almost everytime there is no real technical difference between hosting service for use case 2 and 3. So I get that the business model intend to milk as much money from large organisations that shit gold and can't do basic math. But in the process you are cutting yourself from all small/medium company that just seek to pay a fair price. To keep it simple I believe the basis should be that read only are always free or linked to paying (like get 50 read-only license for each paying editor licence). This better reflect real world situation.
- maxmusing 6y ago
  That's a good point, I'll look into reducing the pricing for read-only users. We haven't had many companies with read-only users so it hasn't come up, but I think it makes sense.

jadbox 6y ago

The pricing model is a little strange to me. I would like to see a minimal free tier and then a micro pay-as-you-go query cost than a large set monthly cost.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kanobo 6y ago

Congrats and looks great, I like the tracking history/change. If everything is tracked is there a feature to rollback to a previous state? If so, why not also advertise it as a innovative backup + edit solution? That would be be a bigger deal than just the spreadsheet part since people already use DataGrip or TablePlus.

maxmusing 6y ago
We only track changes made through BaseDash, so we don't have full snapshots of your database to revert to. We'll definitely add a feature to rollback individual edits though.

danpalmer 6y ago

The main question I have with tools like this is around safety. The reason we typically don't directly edit production data like this is because of application level concerns or validation. I think it's important that any tool like this allows a way to replicate that safety in some way, otherwise it's as risky as using a GUI client directly. Access control (which this does) addresses security and starts addressing safety, but there's a lot more necessary to get to the safety that is often enforced at the application level. There's an argument that the validation should be in the database, and that's nice when it's possible, but it's often not. For any application using Rails/Django, anything else along those lines, anyone interacting with the database mostly via an ORM, will typically not be putting this sort of validation in the database in _all_ cases – thinking about enums, fixed slugs, relative dates, timezone support, etc.

ignoramous 6y ago
> The main question I have with tools like this is around safety. "Your app's data is never stored on our servers with the exception of edit history which lets you audit all changes to your data" from: https://www.basedash.io/pricing https://www.basedash.io/pricing Not the most convincing sell but not that they did not address this concern at all.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  I think that's a different thing. If we think about a field that is an enumeration (in some form), this might need to deserialise to a language-native enumeration option in the application, or need to have one of a small set of values. If someone puts a typo into that field with this tool that could cause issues in production. Yes an audit log may help you notice these and fix them, but that's probably not going to be enough for anyone running a product in production off this database.
- penagwin 6y ago
  He's talking about operational safety - your application applies validation to inputs to the database. This ensures that only valid data is stored. What happens if you have a field that's supposed to be 0-9, but it's an int field and someone types in 22 on accident? Sure it might be valid for the database, but it's not valid for the application. There's certainly different ways to take the problem, but it needs to be considered.

nrudrapp 6y ago

We use dbeaver internally (and we hate it). But it is free and our engineers get by with most of what's required from tool like it. And dashbase looks like a well done product for a new project - what does you stack looks like frontend and backend ? And have to agree with others that dashbase is pricey though! It will be nearly impossible to convince management to pay $600 per year. Can you tell about usecases of your early users who are paying for this ?

fortydegrees 6y ago
I'm CTO of a very early stage startup and $50/mo to allow my CEO to read and edit the database is an easy decision.
- nrudrapp 6y ago
  In a startup, are you sure you like to spend 600 bucks on a db edit tool - what stage is your startup ?
- nrmitchi 6y ago
  This is a half-joke of a comment, but I would pay $50/month to a product that could explicitly prohibit the CEO from editing the production database.
  - iKlsR 6y ago
    I saw this immediately after submitting my comment above and I was like why would you want to give such access to someone who is more than likely non-technical. I can't see any pros from this unless it's locked to read only mode but then at $50 you're just paying for an excel view into your app.
- iKlsR 6y ago
  I disagree, speaking on production data, if your CEO is technical enough they should be able to do this (for whatever reason they have). If not, you need some sort of admin interface (could be a couple forms) to address this properly so invalid data can't be plopped in OR any changes should be documented and sent to someone technical even if it's a typo fix. It seems fun and easy but production data isn't something you should wrap in an excel interface and give to any and everyone. $600 a year so your boss can update names and dates is kinda hard to justify as well.

skunkwerk 6y ago

Congrats on the launch. Have wanted something like this for years - most admin tools aren't easy to use like Airtable, and Airtable itself isn't designed to be a backend for your apps. Would love to see a lower-priced tier for just a single user (no collaborators).

maxmusing 6y ago
Thanks! We'll probably add a cheaper plan for individuals soon. If you're interested, we can set something custom up now. Shoot me an email: max@basedash.io

kkotak 6y ago

Any plans to support NoSQL?

maxmusing 6y ago
Yes! MongoDB and Firestore are first on the roadmap.

contrarianmop 6y ago

Here is a feature i would like to suggest: a mechanism for change reviews, so that any non tech person can make DB changes, but have them reviewed by peers (much like a github review) and approved before having them applied. Can save a lot of headaches.

bikamonki 6y ago

TLDR: Giving non-IT users direct edit access to the production DB will most likely break stuff. I wrote something similar to BaseDash ages ago, I called it dAgent (for database agent). I had it running for many different clients from all sorts of trades (I do custom development). The GUI built itself from reading the DB schema. My initial motivation was to cut dev time since dAgent would automate the coding of CRUD interfaces. However, the use of dAgent in production ended up being quite limited: maybe only used to edit catalog data (i.e. add a city to the cities table). The reason for this limited usage is no mystery: one can easily break things. In particular non-IT users can break things. Allow me to use an example. You have a CRM with a customers table. On that table there is a field called status. For that field, dAgent would load a select input using the related table statuses, there was no risk to break integrity. However, in the business logic of this CRM, changing the status of a customer is the result of running a process. That process not only sets the status of a customer to a new value, but also writes a history log, sends email notifications and perhaps triggers an invoicing process. Now, imagine a non-IT user changing the status field of a customer using a tool such as BaseDash. Now you have a customer in status active who is able to login to your paid SAAS but has never being invoiced. Many such nightmares can happen when users can directly edit a DB. For this reason, in production, dAgent features where limited to CRUDing simple catalog tables. It did help, but was not the silver bullet I had hoped for. On the other hand, IT users would never adopt dAgent since the DB engine provided a much more robust and feature-rich admin GUI. I was not in the business of competing with PHPMyAdmin, so I eventually dropped the project.

itachicomment 6y ago

Look Good from the description.However i know this is not a very necessary feature but consider adding google login, its easier and quick especially for people who want to test the product before committing.

shreyas-satish 6y ago

Product looks great, congrats on the launch. I would reconsider the positioning of the product if I were in your shoes. As danpalmer said, I suspect it might be tricky to ensure data integrity if non-technical people are bypassing app-level validations. That said, while I may not use this for my mission-critical data, I do think there's a lot of potential in using this as a headless CMS. I'm currently using Airtable, and its API limits make it unusable for anything apart from light workloads. Also, doesn't have webhooks. But, if I can use BaseDash instead as my CMS and have my marketing team handle the data through a familiar interface, while design + dev source the data into Figma & a static site through an API respectively, I see myself paying for this.

maxmusing 6y ago
Absolutely, we have a couple customers using BaseDash as a headless CMS. Edit history is especially nice here because you can always look through past iterations of content.

asavinov 6y ago

The real power of such kind of tools is determined by its ability to derive (infer) new data from multiple tables, particularly, by linking tables and aggregating data (using these links). Airtable had an interesting approach to this problem (yet, not perfect imho). Here I do not see how can I derive new tables or columns from already existing ones except for using SQL. If BaseDash relies on SQL then the question is what are its USPs which are directly related to data?

maxmusing 6y ago
We have the ability to join tables along foreign keys in a couple clicks through the UI. Definitely looking into adding aggregated data & computed columns soon!

pratio 6y ago

The product looks cool but i seriously doubt if something like this can fly in any of our production services where changes can be made directly to a production database without an audit trail. Even the example on the website where the account credit is being increased is something that I've yet to see in a production system. To safely use it on a production system internally it would have to be deployed on premise. In addition to that, the TOS clearly wash their hands if something goes wrong. I use airtable extensively in my personal projects and at work which seems to work fine. One more thing i observed about the company structure is that they're based in Delaware in a virtual office. Now, i know that as startups go, this isn't unheard of but trying to get this past legal would be nightmare. Congratulations on the launch though.

maxmusing 6y ago
We have edit history which acts as an audit trail for changes; view logs are coming soon too. We offer on-prem, and expect a good portion of SMBs to use it over our cloud version. Good catch on the virtual office! We're actually based in Canada, that's our US company's legal address.
- pratio 6y ago
  I have several clients that are startups and i usually recommend them JetBrains Datagrip which has yet to disappoint. It also makes it easier to access the databases directly behind a VPN. Is there a limit to the number of databases a single user can access on a startup license? The reason i am asking this is that even a small startup can have multiple databases in production. A single license of DataGrip might sound more beneficial in that case.

secboy 6y ago

I just asked my CISO, about this product. He said, "For small, and really small companies they already have the talent to deal with the database directly because that's how they handle most of their problems because they don't have a "console" interface. So this would be just another product for them, and the technical staff wouldn't find it terribly useful because they already know how to interact with the database. For medium to large companies it doesn't fit because those companies spend all of their time trying to limit direct access to the database, so buying a tool that makes it easier is counter productive. However, it's a cool idea and looks like it was well implemented." Oh, I forgot to add that he said "Allowing a 3rd party web site to connect directly to a production database for the purpose allowing direct database manipulation will only happen with companies that don't have a security department, or their "security person" is just in name only. There are so many things that can go wrong that is just not worth doing. Even if this could run on site, is runs against basically all Information Security and IT operations best practices."

knubie 6y ago
> For small, and really small companies they already have the talent to deal with the database directly because that's how they handle most of their problems because they don't have a "console" interface. I feel like small and really small comparies are the primary market for this tool. A sort of stepping stone until they can build out a large enough engineering team to support more specialized internal tooling. A lot of small companies store most / all of their business data in spread sheets anyway, BaseDash just gives them a more robust backend (SQL) that allows them to transition more seamlessly into custom back office software. > So this would be just another product for them, and the technical staff wouldn't find it terribly useful because they already know how to interact with the database. The technical staff would find it tremendously useful because they can focus on building a solid data model on top of a SQL database without having to spend time building out clunky admin interfaces. And from the other direction they don't need to build out migrations from legacy spreadsheet data into a SQL database. > For medium to large companies it doesn't fit because those companies spend all of their time trying to limit direct access to the database, so buying a tool that makes it easier is counter productive. Maybe, but if BaseDash offers robust enough validations and permissioning, this shouldn't be as much of a concern. The flip side is that without BaseDash, if some data needs to be tweaked that isn't possible to do using the clunky ad hoc admin interfaces that were built, someone on the engineering team would need to make those changes in the database manually, or ops would need to wait for engineering to build out a feature to allow them to make those changes.

benoror 6y ago

Any plans for an API?

smt88 6y ago

> internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of a spreadsheet I've worked at companies with pgAdmin or something similar that allowed people to edit prod. It was a catastrophe. As others have said, non-tech people shouldn't have access to prod data, where they may not understand the schema well enough to edit it. Tech people already have GUIs. Using something like Airtable and syncing it with prod using a thin layer of code is much more viable.

nojvek 6y ago

I started on a similar thing a couple of months back but didn’t make it to YC. I talked to a bunch of folks and demoed then an MVP, but couldn’t get any paying users. Covid-19 hit and I had to find a paying job to make ends meet after many months on it. I open sourced my work to make something out of it. Not as polished as BaseDash or popsql. It’s MIT licensed. https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin Congrats BaseDash on making it to YC and getting this far. I wish you best of luck. Even though I’m a bit jealous.

langitbiru 6y ago
Don't feel bad. I was in your situation in the past. Don't give up. I have finally been able to launch a quite successful product (being used by a significant people daily). I plan to apply to YC this September. I don't want to put my product here because I don't want to steal thunders from BaseDash.
maxmusing 6y ago
I believe a majority of YC founders apply multiple times, often across multiple companies. Personally, I started 2 companies, applied 4 times, interviewed 2 times, across 4 years before getting in with BaseDash. Definitely try again, YC is worth it.

solrflow 6y ago

How does this compare with Prisma Studio? (Prisma framework specifically Prisma 2). Our company is graphql based and uses Prisma Studio as our visual gui for our db

rbobby 6y ago

A few folks mentioned repositioning so I thought I'd suggest a possibility. Medium/large companies do want to restrict access to production databases. Especially sysadmin level access. Maybe your tool could help companies with this. A coder/dba/support person can author an SQL "workbook" against their favorite dev db (thinking something like Jupyter Lab). They then submit the workbook for execution against a test or production db (with specific set of permissions like readonly, update X,Y,Z tables, etc). Make sure everything run against production is audit logged (who did what, what data was viewed, what changes were made). Also a bit of a front end workflow around getting access to production (dev submits request for access, some sort of production supervisor grants access, limited access (workbook requires review), or declined. Anyways just some random thoughts. (very slick website and feature walk throughs. impressive stuff)

brainless 6y ago

Hey there! Fellow founder in the same space here. I deeply understand what you are trying to solve cause I am doing the same. I am sure you are trying to differentiate from Jet Admin which is also in YC. ReTool is more mature (also YC). Then there is Forest Admin and Macro is coming out soon. On top of this, in my early customer validation talks, people ask me if my product is like Metabase or Chartio etc. So yeah it is a crowded space, but I feel this space is huge. Like every business wishes not to invest money in internal tools but they have to. I am still trying to figure out my MVP. I am currently working on complex (JOIN and aggregates) queries without any SQL knowledge. That is what I am going to launch as MVP soon. 2 levels of tables and people really struggle to get out what they want. An example query I am throwing around is "Show me Orders from Red Shoes". This already means Order, Product and Product Category table. This is a real pain for non-technical people and I believe solving this is becoming critical to encourage and enable every business to be able to ask questions about their Business without needing Engineering. I am going to go the UI/UX approach to solve this in my MVP and then go for an NLP based approach if things go well. Like if you could type that in a search box and get data, without knowing anything about databases or without needing any Engineering help, that would be real solution to Businesses. Cheers, and best of luck! Sumit from dwata.com

brainless 6y ago
Oh and also adding Actiondesk to the list of YC funded products, I see Jonathan is here in the comments. Hey!
prostodata 6y ago
> I am currently working on complex (JOIN and aggregates) queries without any SQL knowledge One way to process data without joins and groupy in multiple tables is to use Prosto toolkit: https://github.com/prostodata/prosto https://github.com/prostodata/prosto It is an alternative to SQL, MapReduce and other classical approaches by radically changing how data is processed
- brainless 6y ago
  Thanks, I will take a look, although I prefer to stay with relational algebra, Python and R but make them all available through an easier UX. That might be a core selling point for me.

gregwebs 6y ago

This is a well known concept sometimes called a SQL editor. There's definitely a need for a great implementation of the concept though. There was a really good one called Wagon years ago that of course got bricked after the team was acquired and I still haven't liked any that I have tried since. The emphasis on editing production here is a bit odd since there is a lot of value that can be delivered read-only to analysts or to editing development for developers. I have a war story about editing production with one of these tools. Someone used such an editor to edit a MongoDB database value. The ORM schema said it was a float, but it was entered as an int. This somehow broke production for a lot of users. SQL editors * PopSQL * TeamSQL * DataGrip * https://www.beekeeperstudio.io CLI tools * [usql](https://github.com/xo/usql/releases) * [dbcli](http://www.dbcli.com/)

infinite8s 6y ago
What were your favorite parts of Wagon that haven't been replicated?
bfelbo 6y ago
We use Postico and are pretty happy with it. It's better for our use cases than e.g. PopSQL. That being said, we'd drop Postico any day for a smooth editor with 100% Postgres typing support.

SniperOwl 6y ago

I under stand this is for internal use, but will there be an on site deployment option?

ramraj07 6y ago

Cool tool, how are you guys different from forestadmin?

reportgunner 6y ago

Do I understand correctly that I am supposed to give you write access to my PROD database just so i can edit my production database with the ease of a spreadsheet in a web browser ? What happens when BaseDash is down ? Do I have to go back to using code again ?

cpursley 6y ago

This looks really useful! Not sure how it would handle business rules and callbacks, but these days I'm doing much of that directly in the database anyways after years of fighting inconsistencies at the application level (Rails, cough cough). For admin type dashboards that need customization I've been using Hasura + React Admin (nice replacement for Rails ActiveAdmin). Combine Hasura (automatic GraphQL on top of PostgreSQL) with React Admin (low code CRUD apps) and you can build an entire back office admin suite or form app (API endpoints and admin front end) in a matter of hours. This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql

elitan 6y ago

Nice product, nice UI, nice onboarding experience. Good job!

epost1 6y ago

I would like to give this a test drive against an Oracle cloud database? Possible?

akrymski 6y ago

Max - congrats on the launch! Looks very slick, I'd love to replace AirTable with something more performant. Can I edit the schema yet? Would be great to have a sample database when I login for the first time so I can see the UI in action.

bfelbo 6y ago
Yes, a sample DB would be amazing! I'd love to try this out, but wouldn't give access to one of our DBs w/o setting up a specific role for BaseDash etc.

physicsAI 6y ago

Great product, solving exact pain point we have right now: non-technical team members glued to Django Admin all day long and waiting days to get much-needed data from engineers, who cannot find the time to write simple views with relevant SQL queries. I have signed up and started testing your product. Looks great so far. If things check out, there is a good chance we will sign up for real and pay. Congrats on the launch!