Hey everyone! I'm Max from BaseDash (<a href="https://www.basedash.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.basedash.io</a>). 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.<p>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).<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="https://www.basedash.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.basedash.io</a> and let me know what you think!
The main question I have with tools like this is around safety.<p>The reason we typically <i>don't</i> directly edit production data like this is because of application level concerns or validation.<p>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.<p>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.
Gotta hand it to you, this looks really slick. Also, the call to action at the bottom was well made;<p>> Skip the waitlist, this week only<p>> We're opening access to BaseDash for the next week during our Hacker News launch.<p>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”.<p>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 :)<p>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 ;)
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.<p>I open sourced my work to make something out of it. Not as polished as BaseDash or popsql. It’s MIT licensed.<p><a href="https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin</a><p>Congrats BaseDash on making it to YC and getting this far. I wish you best of luck. Even though I’m a bit jealous.
I just asked my CISO, about this product.<p>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.<p>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.<p>However, it's a cool idea and looks like it was well implemented."<p>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."
$50/user/month seems a bit steep to me, you can easily get something like <a href="https://retool.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://retool.com/pricing/</a> 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.
Product looks great, congrats on the launch. I would reconsider the positioning of the product if I were in your shoes.<p>As danpalmer said, I suspect it might be tricky to ensure data integrity if non-technical people are bypassing app-level validations.<p>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.<p>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.
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!
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.<p>And dashbase looks like a well done product for a new project - what does you stack looks like frontend and backend ?<p>And have to agree with others that dashbase is pricey though!<p>It will be nearly impossible to convince management to pay $600 per year.<p>Can you tell about usecases of your early users who are paying for this ?
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.
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.<p>Is it basically a less intimidating version of that?
A few folks mentioned repositioning so I thought I'd suggest a possibility.<p>Medium/large companies do want to restrict access to production databases. Especially sysadmin level access.<p>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).<p>Make sure everything run against production is audit logged (who did what, what data was viewed, what changes were made).<p>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.<p>Anyways just some random thoughts.<p>(very slick website and feature walk throughs. impressive stuff)
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Congratulations on the launch though.
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.<p>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.
TLDR: Giving non-IT users direct edit access to the production DB will most likely break stuff.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Many such nightmares can happen when users can directly edit a DB.<p>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.
Hey there!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Cheers, and best of luck!<p>Sumit from dwata.com
The real power of such kind of tools is determined by its ability to derive (infer) new data from <i>multiple</i> 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?
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.<p>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.<p>SQL editors<p><pre><code> * PopSQL
* TeamSQL
* DataGrip
* https://www.beekeeperstudio.io
</code></pre>
CLI tools<p><pre><code> * [usql](https://github.com/xo/usql/releases)
* [dbcli](http://www.dbcli.com/)</code></pre>
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).<p>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.<p>This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: <a href="https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql</a>
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).
> <i>internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of a spreadsheet</i><p>I've worked at companies with pgAdmin or something similar that allowed people to edit prod. It was a catastrophe.<p>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.<p>Using something like Airtable and syncing it with prod using a thin layer of code is much more viable.
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
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.
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.<p>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.<p>Congrats on the launch!
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.
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.
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.
Do I understand correctly that I am supposed to give you write access to my PROD database just so i can <i>edit my production database with the ease of a spreadsheet</i> in a web browser ?<p>What happens when BaseDash is down ? Do I have to go back to using code again ?