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Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

baserow.io

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Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#91

Post by hanniabu »

donmcronald wrote: post #55
chrisblackwell wrote: post #50

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 colla…

> 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 beca…

> 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.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#92

Post by hanniabu »

dbrereton wrote: post #38

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

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.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#93

Post by ig1 »

chrisblackwell wrote: post #50

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 colla…

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 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.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#95

Post by azernik »

chrisblackwell wrote: post #50

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 colla…

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.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#96

Post by donmcronald »

renewiltord wrote: post #80
donmcronald wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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,…

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.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#97

Post by remram »

thedays wrote: post #83

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. €4 per user / month is much easier to read and understand for most people than € 4,00 per user / month The comma made it look a bit odd and like €400 initially when I glanced at it and it just seems like an unnecessary level…

"From € 1.000 p/m" is even worse. I was not even aware of any locale using ',' for decimals and '.' for thousands.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#98

Post by flylib »

dbrereton wrote: post #38

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

anyone know of a GitHub list of open source clones of popular products?

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#99

Post by Kiro »

remram wrote: post #97
thedays wrote: post #83

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. €4 per user / month is much easier to read and understand for most people than € 4,00 per user / month The comma made it look a bit odd and like €400 initially when I glanced at it and it just seems like an unnecessary level…

"From € 1.000 p/m" is even worse. I was not even aware of any locale using ',' for decimals and '.' for thousands.

Probably German.
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