Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean AWS?
Yeah, something like that. But for all these SaaS apps.
Sandstorm kind of tried that (https://sandstorm.io).
Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
101–110 of 229 posts
Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
#102There'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, wit…
Isn't this the PaaS model?
Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
#103I 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.
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.
Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
#104I 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…
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%.
Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
#105Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
#106Hi nice job, If you could integrate OAuth2 into it, it would be quite comfortable. I hate having to register manually.
Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
#107A 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 us…
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
It does a lot more, now, too! We're even tracking all the community suggestions and ideas made in Discord in Airtable now.
Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
#108I 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.
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.
Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
#109There'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'm reminded of Jonathan Blow's rant about open source software at the beginning of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLVjSeusPYg
Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative
#110I 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.