Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

baserow.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 229 posts

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#111

Post by social_quotient »

jwitchel wrote: post #77
Swizec wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Silicon Valley SaaS bros have lost touch with reality because they have unlimited money to work with. Disagree. The issue is that they don’t want cheap users. It lowers your average user value, impacts your valuation, and usually cheap users are the most demanding to support in relation to their revenue. A user that pays $50/year and has 5 questions to support us very different than 5 questions from a user posting…

That's not quite right. It's not the support. It's the churn metrics. A guy who uses your system episodically can give the appearance of a high churn rate. This is very bad and if you're raising money can imply that your system isn't sticky which lowers your valuations. If you're in the fundraising game that's actually worse than a few extra dollars of revenue.

Goodhart's law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#112

Post by rovr138 »

Exuma wrote: post #70
bram2w wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that those features have not been created. I agree with you that it has to clearer. We will add a small description what the hourglass icon means soon.

I would just write "coming soon" and make it very clear. a tiny legend is going to be only marginally better, when it should be clear at the expense of slightly fancy looking.

And would just add complexity for people using a screen reader.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#113

Post by grioghar »

tylermenezes wrote: post #110

I am so excited for this software. I have used Airtable extensively, and it's a pile of garbage. Here are just a FEW of the "features" Airtable charges $24/user/mo for: - Reliable 1-5 hours a month of downtime. There are months where it's literally 1 nine of uptime. Their status page was actually down for a while (I think they forgot to renew it?) - Simple and obvious bugs in the official API clients have not been fi…

I’m so glad it’s not just me.

I have been unimpressed with the over-complication and the...lacking API.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#114

Post by mekster »

aschampion wrote: post #32

See also https://seatable.io/

I never see a mention of this even at any of the "awesome" lists but this is really well built and has more features than baserow.

Baserow's mobile support is quite poor but Seatable does it very well and I've been using it for several months and love it.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#115

Post by markfer »

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…

That's ridiculous. Collaborating with clients should almost always be free.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of collaboration are you doing with clients? I'm the CEO of a platform specifically for businesses and their clients, and we loosely compete with Airtable.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#116

Post by mekster »

kennydude wrote: post #63
aschampion wrote: post #32

See also https://seatable.io/

Seatable doesn't appear to be open source, and for some reason the website is incredibly janky on Firefox

Server component seems proprietary but you can easily run it via docker.

https://github.com/seatable/seatable#license

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#117

Post by alisonkisk »

ig1 wrote: post #93
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.

The simple answer is to charge for support like every enterprise company does

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#118

Post by alisonkisk »

donmcronald wrote: post #96
renewiltord wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Meanwhile MS and Google have thousands of satisfied customers with millions of users paying the $10/mo/user.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#119

Post by hanniabu »

popinman322 wrote: post #102
hanniabu wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sort of but not really. On thinking about it some more for the average user, you'd really want to sell a ready-to-go unit so they don't even have to deal with the initial computer setup and platform download/install because I know that's still way more than a lot of people would want to do or feel comfortable doing. They want something that they own, with good privacy, that just works, and is maintenance free.

I imagine this company selling a visually appealing unit similar to how xbox and playstation aim to be more of an elegant accent piece than a clunky electronic box. This way when the user gets the product they just open, plug it in, create an account and password, wait for it to initialize, and then you're good to go and can start immediately downloading apps. Then just download an accompanying app on your phone/desktop/computer and connect to your own personal cloud where you own all your software and data. Could even sell upgradeable units for a premium that have an easy access panel to just swap or plug in additional RAM or SSD modules.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#120

Post by alisonkisk »

Swizec wrote: post #73
Aeolun wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is getting those 5000/month accounts if nobody wants to use your product before they get there.

You’d be surprised. Those users come from sales more than self serve. Very different business model.

Who is going to buy your high touch sales offer if they see no one uses your product?

Is this a thing where all the YC companies buy each other's stuff to prop up the revenue numbers until IPO?

Post reply on HN