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Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

baserow.io

161–170 of 229 posts

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#161

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, wit…

You may be interested in https://sandstorm.io/

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#162
post #22
post #6

Gorgeous landing page. Is it a template or did you handroll that? Kudos either way.

Thanks! It is not a template, I designed it from scratch.

That's impressive. Baserow feels like a labor of love. Will definitely try contributing.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#163

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…

Are your tables large enough Office 365 can't handle it for a reasonable price?

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#164
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Blow is a great programmer but his criticism makes no sense to me. "It's elitist and undemocratic that someone gets to decide whether they want to ship you code". what??

he was criticizing the idea of pull requests. You could spend a lot of time adding code and submit a pull request and the maintainer of the project gets to decide whether they want your code or not. If they don’t, then you just wasted all your time.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#165

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…

Just curious - what do you use airtable for exactly?

When do you need a structured database with many collaborators?

Airtable and the like strike me as a database tool for dummies who want 'anyone change anything anytime', which is just a recipe for no one knowing who the hell is changing what and when anymore.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#166

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…

> Why is this happening in the SasS world??? Everyone seems to be either single Pro user, or Enterprise. Do they really think there is nothing in-between?

The in-between for some software out there is "Guest access". Services like Notion, Miro and Mural have this figured out, but it is very disappointing that most do not.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#167

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…

[deleted]

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#168

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, wit…

https://cloud.google.com/marketplace

Google cloud marketplace allows you to launch all kinds of open source solutions with a click. This includes the setup for databases.

Though it's not a place that a non technical user would think to go, and I expect it's not really as simple as it promises. The devil is always in the details.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#169

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…

Just curious - what do you use airtable for exactly? When do you need a structured database with many collaborators? Airtable and the like strike me as a database tool for dummies who want 'anyone change anything anytime', which is just a recipe for no one knowing who the hell is changing what and when anymore.

Yeah it's common in business. Normally it's in a spreadsheet on a shared drive, so this is a step up.

Businesses change fast and don't always have internal development resources to create an application to do this sort of thing.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#170

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 wonder if there’s a business model of paid hosting of other companies open source alternatives...

This was the promise behind sandstorm.io
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