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Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

baserow.io

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Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#191

Post by auxym »

sofixa wrote: post #189
auxym wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the free tier as a collaborative Kanban board for a tiny 5 person team. Airtable allows me to define arbitrary fields for the Kanban cards, which happens to be a premium/paid feature in all the actual Kanban saas tools (Trello, etc).

It isn't on Jira if you're <10 users, but Jira is a whole lot more than just Kanban and a huge beast.

JIRA would not just overkill but a bad fit for us, potentially requiring extensive configuration.

We're an academic research lab that also happens to do contractual work for other labs (mostly internal to the university), mostly designing and building mechanical prototypes and testbeds for other researchers.

It took like 5 minutes to set up an airtable base to track our WIP and all information we use for billing our "customers": hours, material purchased, internal budget reference, etc.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#192

Post by donmcronald »

ab_testing wrote: post #141
donmcronald wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you answered your question right there. Microsoft does not want the business of a company where 50 mailboxes cost $60 for the whole year. They are happy to leave that market to other lower cost providers

It wouldn’t have to be that cheap though. If they sold Exchange only plans for $1-2 / user / month I could probably convince 10x the users it’s worth it. And they never deal with the customers.

It’s MUCH easier to sell someone another product at that point too. That’s literally the strategy (cross selling) Ballmer used to increase sales so much that he ended up owning part of MS.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#193

Post by donmcronald »

sofixa wrote: post #190
donmcronald wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Hard disagree. Scalability and reliability, and SSO[0] are basic features any piece of software should have. Even a one-person startup shouldn't have to accept a tool being down for a month or all of their data lost due to a fire in a datacenter. Charging extra for any of these is a very shitty business model. 0 - sso.tax

How much scalability does one person need? And no HA doesn’t mean “down for a month”. It means I have no issue with enduring a few hours of downtime here and there. And HA and backups aren’t even related, so...

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#194

Post by eb0la »

Joeri wrote: post #187
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…

An enterprise IWMS system I worked on solved this by charging only for enabled accounts. An admin could enable or disable accounts, and every month a report would show how many unique accounts were enabled that month and determined the billing. That shouldn’t be that hard to implement for airtable or any other SaaS, so it is puzzling why that option isn’t offered.

I remember Qlikview (reporting/data discovery software) had a per minute license for this.

There are a lot of inactive users in reporting apps. A lot of people just log in once a month to see a single report and this was a useful way to get more users onboard.

It looked scary at first because you didn't knew beforehand how many minutes you should buy.

Mising standard and by minute license worked great, though

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#195

Post by oezi »

mappu wrote: post #161
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…

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

Is Baserow on Sandstorm.io already? That would be awesome.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#197

Post by zwily »

tthun wrote: post #149
andrenotgiant wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

salesforce.com? can't tell if you're making a joke, recommending SalesForce, or there's another company called force with a different TLD.

Not a Joke. I am recommending Salesforce.com's PaaS offering (used to licensed as force.com, now called "platform" [0]). Expensive, but it is IMHO the best low code cloud platform there is that has got every aspect (Apps, Identity, Security, ACLs, Workflows and Triggers, APIs) right. [0] https://www.salesforce.com/editions-pricing/platform/

I have never used a Salesforce app that was not terrible. I'm sure it provides lots of value to the business who use it, but it is awful awful for end users it is thrust upon.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#198

Post by revskill »

The core of a sustainable software to me is in the ORM layer. This is where Ruby on Rails or similar framework failed terribly.

One classic example is: How do your ORM/libraries provide you tool to define a calculable "name" field, which is equal to "firstName + lastName", with option to store it as a database field ?

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#199

Post by ajsnigrutin »

chaps wrote: post #40
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course... if it's outside facing... internal stuff can be delayed (and often is).... but again, that's why you pay admins for. Usually feature updates (api changes) and security updates are kept separate (unless you waited with the feature update, until there was a security issue).... but again, the thing is still yours. it's like a taxi vs a free car + free parts, and all you need is gas and time to do service.

"but again, that's why you pay admins for" Yes, that's the exact point I'm making. You have to pay someone to manage something like this. The point (edit: okay, not the point) of this sort of software is to try to minimize those costs, but at the end of the day you still have to pay for them, and often even more.

You still need an admin, even if you use SaaS... someone has to make the SaaS work... this just adds an aditional update every now and then to their workload.

Re: Baserow.io – Self-hosted Airtable alternative

#200

Post by onetom »

auxym wrote: post #186
alexashka wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use the free tier as a collaborative Kanban board for a tiny 5 person team. Airtable allows me to define arbitrary fields for the Kanban cards, which happens to be a premium/paid feature in all the actual Kanban saas tools (Trello, etc).

It sounds like https://notion.so can do that too, besides being a real-time collaborative document editor, wiki, spreadsheet, etc etc
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