Show HN: DrawDB – open-source online database diagram editor (a retro)

One year ago I open-sourced my very first 'real' project and shared it here. I was a college student in my senior year and desperately looking for a job. At the time of sharing it i couldn't even afford a domain and naively let someone buy the one i had my eyes on lol. It's been a hell of a year with this blowing up, me moving to another country, and switching 2 jobs.

In a year we somehow managed to hit 26k stars, grow a 1000+ person discord community, and support 37 languages. I couldn't be more grateful for the community that helped this grow, but now i don't know what direction to take this project in.

All of this was an accident. But now I feel like I'm missing out on not using this success. I have been thinking of monetization options, but not sure if I wanna go down that route. I like the idea of it being free and available for everyone but also can't help but think of everything that could be done if committed full-time or even had a small team. I keep telling myself(and others) i'll do something if i meet a co-founder, but doubt and fear of blowing this up keeps back.

How would you proceed?

Show HN: DrawDB – open-source online database diagram editor (a retro)
drawdb.app

This seems like a really cool project.

Some observations...

First I'd get some legal advice for how to convert this idea / product into a thing that you own and have a stake in, but that's distinct from you. This means you'd be able to collect money and attribute that money to the product, you'd be able to sell it to someone else and walk away from it, etc. This legal construct is important; probably not _necessary_ but very useful.

You seem to have a reasonable community contributing to and using the project; that's your most valuable asset. Make up a brief roadmap of where you'd like to take the project in six and eighteen months, share that with the community. Think about how some projects, like Elastic.co, grew based on community feedback and how ultimately perhaps those companies felt they needed to change the company in ways that many in the original community disagreed with. There are lots of sides to that coin, and you as the founder need to think about how you'd want to develop the product.

Lastly, once you've got a clear accounting mechanism of how to track money from it and costs of it, you should just .... start asking people for money. "How much is a support contract worth for this?" "How much is it worth to you to focus on developing this feature instead of that?" Obviously -- be very cautious if people are offering money in exchange for fractional ownership of "the thing" but even that may be palatable... but make sure you've had someone representing your interests read the contract...

I experimented with this for five minutes, and so far it looks great. The one thing missing, or that I didn't see in five minutes, is that when I uploaded the schema for one of our SQLite databases, the tables came out perfectly, but the views were ignored. There are a lot of views, and we would want them in the diagram. I will definitely be coming back to it. As I say, what I saw was great.

Very cool. Which library do you use for the drag&drop part?

Congratulations on releasing the product and its success.

You will likely have to compete with Supabase's diagram editor (there might be other competitors too), which has AI integrated. You can check it out and see if you can improve your system. Their product is open source as well, so you can review the code.

The simplest monetization path would be to keep it free and charge users for AI access. However, don’t hire a team, as it may not be viable against other big players in the long run.