
Launch HN: BaseDash (YC S20) – Edit your database with the ease of a spreadsheet - maxmusing
Hey everyone! I&#x27;m Max from BaseDash (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.basedash.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.basedash.io</a>). BaseDash is an internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of a spreadsheet. It&#x27;s like being able to use Airtable to manage your company&#x27;s internal operations.<p>I was working on a side project a few years ago that required a lot of manual data management. I was using Django Admin which was fine, but wished I could just set up a two-way sync between my SQL database and Airtable (without any crazy Zapier workflows).<p>After building a quick prototype as an internal tool, I realized that there was a space missing for a product somewhere between an admin panel and a database client. Something with an amazing interface that&#x27;s usable by both engineers and non-technical users who need to access data within their company (e.g. customer support, operations).<p>From there, I built BaseDash with a strong focus on expanding upon existing tools I love, with extra care and polish. The resulting product is a polished, opinionated internal tool, with all the functionality most companies need out-of-the-box.<p>Being a web app, there are some great features that BaseDash enables for cross-functional teams. BaseDash keeps a full edit history of all changes made, makes it super easy to share access to teammates, and enables Google Sheets-like real-time collaboration for editing data.<p>We currently support most SQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redshift, SQL Server, MariaDB), with support for MongoDB and Firestore on the roadmap. We offer a hosted version, or you can host it yourself on-prem.<p>We&#x27;re still in early access but happy to invite the Hacker News community to try the product out. We&#x27;re currently focused on small-to-medium sized software companies, with a combination of engineers and non-technical users. Try it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.basedash.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.basedash.io</a> and let me know what you think!
======
danpalmer
The main question I have with tools like this is around safety.

The reason we typically _don 't_ directly edit production data like this is
because of application level concerns or validation.

I think it's important that any tool like this allows a way to replicate that
safety in some way, otherwise it's as risky as using a GUI client directly.
Access control (which this does) addresses security and starts addressing
safety, but there's a lot more necessary to get to the safety that is often
enforced at the application level.

There's an argument that the validation should be in the database, and that's
nice when it's possible, but it's often not. For any application using
Rails/Django, anything else along those lines, anyone interacting with the
database mostly via an ORM, will typically not be putting this sort of
validation in the database in _all_ cases – thinking about enums, fixed slugs,
relative dates, timezone support, etc.

~~~
ignoramous
> The main question I have with tools like this is around safety.

" _Your app 's data is never stored on our servers with the exception of edit
history which lets you audit all changes to your data_" from:
[https://www.basedash.io/pricing](https://www.basedash.io/pricing)

Not the most convincing sell but not that they did not address this concern at
all.

~~~
penagwin
He's talking about operational safety - your application applies validation to
inputs to the database. This ensures that only valid data is stored.

What happens if you have a field that's supposed to be 0-9, but it's an int
field and someone types in 22 on accident? Sure it might be valid for the
database, but it's not valid for the application.

There's certainly different ways to take the problem, but it needs to be
considered.

~~~
koolba
> What happens if you have a field that's supposed to be 0-9, but it's an int
> field and someone types in 22 on accident? Sure it might be valid for the
> database, but it's not valid for the application.

This is why database constraints exist.

Any sufficiently long lived database ends up with more than one code base
connected to it. Enforcing rules in the database ensures a baseline level of
data sanity.

~~~
unionpivo
You are right.

But ....

In the wild, database constraints are rare. I even often see databases without
any foreign key constraint.

We have a new client like that. application developed in the past 3 years on
postgres, uses all the buzzwords (microservices, Kubernetes, terraform, ...).
The only constraints in database is on primary keys. The site moves up to 500k
EUR per day.

This is far from rare.

~~~
edw
Both your and the parent's sentiments are _so_ on-point. And they're one of
the reasons I don't like ORMs or the use of in-app constraint checking. The
mid-Aughties rise of CRUD-focused frameworks that treat the database as a
sidecar to the web app ignored as inconvenient the full power of an RDBMS, in
part because MySQL was the not-full-RDBMS that they were often paired with.

~~~
koolba
I think a big part of it is a general fear of database migrations. Once you
embrace schema evolution as a normal part of development, it becomes natural
to have your schemas reflect your true data constraints and relationships.
Rather than just unlabeled sacks of text fields.

~~~
edw
Django's migration tool is awesome; I can see how people could get seduced by
it. It's happened to me.

~~~
penagwin
Django's migration tool is one of the main reasons I can't leave django.

What comparative ORMs do you use for non-django, or non-python languages?

------
codetrotter
Gotta hand it to you, this looks really slick. Also, the call to action at the
bottom was well made;

> Skip the waitlist, this week only

> We're opening access to BaseDash for the next week during our Hacker News
> launch.

Usually when someone is like “act now” I’m like “yeah right”. But in this
case, whether it really matters or not that I sign up exactly this week, the
fact that you put some effort into connecting the text to the HN post made it
feel more genuine and was sufficient to instead make me go “alright I’ll do
it”.

I don’t immediately have time to use it but I can tell that this product is
useful so I’m making a mental note to log back in in the future and check it
out more. For now I was happy to see that in addition to the UX niceties that
were mentioned on the landing page, you guys make it possible to configure a
connection with SSH between your servers and the db servers of the user. That
is very encouraging to see :)

I think on top of that it would be neat if you also offered users to configure
connections that go through Wireguard, as I run Wireguard on my personal
server and I know other people do too. I guess one guy asking for Wireguard is
probably not going to convince you to add it. But who knows, maybe others will
request it too ;)

~~~
maxmusing
Thanks! We thought it would be best for HN to have direct access (we didn't do
this for Product Hunt).

I'll keep Wireguard in mind :)

------
nojvek
I started on a similar thing a couple of months back but didn’t make it to YC.
I talked to a bunch of folks and demoed then an MVP, but couldn’t get any
paying users. Covid-19 hit and I had to find a paying job to make ends meet
after many months on it.

I open sourced my work to make something out of it. Not as polished as
BaseDash or popsql. It’s MIT licensed.

[https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin](https://github.com/nojvek/boomadmin)

Congrats BaseDash on making it to YC and getting this far. I wish you best of
luck. Even though I’m a bit jealous.

~~~
langitbiru
Don't feel bad. I was in your situation in the past. Don't give up. I have
finally been able to launch a quite successful product (being used by a
significant people daily). I plan to apply to YC this September. I don't want
to put my product here because I don't want to steal thunders from BaseDash.

------
secboy
I just asked my CISO, about this product.

He said, "For small, and really small companies they already have the talent
to deal with the database directly because that's how they handle most of
their problems because they don't have a "console" interface. So this would be
just another product for them, and the technical staff wouldn't find it
terribly useful because they already know how to interact with the database.

For medium to large companies it doesn't fit because those companies spend all
of their time trying to limit direct access to the database, so buying a tool
that makes it easier is counter productive.

However, it's a cool idea and looks like it was well implemented."

Oh, I forgot to add that he said "Allowing a 3rd party web site to connect
directly to a production database for the purpose allowing direct database
manipulation will only happen with companies that don't have a security
department, or their "security person" is just in name only. There are so many
things that can go wrong that is just not worth doing. Even if this could run
on site, is runs against basically all Information Security and IT operations
best practices."

~~~
mmsimanga
I see this as a substitute for spreadsheets. I work in Business Intelligence
and we spend a fair amount of time importing data from user spreadsheets that
need to be incorporated into data warehouse and reports. It is a nightmare of
a process because so many things can go wrong. I would jump at opportunity to
substitute the spreadsheets for database tables.

~~~
cleansingfire
Yes, this tool seems ideal for the people who unintentionally create databases
in excel. I realize this sounds insulting, but providing tools to the people
who know their business is useful. Perhaps you could brand it as MaxS?

------
randtrain34
$50/user/month seems a bit steep to me, you can easily get something like
[https://retool.com/pricing/](https://retool.com/pricing/) for $10/user/month.
Granted it's a bit of a different market, but it does a lot more in addition
to having editable/searchable/filterable DB tables.

~~~
Twisell
For me the pain point is that, like many others, they want to charge the same
price for editors and read-only users.

Do the math with me to feel the pain:

-I use the product $50/month great

-My team use the product $300/month (6x50€) bearable if product really fit our need

-My team want to share access in read-only mode with the whole department 2500$/month (50x50) acceptable only if it's a core unavoidable product

Almost everytime there is no real technical difference between hosting service
for use case 2 and 3. So I get that the business model intend to milk as much
money from large organisations that shit gold and can't do basic math. But in
the process you are cutting yourself from all small/medium company that just
seek to pay a fair price.

To keep it simple I believe the basis should be that read only are always free
or linked to paying (like get 50 read-only license for each paying editor
licence). This better reflect real world situation.

~~~
maxmusing
That's a good point, I'll look into reducing the pricing for read-only users.
We haven't had many companies with read-only users so it hasn't come up, but I
think it makes sense.

------
shreyas-satish
Product looks great, congrats on the launch. I would reconsider the
positioning of the product if I were in your shoes.

As danpalmer said, I suspect it might be tricky to ensure data integrity if
non-technical people are bypassing app-level validations.

That said, while I may not use this for my mission-critical data, I do think
there's a lot of potential in using this as a headless CMS. I'm currently
using Airtable, and its API limits make it unusable for anything apart from
light workloads. Also, doesn't have webhooks.

But, if I can use BaseDash instead as my CMS and have my marketing team handle
the data through a familiar interface, while design + dev source the data into
Figma & a static site through an API respectively, I see myself paying for
this.

~~~
maxmusing
Absolutely, we have a couple customers using BaseDash as a headless CMS. Edit
history is especially nice here because you can always look through past
iterations of content.

------
taylorwc
I'm really bullish on this concept. I learned how to code coming from a
finance background, and the mental shift from Excel to relational database
felt natural enough, but the lack of Excel-like ways to interact with those
databases has always felt like white space to me. Well done!

~~~
joparisot
Hey Taylor, You should check out actiondesk (disclaimer: I'm the founder)!
We're complementary from basedash (not doing the writing to the database, but
focusing on viewing and analyzing your db data in a spreadsheet)

~~~
maxmusing
Actiondesk is awesome. We share a couple customers.

------
nrudrapp
We use dbeaver internally (and we hate it). But it is free and our engineers
get by with most of what's required from tool like it.

And dashbase looks like a well done product for a new project - what does you
stack looks like frontend and backend ?

And have to agree with others that dashbase is pricey though!

It will be nearly impossible to convince management to pay $600 per year.

Can you tell about usecases of your early users who are paying for this ?

~~~
fortydegrees
I'm CTO of a very early stage startup and $50/mo to allow my CEO to read and
edit the database is an easy decision.

~~~
nrmitchi
This is a half-joke of a comment, but I would pay $50/month to a product that
could explicitly prohibit the CEO from editing the production database.

~~~
iKlsR
I saw this immediately after submitting my comment above and I was like why
would you want to give such access to someone who is more than likely non-
technical. I can't see any pros from this unless it's locked to read only mode
but then at $50 you're just paying for an excel view into your app.

------
darkhorse13
How big is the "spreadsheet as database" market? I mean don't get me wrong, I
am a huge fan of spreadsheets. But it seems like there are many products and
companies trying to compete in this space.

~~~
maxmusing
We're more so positioned as an internal tool, so competing with products like
Retool and Internal. Main difference is that BaseDash gives an opinionated
interface rather than a UI builder. We're betting that most companies can get
away with a really polished Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing
engineers to build the UI themselves.

~~~
ignoramous
> _We 're betting that most companies can get away with a really polished
> Airtable-like interface, saving them from needing engineers to build the UI
> themselves._

Yes! If you add to this [0] a managed database offering of your own (ala
airtable) and make it tres simple to (ab)use, then that'd be something. All
the best.

[0] database _is_ the app?

~~~
brainless
I actually liked this idea when it came up in my customer conversations and I
have this in the roadmap of my product. This space is definitely going to get
more mature and I feel Airtable is a big inspiration for me. Making it easy
for non-technical teams to add new Tables and do complex queries (I mentioned
in separate comment here) is what I feel will be a differentiator for me.

------
ron22
You can track changes and see comments as to why each change was made, that's
really cool.

~~~
itachicomment
They should use this as their main selling point.

------
rbobby
A few folks mentioned repositioning so I thought I'd suggest a possibility.

Medium/large companies do want to restrict access to production databases.
Especially sysadmin level access.

Maybe your tool could help companies with this. A coder/dba/support person can
author an SQL "workbook" against their favorite dev db (thinking something
like Jupyter Lab). They then submit the workbook for execution against a test
or production db (with specific set of permissions like readonly, update X,Y,Z
tables, etc).

Make sure everything run against production is audit logged (who did what,
what data was viewed, what changes were made).

Also a bit of a front end workflow around getting access to production (dev
submits request for access, some sort of production supervisor grants access,
limited access (workbook requires review), or declined.

Anyways just some random thoughts.

(very slick website and feature walk throughs. impressive stuff)

------
MattGaiser
How does this differ from something like DBeaver? Our QA Analysts (semi-manual
testers) use that for making tweaks to our databases, both production and
otherwise. Developers also use it because it is frequently easier than the
command line when we do not know all the table and column names.

Is it basically a less intimidating version of that?

~~~
maxmusing
Yes, it's meant to be much easier for non-technical teammates, plus has more
collaborative functionality built for teams (easy to share access, team-wide
edit history, real-time collaboration).

I tend to think of tools like DBeaver as being built for individual, technical
users, while BaseDash is built for cross-functional teams.

------
pratio
The product looks cool but i seriously doubt if something like this can fly in
any of our production services where changes can be made directly to a
production database without an audit trail. Even the example on the website
where the account credit is being increased is something that I've yet to see
in a production system. To safely use it on a production system internally it
would have to be deployed on premise.

In addition to that, the TOS clearly wash their hands if something goes wrong.
I use airtable extensively in my personal projects and at work which seems to
work fine.

One more thing i observed about the company structure is that they're based in
Delaware in a virtual office. Now, i know that as startups go, this isn't
unheard of but trying to get this past legal would be nightmare.

Congratulations on the launch though.

~~~
maxmusing
We have edit history which acts as an audit trail for changes; view logs are
coming soon too.

We offer on-prem, and expect a good portion of SMBs to use it over our cloud
version.

Good catch on the virtual office! We're actually based in Canada, that's our
US company's legal address.

~~~
pratio
I have several clients that are startups and i usually recommend them
JetBrains Datagrip which has yet to disappoint. It also makes it easier to
access the databases directly behind a VPN. Is there a limit to the number of
databases a single user can access on a startup license?

The reason i am asking this is that even a small startup can have multiple
databases in production. A single license of DataGrip might sound more
beneficial in that case.

------
switz
I've been ruminating on this exact problem for months. I'm consulting at a
company where we have a lot of non-engineers who own several major processes
w/r/t data sources of truth. Engineers need up-to-date programmatic access to
that data, and the non-engineers need a way to keep that information accurate.

This is awesome. I was considering building it myself, but it's always a
pleasure to see someone else deliver a working product on an idea you've been
bouncing around. Good luck, this is a relatively 'simple' product with a huge
market.

~~~
maxmusing
Glad to hear you like the product! Would love to hear your thoughts after
trying it.

------
bikamonki
TLDR: Giving non-IT users direct edit access to the production DB will most
likely break stuff.

I wrote something similar to BaseDash ages ago, I called it dAgent (for
database agent). I had it running for many different clients from all sorts of
trades (I do custom development). The GUI built itself from reading the DB
schema.

My initial motivation was to cut dev time since dAgent would automate the
coding of CRUD interfaces. However, the use of dAgent in production ended up
being quite limited: maybe only used to edit catalog data (i.e. add a city to
the cities table). The reason for this limited usage is no mystery: one can
easily break things. In particular non-IT users can break things.

Allow me to use an example. You have a CRM with a customers table. On that
table there is a field called status. For that field, dAgent would load a
select input using the related table statuses, there was no risk to break
integrity. However, in the business logic of this CRM, changing the status of
a customer is the result of running a process. That process not only sets the
status of a customer to a new value, but also writes a history log, sends
email notifications and perhaps triggers an invoicing process.

Now, imagine a non-IT user changing the status field of a customer using a
tool such as BaseDash. Now you have a customer in status active who is able to
login to your paid SAAS but has never being invoiced.

Many such nightmares can happen when users can directly edit a DB.

For this reason, in production, dAgent features where limited to CRUDing
simple catalog tables. It did help, but was not the silver bullet I had hoped
for. On the other hand, IT users would never adopt dAgent since the DB engine
provided a much more robust and feature-rich admin GUI. I was not in the
business of competing with PHPMyAdmin, so I eventually dropped the project.

------
brainless
Hey there!

Fellow founder in the same space here. I deeply understand what you are trying
to solve cause I am doing the same. I am sure you are trying to differentiate
from Jet Admin which is also in YC. ReTool is more mature (also YC). Then
there is Forest Admin and Macro is coming out soon.

On top of this, in my early customer validation talks, people ask me if my
product is like Metabase or Chartio etc. So yeah it is a crowded space, but I
feel this space is huge. Like every business wishes not to invest money in
internal tools but they have to. I am still trying to figure out my MVP. I am
currently working on complex (JOIN and aggregates) queries without any SQL
knowledge. That is what I am going to launch as MVP soon. 2 levels of tables
and people really struggle to get out what they want.

An example query I am throwing around is "Show me Orders from Red Shoes". This
already means Order, Product and Product Category table. This is a real pain
for non-technical people and I believe solving this is becoming critical to
encourage and enable every business to be able to ask questions about their
Business without needing Engineering.

I am going to go the UI/UX approach to solve this in my MVP and then go for an
NLP based approach if things go well. Like if you could type that in a search
box and get data, without knowing anything about databases or without needing
any Engineering help, that would be real solution to Businesses.

Cheers, and best of luck!

Sumit from dwata.com

~~~
prostodata
> _I am currently working on complex (JOIN and aggregates) queries without any
> SQL knowledge_

One way to process data without joins and groupy in multiple tables is to use
Prosto toolkit:
[https://github.com/prostodata/prosto](https://github.com/prostodata/prosto)
It is an alternative to SQL, MapReduce and other classical approaches by
radically changing how data is processed

~~~
brainless
Thanks, I will take a look, although I prefer to stay with relational algebra,
Python and R but make them all available through an easier UX. That might be a
core selling point for me.

------
asavinov
The real power of such kind of tools is determined by its ability to derive
(infer) new data from _multiple_ tables, particularly, by linking tables and
aggregating data (using these links). Airtable had an interesting approach to
this problem (yet, not perfect imho). Here I do not see how can I derive new
tables or columns from already existing ones except for using SQL. If BaseDash
relies on SQL then the question is what are its USPs which are directly
related to data?

~~~
maxmusing
We have the ability to join tables along foreign keys in a couple clicks
through the UI. Definitely looking into adding aggregated data & computed
columns soon!

------
gregwebs
This is a well known concept sometimes called a SQL editor. There's definitely
a need for a great implementation of the concept though. There was a really
good one called Wagon years ago that of course got bricked after the team was
acquired and I still haven't liked any that I have tried since.

The emphasis on editing production here is a bit odd since there is a lot of
value that can be delivered read-only to analysts or to editing development
for developers. I have a war story about editing production with one of these
tools. Someone used such an editor to edit a MongoDB database value. The ORM
schema said it was a float, but it was entered as an int. This somehow broke
production for a lot of users.

SQL editors

    
    
      * PopSQL
      * TeamSQL
      * DataGrip 
      * https://www.beekeeperstudio.io
    

CLI tools

    
    
      * [usql](https://github.com/xo/usql/releases)
      * [dbcli](http://www.dbcli.com/)

~~~
bfelbo
We use Postico and are pretty happy with it. It's better for our use cases
than e.g. PopSQL.

That being said, we'd drop Postico any day for a smooth editor with 100%
Postgres typing support.

------
cpursley
This looks really useful! Not sure how it would handle business rules and
callbacks, but these days I'm doing much of that directly in the database
anyways after years of fighting inconsistencies at the application level
(Rails, cough cough).

For admin type dashboards that need customization I've been using Hasura +
React Admin (nice replacement for Rails ActiveAdmin). Combine Hasura
(automatic GraphQL on top of PostgreSQL) with React Admin (low code CRUD apps)
and you can build an entire back office admin suite or form app (API endpoints
and admin front end) in a matter of hours.

This adaptor connects react-admin with Hasura: [https://github.com/Steams/ra-
data-hasura-graphql](https://github.com/Steams/ra-data-hasura-graphql)

------
skunkwerk
Congrats on the launch. Have wanted something like this for years - most admin
tools aren't easy to use like Airtable, and Airtable itself isn't designed to
be a backend for your apps. Would love to see a lower-priced tier for just a
single user (no collaborators).

~~~
maxmusing
Thanks! We'll probably add a cheaper plan for individuals soon. If you're
interested, we can set something custom up now. Shoot me an email:
max@basedash.io

------
physicsAI
Great product, solving exact pain point we have right now: non-technical team
members glued to Django Admin all day long and waiting days to get much-needed
data from engineers, who cannot find the time to write simple views with
relevant SQL queries.

I have signed up and started testing your product. Looks great so far. If
things check out, there is a good chance we will sign up for real and pay.

Congrats on the launch!

------
solrflow
How does this compare with Prisma Studio? (Prisma framework specifically
Prisma 2). Our company is graphql based and uses Prisma Studio as our visual
gui for our db

------
smt88
> _internal tool that lets you edit your production database with the ease of
> a spreadsheet_

I've worked at companies with pgAdmin or something similar that allowed people
to edit prod. It was a catastrophe.

As others have said, non-tech people shouldn't have access to prod data, where
they may not understand the schema well enough to edit it. Tech people already
have GUIs.

Using something like Airtable and syncing it with prod using a thin layer of
code is much more viable.

------
jadbox
The pricing model is a little strange to me. I would like to see a minimal
free tier and then a micro pay-as-you-go query cost than a large set monthly
cost.

------
kanobo
Congrats and looks great, I like the tracking history/change. If everything is
tracked is there a feature to rollback to a previous state? If so, why not
also advertise it as a innovative backup + edit solution? That would be be a
bigger deal than just the spreadsheet part since people already use DataGrip
or TablePlus.

~~~
maxmusing
We only track changes made through BaseDash, so we don't have full snapshots
of your database to revert to. We'll definitely add a feature to rollback
individual edits though.

------
akrymski
Max - congrats on the launch! Looks very slick, I'd love to replace AirTable
with something more performant. Can I edit the schema yet? Would be great to
have a sample database when I login for the first time so I can see the UI in
action.

~~~
bfelbo
Yes, a sample DB would be amazing! I'd love to try this out, but wouldn't give
access to one of our DBs w/o setting up a specific role for BaseDash etc.

------
itachicomment
Look Good from the description.However i know this is not a very necessary
feature but consider adding google login, its easier and quick especially for
people who want to test the product before committing.

------
SniperOwl
I under stand this is for internal use, but will there be an on site
deployment option?

------
epost1
I would like to give this a test drive against an Oracle cloud database?
Possible?

------
kkotak
Any plans to support NoSQL?

~~~
maxmusing
Yes! MongoDB and Firestore are first on the roadmap.

------
reportgunner
Do I understand correctly that I am supposed to give you write access to my
PROD database just so i can _edit my production database with the ease of a
spreadsheet_ in a web browser ?

What happens when BaseDash is down ? Do I have to go back to using code again
?

------
ramraj07
Cool tool, how are you guys different from forestadmin?

------
interactivecode
could we self host this for DIY/home use?

------
elitan
Nice product, nice UI, nice onboarding experience.

Good job!

------
benoror
Any plans for an API?

