Ultorg: A User Interface for Relational Data
ultorg.com
ultorg.com
I would pay you $400 for this tool without hesitation. I would also pay for upgrades. However, the $400/yr subscription model is a deal killer. This is fine if you're targeting business users only, but it puts the tool out of reach for all but the most determined individuals.
You might want to consider the pricing model used for many digital audio workstations -- a perpetual license for a few hundred dollars, with free patches until the next major version. Then the next major version also costs a few hundred dollars. Rinse and repeat.
This gives you a solid income stream, without ripping your software out of the hands of a customer the instant they're short on cash. It also means the program could work without an internet connection or other constant DRM/activation nonsense. This will likely matter for the technical audience you're targeting.
Best of luck!
I always thought of relational databases as a tool for businesses; normally we don't need them as individuals--except perhaps when planning a wedding! Thus the pricing is targeted for businesses and people who get reimbursed by their employers. A second group might be contractors who purchase their own tools.
There might be ways to make a separate tier for private or occasional use, though. And recurring vs. perpetual might be a separate question from the actual total expected cost.
1. Do not include the planned online collaboration features.
2. Support only Excel, Access, CSV/TSV, and Sqlite data sources.
Charge a fair one-time license fee for this, and you would create an attractive tier for individual power-users, without cannibalizing subscription sales of the "online version" for businesses and contractors who care about collaboration and interacting with large production databases.
Just my $0.02.
Perhaps consider a limited free version, say 1000 rows and 10 tables as a limit.
The positive side of this is that it will put it in the hands of many people, most of whom wouldn't have bought it anyway. This lets you get more feedback and find more bugs. A fraction of them will like it and tell their boss to buy the paid version. Do not provide support to free users, it will eat your time.
Build something better, undercut his price, then we can talk.
Something like $399 perpetual license + 1 year free updates/support, and then optional around $99/year. Being self-hosted, you can always keep using it, but to make the company sustainable, it's not wise to promise free lifetime updates.
Would this model too work for you?
It would be nice to have a free tier, even if it limited the amount of time that I could use it per day. 1h/day seems enough for a hobbyist to incorporate this tool into their workflow.
I've noticed that SQLite itself seems to already have all the functionality needed for an AirTable clone besides the UI, everything needed to generate a pretty decent end user forms interface is basically already in a database schema. sqlite-web is really close, just missing foreign key browsing.
There was a big "The fallacy of freemium in SaaS" post from another founder a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37832809), which inspired me to try with "free trial then paid-tier-only" for the initial launch. But I might change it later.
For now, I've set a rather long free trial period (21 days).
For people who prefer perpetual licenses, is this because of a perceived lower total cost? Or for some other reason? Does the sentiment change depending on whether the buyer is purchasing for themselves or for their employer?
One downside of perpetual licenses is that at any given time, a large number of different versions will be in use across different users. Though maybe the users don't mind--perhaps they only want to upgrade their software whenever they change laptops.
Question: Do you plan to implement valuable enhancements over the coming years or do you believe this is feature complete?
> who prefer perpetual licenses, is this because of a perceived lower total cost? Or for some other reason?
For me, it's knowing that I'll have access to the software forever, but if I want to continue to get valuable enhancements, I keep paying. This is for me, the individual. When it's for a company, I truthfully care about that a lot less, next to nill, but care more about support, invoicing, SLAs, etc...
I have IntelliJ Ultimate at home and pay for it every year, but it gives me piece of mind knowing that if something happens, it's still "mine", but just doesn't get any new bells and whistles.
Every place I go to, guess what I develop with? IntelliJ. If they don't have it for me already, they will within the week.
This is an excellent question. Not just for this particular case but for anyone planning on releasing subscription SaaS or app
Yes, absolutely. The current release marks the productization of a long backlog of features that were previously developed only to the prototype stage--due to the project's origin as an academic research project.
With that now done, I'm hoping to (1) establish a sustainable business model, based on the current product, to fund future development, and then (2) start a big engineering effort to really develop Ultorg as an alternative to Excel and custom-made CRUD apps.
(You'll see a lot of VC-funded startups with similar goals. Inventing the "killer app" that lies in the space between Excel and a relational database is one of the software industry's holy grails. But there are some technological breakthroughs required that existing products didn't manage to crack, despite a lot of money poured into the problem.)
But.
I'm not a product, market or pricing expert but even I can tell that this is a very very steep (and recurring per user) price especially in 2023 where businesses and individuals alike are tracking and scrutinizing every single dime spent or to be spent.
No kidding but big companies won't mind putting more engineering hours to build their internal data dashboards which would be almost a one time Investment and minor tweaks here and there afterwards whereas most already would have.
Individuals and hobbyists can't do that but most can't afford this either.
Which leaves to pretty much financial industry (PEs, Wall Street folks and such) that have to juggle Excel sheet Attachments from multiple parties and such.
Maybe they or some of them find value at this price point. But I'm not so sure of that either.
EDIT: Typos
The $35/mo pricing seems off to me. DataGrip is $9 a month and feels more capable - though I only spent a couple of hours with ultorg but I didn't see any benefit worth paying 3x for. Again though, only a couple of hours of use. I also don't know why I'd be paying more for a tool than I am for the database service its connecting to.
Its’s a game changer tool for me, providing an intuitive graphical query construction interface (via a simple stacked table header, very sum-product like) and cross-db joins. The multi-column report style layouting is also really useful for looking at wide queries with lots of data. I’ve shamelessly ripped of some of eirik’s ideas and wowed people from (especially) the financial world
IMO its one of the truest advancements in SQL clients that i’ve seen in a while.
Please reconsider the rent-seeking price model, or at least move it somewhere appropriate like an enterprise support tier.
Like a piece of software that could go un-updated if the user wished.
Ultorg: A user interface for relational databases [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31219324 - April 2022 (67 comments)
Ultorg: A General-Purpose User Interface for Relational Databases (2020) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29647880 - Dec 2021 (13 comments)
Traditional BI tools work like an Excel pivot table: Put some fields on the X axis, some fields on the Y axis, and get an aggregation or visualization in the middle. The input is always a single table (or, if you have multiple tables, a flat join across all of them).
Ultorg is better at working with databases that have multiple tables in them, across arbitrary one-to-many relationships (not just warehouse-style star schemas), and where you want to look at actual raw data rather than colorful aggregations. There are specialized automatic table styles that visualize e.g. how one table relates to others through nested or parallel joins. The data displays you see in Ultorg are also editable--you can commit changes back to the database if desired.
So for now I'd recommend doing the actual CREATE TABLE statements manually in e.g. an external PostgreSQL database, but then using Ultorg to edit the data.
Schema editing actions (Create Table, Insert Column etc.) are on the TODO list, though.