maxmusing

Hey, founder of Basedash here. I launched the original version of Basedash on Hacker News almost 3 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23999124). Back then, it was a simple web-based database editor. Y'all had LOADS of great feedback about security, validation, and permissioning.

Since then, I've grown the team to 7 and we've made a ton of improvements across those areas (RBAC, API actions, NL querying, self-hosting, SSO, etc.) and repositioned the product as a modern admin panel that connects to most SQL databases.

We recently raised a seed round from some incredible investors. We couldn't have gotten here without the support and feedback from this community, so thank you. Check out the product if you haven't already, and feel free to be harsh with your feedback. We're still at the beginning of our journey.

We (the team at Basedash) are running a survey on the state of databases in 2023. We'll be releasing the results after the survey closes in 1 month. We're also running a giveaway for an Apple Studio Display for all submissions.

Check out the results from last year here: https://2022.stateofdb.com

Basedash founder here. We're much more focused on admin panels that you would give to non-technical teammates (e.g. support, ops, sales) to view & edit data. Less around data analysis and charts, though we have a bit of that. We're also not limited to databases, you can set up actions to hit APIs (e.g. Stripe, SendGrid, internal APIs).

I'm a founder of BaseDash, I started building it as a spiritual successor to Django Admin. Big focus on UX and usability for non-technical users. I like to think of it as "Airtable for your SQL database".

Some features that are especially important if you're giving access to non-technical team members:

- Edit history of all changes made through the tool

- Permission system to limit access to certain databases/tables

- Views that let you pre-filter tables and hide columns

- Request edit system so that all edits have to be approved (WIP)

We support both MySQL and PostgreSQL, planning to add support for NoSQL databases in the future.

It's paid for teams but free for 2 users.

Website link: https://www.basedash.com

I believe a majority of YC founders apply multiple times, often across multiple companies. Personally, I started 2 companies, applied 4 times, interviewed 2 times, across 4 years before getting in with BaseDash.

Definitely try again, YC is worth it.

I remember working on my first full-stack project, I was so intimidated by migrations. Nowadays I couldn't imagine starting even a small side project without writing migrations from the first commit.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of new developers resort to MongoDB because they think it's better for early stage evolving schemas. It's certainly more open to changing your schema on the fly, but perhaps not for the better.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

The stack is Node.js with Express and React. We use Sequelize to handle database connections.

As others mentioned, our current pricing is in line with higher tiers of other internal tools, mostly geared towards startups with revenue or funding. We're hoping to add cheaper (and free!) plans moving forward once we validate that we can make money from SMBs.

Early customers are using the product for customer support, order management, basic analytics dashboards, data entry. Good mix of technical and non-technical users within teams.

Yes! MongoDB and Firestore are first on the roadmap.

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.

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

We actually had a 1-month-long pivot to managed database hosting early on in development, but it was super janky. Might look into this again in the future.

Actiondesk is awesome. We share a couple customers.

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 :)

Definitely agree with this. As you mentioned, we currently support database-level validation (anything data type related, foreign keys, etc.), still trying to figure out the best way to handle ORM-level validation.

I think ultimately BaseDash would hook into your existing validations (e.g. through models.py) to handle this.

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.

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.