Microsoft's revenue in 1990 was 1.18B when they launched Office, sold for one-time payments. Of course they're pushing people to subscribe now so they can get that sweet recurring revenue, but that business model sustained freaking Microsoft for about 30 years.
I'm not convinced by unsustainability arguments. Now, it could be that competing with FOSS makes it a lot harder to make money now. I'm sympathetic to that, inasmuch as I can be for someone who wants to sell what others are giving away. That would be challenging. But why is it suddenly impossible to sell software, when they was the common model until rental became popular a few years ago? What's inherently different now that let someone sell programs for decades but now it's just impossible?
buying - capital expenditure with amortization (and usually goes through a lot of approvals, centralized IT, etc.), subscription - expense, frequently decided upon and paid directly by the Line-Of-Business/dept. Expense is generally better, so it is chosen by business when possible (it is all very generic of course, and there are niche cases where situation is different)
That matches on the supplying side as subscription revenue is also generally better.
Fairly certain it'd be more sustainable than a $4/month subscription, which is a nuisance for anybody who'd actually want to pay for this.
$4 is targeting the hobbyist market. Within that segment, the tiny population of devs who'd actually be willing to pay for tools usually uses a large assortment of tools, and is not willing to pay a separate subscription fee for each.
Taking a huge risk with the naming here, I would be expecting to hear from a Microsoft lawyer any minute (Due to MS's flagship 'SQL Server Management Studio').
e: Don't let this dishearten you, I only would consider a name change to be more of your own brand. When I saw 'SQL Studio', I assumed MS had created an online version of their product. This looks like a well-done passion project.
This looks really cool, but I'm not going to use it today, because it only supports SQLite, with Postgres and SQL Server "coming soon." This seems like a very odd starting point, especially for a paid tool. I don't have any SQLite databases I'd want to explore, and certainly none with "massive tables." I'd want to use it for Postgres and MySQL/MariaDB first.
Also, if autocomplete is what we care about, PRQL support seems like it will offer the best experience. https://prql-lang.org/ PRQL queries transpile to SQL. Just having the `FROM` clause first does wonders for autocomplete.
This reminds me of the pipe syntax for Google's BigQuery. Other helping with autocomplete it also significantly reduces the amount of WITH statements and subqueries needed
The fact that some people may call it SQL Studio (never heard that personally) doesn't mean they will come after this "for sure". If anything SQL Studio is too generic to be valuable. Besides most people call it "Sequel Management Studio" anyway.
I'm a huge fan of Postico. It does the one thing I need (DB data exploration and editing) and does it well.
What I really miss in DB Tooling is something like SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare from Red Gate. It used to work with SQL server, and would compare two databases and produce "diff" SQL statements to get from one to the other.
It was awesome for deployments. Most frameworks handle DDL via migrations, and that works well, but one-time data migrations that are tested in QA and should be pushed live... I've never found a better workflow apart from generating one-time scripts. Now with AI that's easier, but until recently, it wasn't.
Not sure if that's the plan for this app eventually, but I sorely miss it, wasn't sure if others felt the same.
I really love it when a single dev makes something like this at a price point that's pretty cheap for us - potentially very lucrative for the developer. That's how we should be doing it - stop working for the man if you can!
Interesting there now seems to be an insurgence of SQL workbench type apps. I also saw DB Pro recently.
Despite all of these really polished query editing experiences in these new apps, I reach for Redash every single time. Even though Redash's editor is horrible. The ability to generate even extremely simple sharable visualizations, and alerts is insanely useful.
So to any of the devs of these programs out there: ship visualizations and alerts and I will buy your product immediately.
This looks cool and it hits a niche. There are suprisingly few good IDEs for DB work. I use DuckDB a lot for analytics tasks mostly in DataGrip but its not great. The alternatives like DBeaver are ok but not that great as well.
JetBrains' excellent DataGrip IDE is free for non-commercial use, and IntelliJ Ultimate (which includes the DB functionality in addition to every single thing in all their other IDE products) costs a little under 3x what you're asking for for this app alone. A bit of a hard sell.
Most JetBrains IDE's include the database tools actually, we use Phpstorm and PyCharm, and they come with fully-fledged database connection support; that includes in-editor completion of queries against your schema, by the way, in addition to the myriad of features DataGrip and the DB plugin provide. I wouldn't switch to any external tool anymore
This looks great, with postgres support I could see myself using this regularly.
What is the landscape for simple tools for writing to databases? We used to have Access and simple CRUD tools. I saw a demo of Steve Jobs demoing NextStep which had this beautiful CRUD generator which obviously does not exist today.
It seems like the landscape is basically Airtable, Retool, Google Forms or roll your own with a more sophisticated stack. I feel like it ought to be incredibly easy to build a form, either web based or native, which writes to a database. Yet it seems like we are farther away from this than we have ever been
It allowed for both HTML applications and Java apps (both JNLP and completely local). And before the transition to Java it was ObectiveC, and I think even had a scripting language (WebScript?). It was beautiful, fast, and for lots of things you could just wire up a small app to a database with almost no code (then later add the business code after the demo).
One of my first jobs was writing a web app using it, and those were fun days.
The EnterpriseObjects part (the part that managed data to/from the database) survived for a long time in parts of Apple's web back-end. And I have always thought that WebObjects was the model that Ruby-on-Rails was designed to mimic (in many ways, but not all).
My dream is to build such tool, I slowly doing in the side (https://tablam.org). Probably need to ask for funding too.
In concrete, what I want is a real alternative to Fox/Access that work, unrestricted, locally (including inside a phone/iPad). I don't mind have support for cloud stuff (that is what pay the bills mostly) but that is secondary IMHO.
Current computers, even mobile, have far much power than most need, and is a shame not much tools actually exploit it.
It took me a second to realize this wasn't some cursor-style Microsoft replacement of SSMS, which would seem to lend some credibility to the potential for consumer confusion and trademark infringement, though of course IANAL
Is there a spec sheet or anything like that? I realize it's only for sqlite now, but supposing it's available for Postgres soon, I have a bunch of hard requirements. First is native support for SSH jump hosts. Next is query plan view.
That’s a flimsy argument. Product sales can do that. Doesn’t need to be a subscription unless you know your market is weak or your data mining.
We can’t be ok with everything being a subscription. You won’t have any money left or, worse, only the rich can afford the tools. I’m much happier paying for $60 Steam games and forgetting about them after a month. Sell this for $20 forever and do it 50,000 times by building a good product. If you get to market mass where you need a dev team to keep up with all the bleeding edge changes to SQL that are coming out, then charge a subscription.
$99 for the current version forever with 1 year of updates. Once that expires you can keep using the last version you had access to forever, or get another year of update for $59.
You can also renew at any time. I’ve paid for it in the past, at some point stopped using it for a few years, and when I started using it again I just renewed for a year to get a few years worth of updates at once.
I like this pricing a lot too because you actually support and incentivize the development of new features.
I've known and used SQL for 25 years; over the last year I haven’t written a single query by hand - AI is very good at it. I use SQL editors only to quickly see what I have there and to check the AI-generated query.
I'd love to see a new SQL program that focuses on the design view/access style with the tables joined with lines. For people who aren't used to code its the easiest way to get what is in each table
Really should consider supporting Oracle. So many companies are married to it, could even offer it under a corporate recurring license. It's easily worth the money to them.
Since currently this only does Sqlite it’s probably fair to add https://sqlitestudio.pl, which I haven’t used heavily yet, but I believe is pretty excellent. And it’s open source.
“Made by a single developer” is only a selling point if it is someone with a strong track record to maintain the software, otherwise it’s just saying the bus factor is 1.
This is you opinion. The author obviously prefers being transparent with it and using it to brag for anybody with an opinion that is different from yours. Not everybody thinks the same way.
A business analyst friend of mine and SQL novice was given a multi-tabbed editor like this (edit: apparently it was not this brand-new app). We found it difficult to track which query and results tabs are linked, whether they've been refreshed since the query was edited, whether queries in a script have been executed out of order, etc. Hopefully there are ways to address those usability issues.
This SQL Studio which was seemingly released to the public yesterday? Or are you talking about MS's SQL Server Management Studio? The MS one is a beast.
Management Studio is a monster. I was using for years and every so often someone would show me a feature I was totally unaware of that blew my mind.
Visual Studio also had "Database Project" which was amazing. Not seen anything like it. I think everyone moved over to using EF or Fluent Migrations but I loved the Database Projects.
Kudos on the beautifully and thoughtfully designed landing page - which is becoming a rarity these days. Most product landing page highlight adjectives and abstract value propositions with links to join waiting lists for 'priority' access - providing little insight into the value proposition of the product itself. Not to mention the gratuitous visual effects.
So its a pleasure to see a thoughtfully done product landing page (which strongly signals that the same care will have gone into the product). The page is performant, no gratuitous visual effects. It clearly highlights the core product value propositions in the context of product visuals. Addresses key hesitations clearly and upfront (e.g. no cc required, pricing information), and a simple, obvious call to action.
Hopefully more people follow this template than the slop generated by auto generators.
I don’t like how the page disables pulldown-reload on mobile. I didn’t even think that was possible. Guess it makes sense when your page is a game of Tetris, but why here?! Sometimes I just like to overscroll a little…
Clean, simple, information is where you expect it to be, links go to predictable places, exist in predictable places. Craft and care taken with little things are important, and this was well done.
I have recently asked my LinkedIn audience if my company should build a great PostgreSQL IDE. That's my wish for many years, and I know exactly where we can provide significant value over existing solutions. Yet basically everyone said not to do it.
Too many free options, hard to get people to change habits, you can't charge enough because devs just don't want to pay if they can help it.
I decided we will build something else. That said, good luck to this developer, I hope their product takes off.
Do we still need tools like this (with a subscription) when we have AI? Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely built with love but I haven’t used a tool like this (I used to use SQLTools in vscode) in about 4 years.
People are outsourcing even basic sql to AI? Do you do any thinking for yourself still? I’m super curious what the AI brain rot will look like even 5 years from now when some senior dev can’t do a join without AI
> Billed Monthly
I'm out. I'll gladly buy a license though, exactly once. Willing to pay you for your time, but I'm tired of "rental economy".
Unfortunately, I doubt this would be a sustainable model for the developer.
Microsoft's revenue in 1990 was 1.18B when they launched Office, sold for one-time payments. Of course they're pushing people to subscribe now so they can get that sweet recurring revenue, but that business model sustained freaking Microsoft for about 30 years.
I'm not convinced by unsustainability arguments. Now, it could be that competing with FOSS makes it a lot harder to make money now. I'm sympathetic to that, inasmuch as I can be for someone who wants to sell what others are giving away. That would be challenging. But why is it suddenly impossible to sell software, when they was the common model until rental became popular a few years ago? What's inherently different now that let someone sell programs for decades but now it's just impossible?
buying - capital expenditure with amortization (and usually goes through a lot of approvals, centralized IT, etc.), subscription - expense, frequently decided upon and paid directly by the Line-Of-Business/dept. Expense is generally better, so it is chosen by business when possible (it is all very generic of course, and there are niche cases where situation is different)
That matches on the supplying side as subscription revenue is also generally better.
at $4 a month he is going to need one hell of a lot of customers and zero churn to even keep the lights on over his ramen bowl.
All it takes is some dev shop to say “give me 5,000 seats”
Fairly certain it'd be more sustainable than a $4/month subscription, which is a nuisance for anybody who'd actually want to pay for this.
$4 is targeting the hobbyist market. Within that segment, the tiny population of devs who'd actually be willing to pay for tools usually uses a large assortment of tools, and is not willing to pay a separate subscription fee for each.
it might even be more profitable to pay once. What are the odds a user stays subscribed to this for >4 years vs paying $199?
Probably low, but it's probably more than 4X times likely for a user to stay subscribed for 6 months rather than paying $199.
Taking a huge risk with the naming here, I would be expecting to hear from a Microsoft lawyer any minute (Due to MS's flagship 'SQL Server Management Studio').
e: Don't let this dishearten you, I only would consider a name change to be more of your own brand. When I saw 'SQL Studio', I assumed MS had created an online version of their product. This looks like a well-done passion project.
Trademarks are complicated, but they probably won't let anyone claim SQL Studio
That doesn't matter if you run out of money before the end of the case.
true
Not to mention that when you Google "SQL Studio", all you see are MS SSMS results.
This looks really cool, but I'm not going to use it today, because it only supports SQLite, with Postgres and SQL Server "coming soon." This seems like a very odd starting point, especially for a paid tool. I don't have any SQLite databases I'd want to explore, and certainly none with "massive tables." I'd want to use it for Postgres and MySQL/MariaDB first.
Also, if autocomplete is what we care about, PRQL support seems like it will offer the best experience. https://prql-lang.org/ PRQL queries transpile to SQL. Just having the `FROM` clause first does wonders for autocomplete.
This reminds me of the pipe syntax for Google's BigQuery. Other helping with autocomplete it also significantly reduces the amount of WITH statements and subqueries needed
I thought this was from MS, who also has a program called MSSQL Management Studio, short SQL Studio. They will come after this for sure.
The fact that some people may call it SQL Studio (never heard that personally) doesn't mean they will come after this "for sure". If anything SQL Studio is too generic to be valuable. Besides most people call it "Sequel Management Studio" anyway.
Well to my understanding, half of the point of trademark in the US is to prevent 'consumer-confusion' regardless of company interest
Or Microsoft Sequel Copilot any day now.
Never heard that. People call it SSMS.
Or "Management Studio". Never heard "SQL Studio" either.
I'm a huge fan of Postico. It does the one thing I need (DB data exploration and editing) and does it well.
What I really miss in DB Tooling is something like SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare from Red Gate. It used to work with SQL server, and would compare two databases and produce "diff" SQL statements to get from one to the other.
It was awesome for deployments. Most frameworks handle DDL via migrations, and that works well, but one-time data migrations that are tested in QA and should be pushed live... I've never found a better workflow apart from generating one-time scripts. Now with AI that's easier, but until recently, it wasn't.
Not sure if that's the plan for this app eventually, but I sorely miss it, wasn't sure if others felt the same.
I really love it when a single dev makes something like this at a price point that's pretty cheap for us - potentially very lucrative for the developer. That's how we should be doing it - stop working for the man if you can!
Interesting there now seems to be an insurgence of SQL workbench type apps. I also saw DB Pro recently.
Despite all of these really polished query editing experiences in these new apps, I reach for Redash every single time. Even though Redash's editor is horrible. The ability to generate even extremely simple sharable visualizations, and alerts is insanely useful.
So to any of the devs of these programs out there: ship visualizations and alerts and I will buy your product immediately.
Could Metabase be a better fit?
This looks cool and it hits a niche. There are suprisingly few good IDEs for DB work. I use DuckDB a lot for analytics tasks mostly in DataGrip but its not great. The alternatives like DBeaver are ok but not that great as well.
JetBrains' excellent DataGrip IDE is free for non-commercial use, and IntelliJ Ultimate (which includes the DB functionality in addition to every single thing in all their other IDE products) costs a little under 3x what you're asking for for this app alone. A bit of a hard sell.
Most JetBrains IDE's include the database tools actually, we use Phpstorm and PyCharm, and they come with fully-fledged database connection support; that includes in-editor completion of queries against your schema, by the way, in addition to the myriad of features DataGrip and the DB plugin provide. I wouldn't switch to any external tool anymore
I would rather support a solo developer than a faceless corporation. Also Datagrip is $133/year for most use cases
What pricing are you looking at? IntelliJ Ultimate is $199 a year - $16.53 a month. This is $4 a month.
Looks like the pricing is free or $4 per month - sounds reasonable?
This looks great, with postgres support I could see myself using this regularly.
What is the landscape for simple tools for writing to databases? We used to have Access and simple CRUD tools. I saw a demo of Steve Jobs demoing NextStep which had this beautiful CRUD generator which obviously does not exist today.
It seems like the landscape is basically Airtable, Retool, Google Forms or roll your own with a more sophisticated stack. I feel like it ought to be incredibly easy to build a form, either web based or native, which writes to a database. Yet it seems like we are farther away from this than we have ever been
The NeXT (then Apple) product you are talking about is/was WebObjects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects
It allowed for both HTML applications and Java apps (both JNLP and completely local). And before the transition to Java it was ObectiveC, and I think even had a scripting language (WebScript?). It was beautiful, fast, and for lots of things you could just wire up a small app to a database with almost no code (then later add the business code after the demo).
One of my first jobs was writing a web app using it, and those were fun days.
The EnterpriseObjects part (the part that managed data to/from the database) survived for a long time in parts of Apple's web back-end. And I have always thought that WebObjects was the model that Ruby-on-Rails was designed to mimic (in many ways, but not all).
Edit: here is some documentation I just found: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Le...
Poor.
My dream is to build such tool, I slowly doing in the side (https://tablam.org). Probably need to ask for funding too.
In concrete, what I want is a real alternative to Fox/Access that work, unrestricted, locally (including inside a phone/iPad). I don't mind have support for cloud stuff (that is what pay the bills mostly) but that is secondary IMHO.
Current computers, even mobile, have far much power than most need, and is a shame not much tools actually exploit it.
It took me a second to realize this wasn't some cursor-style Microsoft replacement of SSMS, which would seem to lend some credibility to the potential for consumer confusion and trademark infringement, though of course IANAL
Is there a spec sheet or anything like that? I realize it's only for sqlite now, but supposing it's available for Postgres soon, I have a bunch of hard requirements. First is native support for SSH jump hosts. Next is query plan view.
why does a software like this needs a subscription?
To make it sustainable. That's about the only reason, which given the recent TailwindCSS stories, isn't necessarily a bad reason.
>”To make it sustainable”
That’s a flimsy argument. Product sales can do that. Doesn’t need to be a subscription unless you know your market is weak or your data mining.
We can’t be ok with everything being a subscription. You won’t have any money left or, worse, only the rich can afford the tools. I’m much happier paying for $60 Steam games and forgetting about them after a month. Sell this for $20 forever and do it 50,000 times by building a good product. If you get to market mass where you need a dev team to keep up with all the bleeding edge changes to SQL that are coming out, then charge a subscription.
I prefer the pricing model of TablePlus[0].
$99 for the current version forever with 1 year of updates. Once that expires you can keep using the last version you had access to forever, or get another year of update for $59.
Fair and flexible for everyone.
[0]https://tableplus.com/pricing
You can also renew at any time. I’ve paid for it in the past, at some point stopped using it for a few years, and when I started using it again I just renewed for a year to get a few years worth of updates at once.
I like this pricing a lot too because you actually support and incentivize the development of new features.
I've known and used SQL for 25 years; over the last year I haven’t written a single query by hand - AI is very good at it. I use SQL editors only to quickly see what I have there and to check the AI-generated query.
Must be nice to only work with solid, well-documented data models.
That sounds like snark, I guess, but I’m actually jealous. AI would choke on the last few “DWs” I’ve used.
I'd love to see a new SQL program that focuses on the design view/access style with the tables joined with lines. For people who aren't used to code its the easiest way to get what is in each table
Really should consider supporting Oracle. So many companies are married to it, could even offer it under a corporate recurring license. It's easily worth the money to them.
There’s also SQLPro Studio - the studio namespace is getting crowded!
https://sqlprostudio.com
Since currently this only does Sqlite it’s probably fair to add https://sqlitestudio.pl, which I haven’t used heavily yet, but I believe is pretty excellent. And it’s open source.
“Made by a single developer” is only a selling point if it is someone with a strong track record to maintain the software, otherwise it’s just saying the bus factor is 1.
This is you opinion. The author obviously prefers being transparent with it and using it to brag for anybody with an opinion that is different from yours. Not everybody thinks the same way.
There's already one available at https://sqlitestudio.pl/, which I've been using for many years, and it's very stable.
A business analyst friend of mine and SQL novice was given a multi-tabbed editor like this (edit: apparently it was not this brand-new app). We found it difficult to track which query and results tabs are linked, whether they've been refreshed since the query was edited, whether queries in a script have been executed out of order, etc. Hopefully there are ways to address those usability issues.
This SQL Studio which was seemingly released to the public yesterday? Or are you talking about MS's SQL Server Management Studio? The MS one is a beast.
Management Studio is a monster. I was using for years and every so often someone would show me a feature I was totally unaware of that blew my mind.
Visual Studio also had "Database Project" which was amazing. Not seen anything like it. I think everyone moved over to using EF or Fluent Migrations but I loved the Database Projects.
Database projects are still there, I also love them.
Ah, I guess not then. I revised my comment. Maybe it was DBeaver, after all.
Crashes on Mac trying to open up a fairly small workspace (max 97,000 rows).
Looks nice. But not "Ready to experience the future?" nice.
Kudos on the beautifully and thoughtfully designed landing page - which is becoming a rarity these days. Most product landing page highlight adjectives and abstract value propositions with links to join waiting lists for 'priority' access - providing little insight into the value proposition of the product itself. Not to mention the gratuitous visual effects.
So its a pleasure to see a thoughtfully done product landing page (which strongly signals that the same care will have gone into the product). The page is performant, no gratuitous visual effects. It clearly highlights the core product value propositions in the context of product visuals. Addresses key hesitations clearly and upfront (e.g. no cc required, pricing information), and a simple, obvious call to action.
Hopefully more people follow this template than the slop generated by auto generators.
I don’t like how the page disables pulldown-reload on mobile. I didn’t even think that was possible. Guess it makes sense when your page is a game of Tetris, but why here?! Sometimes I just like to overscroll a little…
> Kudos on the beautifully and thoughtfully designed landing page
Can't say the same - The site shows me an empty white page in PaleMoon (with uBlock Origin Legacy enabled and web assembly and webGL disabled).
Clean, simple, information is where you expect it to be, links go to predictable places, exist in predictable places. Craft and care taken with little things are important, and this was well done.
Not to be confused with SQLite studio, which is open source and actively maintained for nearly 20 years https://sqlitestudio.pl/
I have recently asked my LinkedIn audience if my company should build a great PostgreSQL IDE. That's my wish for many years, and I know exactly where we can provide significant value over existing solutions. Yet basically everyone said not to do it.
Too many free options, hard to get people to change habits, you can't charge enough because devs just don't want to pay if they can help it.
I decided we will build something else. That said, good luck to this developer, I hope their product takes off.
Thank you for not pushing yet another Claude wrapper and having a nice clean page!
What is your timeline for Postgres support? I'll subscribe the moment it's available.
[dead]
Do we still need tools like this (with a subscription) when we have AI? Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely built with love but I haven’t used a tool like this (I used to use SQLTools in vscode) in about 4 years.
Everything we do is via agents or in code.
People are outsourcing even basic sql to AI? Do you do any thinking for yourself still? I’m super curious what the AI brain rot will look like even 5 years from now when some senior dev can’t do a join without AI
Well, we used ORMs for a decade and treated our code as schema.
Now we hooked all that up to agents.
I can still do a join and often write sql queries by hand to execute in a shell.
> Now we hooked all that up to agents.
I and many others are not in your we
Not everyone just mindlessly plays the AI slot machine to generate code these days.
Probably part of a minority but I like writing SQL and optimizing slow queries myself, it's fun.
Who's "we"?
My company
Is your company a data company? Because I doubt you can get away with using agents to clean messy data from huge databases
And here I am, still writing sprocs for all of our business logic...