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.
I feel this way too. I was excited, as a beta user, to see this go GA but then I saw the pricing and was forced to move on. Pretty steep indeed. But he has a great piece of software here. Best of luck Eirik!
Looks nice, but the pricing is steep, and the subscription model has drawbacks as other commenters have mentioned.
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.
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.
It's a very different conversation when an engineer goes to their manager and says "I think this tool I tried out at home could improve our work" versus "we should buy everyone licenses for this tool that I've never used".
Should you be interested in doing so, my suggestion would be to offer an "offline" version. It could be feature-limited as follows:
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.
I am trying a similar pricing model for my product.
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.
These subscription models are straight up scam if a webservice is not essential for its working and also then it must be resonably priced. I pay for MS Office + OneDrive probably 7€/month. So how does this shit add up?
I love this, but am not going to pay a subscription for this. $420 a year? That’s more than IntelliJ Ultimate! Doesn’t even come with a fallback license that I can use when I stop subscribing.
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.
Founder here. I launched Ultorg a few days ago, so I still haven't quite figured out if there ought to be a free or reduced-functionality tier yet.
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).
Looking at IntelliJ Ultimate, they do $599 for the first year, $479 for the second, $359 for the third and onwards. But then they have a "perpetual fallback license"... so I assume many people will buy just the first year and then keep that version forever.
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.
> Question: Do you plan to implement valuable enhancements over the coming years
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.)
I'm very curious what a hobbyist could use this for!
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been using ultorg for a couple years now, very happy to see it reach broader audiences
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.
Ultorg has a bundled internal PostgreSQL database that is used for query execution over Excel/GSheets/CSV/MS Access sources. The tables are automatically dumped into PostgreSQL in an efficient manner when necessary. If you hit the Refresh button in the toolbar (F5 or Ctrl+R), Ultorg checks if there are changes in the original sources and refreshes the extracts if necessary.
The same mechanism kicks in if you join tables from different data sources in a single visual query. E.g. you might join a table in a remote PostgreSQL database with a table in a local CSV file. Both tables end up getting extracted locally.
There's a "Generated Extracts" folder in the sidebar where you can see a list of table extracts that were auto-generated on the local machine. The process is otherwise seamless, and queries in fact often perform much better locally than being executed on a remote database. The latter is due to no network latency, powerful laptops, and a custom PostgreSQL configuration on the local database that is tuned for single-user ad hoc queries.
Echoing the sentiment of other users here - I would happily pay a steep up front price for this software. I will not pay a monthly subscription for software that runs on my machines using data on my machines.
Please reconsider the rent-seeking price model, or at least move it somewhere appropriate like an enterprise support tier.
I wasn’t confused by your post, I disagreed with it. OP expects that their software will continue to deliver value over time, and so has chosen a payment model that reflects that. This is not “rent-seeking”.
If that's true, OP's pricing model could reflect that by charging for updates or having a fallback license for current version. As long as it does not, it is in fact, rent-seeking by definition.
I’m not sure which definition of rent-seeking you’re using here, but I encourage you to revisit it. Rent-seeking doesn’t just mean “charging an expensive subscription fee”.
One more vote for a one-off license or subscription tier aimed a solo developers and hobbyists - I would pay for this in a heartbeat and it appears I’m not alone!
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.
You can edit data in existing tables, but there is not yet a "Create Table" action. In fact, Ultorg does not currently host any data at all; it is all assumed to be existing in an external data source.
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.
A friend on Hackernews! Thanks!! Kriti also has a wonderful project in this space, which is non-commercial and organized as a 501(c)(3): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999774
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!