Devs love to give feedback.
Devs have decent paying jobs, and therefore money to purchase devtools (ours is $79)
Devs love trying out new things and being early adopters.
Coz theyre very reluctant to pay for tools and cant be bothered to lobby their boss for tool purchases for more than a couple of things.
If there's an open source version thats half as good or they can hack together their own version with bits of string they will usually do that instead.
Unfortunately I have a launch planned soon for a dev B2B product. I'm hoping that the combination of non AI coded work over many months combined with separating the docs intended for LLMs and thebdics intended for humans will break through the noise ceiling.
But, you know, maybe I should have just vibed it in a week and crossed my fingers.
And the biggest update is coming soon, DB Pro Cloud, which will let you connect to and manage any database through your browser as well as collaborate with your team.
First of all, Homeworld was an iconic game for me growing up, so as other people have said, thank you for being apart of its creation.
I could not agree more. It feels like the creativity is back. I grew up building fun little websites in the 90s, building clan websites for Quake 2.
That creativity died somewhere between Node.js, AWS, npm, and GitHub.
Some might say, well, that's growing up and building serious apps.
Maybe. But it doesn't change that I spent the last 15 years doing the same frontend / backend wiring over and over again to churn out a slightly different looking app.
The last 2 years have been amazing for what I do. I'm no longer spending my time wiring up front ends. That's done in minutes now, allowing me to spend my time thinking about solving the real problems.
I'm building DB Pro, a cross-platform database management app that lets you browse, query, and manage SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and more from a single native interface. It's been growing steadily with a community of ~1,400 subscribers on YouTube and paying users.
What I'm most excited about right now is DB Pro Studio: a collaborative web-based version I'm building on top of it.
The idea is simple: databases are a team activity, but every DB tool treats them as a single-player experience. Studio adds either a self-hosted or managed hosted data browser, real-time collaboration, dashboards, visual workflow automation, and enterprise features like audit logging and role-based access. Think "database command center" where your whole team can inspect, query, and build on your data together.
The desktop app acts as the execution engine (your data never leaves your infrastructure), while Studio provides the shared dashboard layer.
I've also consistently posted devlogs on YT throughout the journey, which has helped build a community of ~1,400 subscribers who've shaped the product along the way.
Developers are pretty willing to pay for tools that save them daily friction, even in crowded spaces. I find that the trick is finding the wedge that makes yours feel essential rather than nice-to-have.
At the end of the day, people pay to save time. Doesn't matter if it's been done to death.
If you want to go a step further the PostHog roadmap items are all GitHub issues that users can upvote which gives a great sense of who wants what in the community.
I find that when people can see what's coming, they're more invested in the product and more likely to share feedback that actually shapes the direction. The devlogs on YouTube serve the same purpose. It's a two-way street.
Thanks Steve! The team angle came from mine and my co-founder's own frustration. We kept copy-pasting query snippets and results of queries into Slack/Teams to our engineering team but also Sales/Marketing etc. Figured there had to be a better way. If you ever want to give it a spin, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I've honestly been looking for this -- a modern slick db management app, both for local dbs and remote (just for me though, no collaboration). Existing tools are solid but they feel outdated.
Downloaded and onboarding was nice. A couple of things:
- The initial schema for my local Postgres table was showing public but there were a bunch of tables showing that clearly were not tables in my public schema. Changing the schema to something else and back worked.
- Limiting the free version on number of tabs feels... annoying. I appreciate that a lot of stuff out there doesn't even have a free version but the software automatically opened with a few tabs (or I accidentally clicked on it?) and then as soon as I clicked on my first table I was paywalled. I feel like I'll accidentally open more tabs (even though I really just wanna work on one at a time) and get frustrated, which is more likely to drive me away than to pay at this point.
Note btw that ofc you have to make money and this is a product that I feel I'd be willing to pay for but I got frustrated within 2mins of using it so it wasn't like oh I've felt the value let me pay, it was more like I haven't even gotten to value yet.
Great work anyway and I'll keep trying and provide feedback as it comes! Thanks for building this
I spent the last few hours hacking together PetrolMate using this dataset: https://petrolmate.co.uk
A couple of interesting observations while building it:
Yesterday the dataset had ~600 stations. Today it’s reporting 6,666 stations from the UK government feed, which is… a slightly ominous number, but according to the data and me asking an LLM, that’s close to full UK coverage already.
I deliberately went for a “pure speed” tech stack. Astro, no UI framework, just vanilla JS. Deployed on Cloudflare, with prices stored in D1.
I'm not using the API to load the data, I'm cleansing and then importing the CSV (which you can download for free) into the D1 database.
Really nice to finally have an official, open dataset to build on. It already feels far more reliable than the old user-reported approaches, and it’ll be interesting to see how coverage and update frequency settles over the next few weeks.
Would love to hear feedback by the way. What is this missing to make it a genuinely useful tool?
Thanks for putting this together!
Couple QoL features I'd love to see:
1. filter slider, decreasing on price, to see places closest to me disappearing
2. on the left panel, when I click on a low priced area, it should highlight it on the map, so I know where it is. The 'go to pump' button, I guess is good. but I'd only want to commit to gmaps if I already know that it's a reasonable place for me to. be going.
It covers the race condition, the atomic claim behaviour, worker crashes, and how priorities and retries are usually layered on top. Very much the same approach described in the old 2ndQuadrant post, but with a modern end-to-end example.
DuckDB is on our radar. In practice each database still needs some engine-specific work to feel good, so a fully generic plugin system is harder than it sounds. We are thinking about how to do this in a scalable way.
I’m building DB Pro, a modern desktop database client for developers who want a fast, local-first workflow.
I started in October 2025, launched v1 at the end of November, and just crossed $1k MRR.
I also post devlogs of life building and marketing DB Pro and am about to post devlog #4. The latest one is here if anyone’s curious:
https://youtu.be/-T4GcJuV1rM
Still very early, but it’s been fun seeing something fairly “boring” resonate once the UX is treated seriously.
Loved the design, looks better then the most tools I've tried. I'm using Prisma + Supabase in one of my side projects and having constant db issues. Can I integrate DB Pro? Will it replace Prisma or what?
So DB Pro is a local desktop database client for managing your databases and data. Prisma ORM it won't replace, but Prisma's browser-based data browser, yes it will absolutely replace that. It's not a replacement for Supabase, it works alongside it, if that answers your question?
I'm planning to extend DB Pro into much more than a database manager though, letting you build dashboards, workflows and workbooks.
It has some behaviour differences (connection handling, pooling, serverless constraints) that I want to support properly rather than “mostly works”. Right now I'm focused on making the core experience rock solid across the most common setups first. My focus has been UX and DevEx and it's working.
Neon support is on the roadmap though, and once I add it, it’ll be first-class rather than a checkbox integration.
Yep, it’s built with Electron. Performance has been a big focus from day one, and it’s been really performant in all of my testing so far. The goal was a proper desktop-first experience with local performance and direct database access, rather than trying to force it into a web app. Although I do have plans to offer a self-hosted version as well.
We are working on DB Pro, a modern desktop data workbench for developers and data engineers.
The focus is on going beyond a query editor and building a complete environment for working with data. Visual exploration, inline editing, dashboards, and Jupyter notebook style workbooks for queries, notes, and experiments all in one place.
We launched v1 a few weeks ago and the reaction has been genuinely jaw dropping. Downloads, feedback, feature requests, and some great long form discussions around real world data workflows.
We are documenting the entire journey through a public devlog series. The latest video covers the v1 launch.
1. Keeping a consistent devlog on YouTube. It's the #1 source of traffic.
2. Getting a rank 1, page 1 HN post for a technical blog post related to our product.
3. Word of mouth. It's slow, but it works.
Just thought I'd chip in. The devlogs work the best though. Plus they keep momentum.
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