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Show HN: Airforms – never build another CRUD app
Airforms is a database form builder. You can lower software development costs by using Airforms instead of developing custom CRUD applications to enter and update data. Airforms lets you build forms using a simple drag-and-drop interface. No coding skills needed.
Airforms was built from the ground up to support relational databases. Joins and lookups, and query parameters including multi-valued and cascading parameters are supported.
Airforms also includes a graphical query builder, and tools for browsing database schema, relationships and data. An automatic database diagram generator is also included.
- thedangler 4y agoNeed more example of the form builder. What is availble, how does it handle errors? Can you add show hide logic based on a field value? Is there form logic at all? What form fields are allowed? Lots of unknowns.
- airforms 4y agoTo handle errors Airforms supports extensive validation options. Regarding show/hide based on field value -- this is accomplished via "rules", where you build conditions graphically. This is not enabled in the current build, but is coming in November. Common types of form fields such as radio, checkbox, textbox, textarea, combobox, date and so on are supported. Please contact us via the email address at the bottom of the web site if you would like to discuss your specific scenarios.
- yodon 4y agoIt sounds like your target user is quite technical if they know terminology like CRUD well enough for it to be the first thing you discuss on the page, as well as "Joins and lookups, query parameters including multi-valued and cascading parameters, are all transparently supported." You might consider whether either your marketing text is too technical for your target user, or, if not, whether your target user is sufficiently technical that they are looking for a low code or no code application for reasons other than that they don't know how to write code (as in listing "No coding skills" as the second big focus target on the page might not be right given the rest of the page's focus).
- airforms 4y agoGood feedback! In the beginning we expect early adopters will be technology enthusiasts, so the marketing text is oriented towards them. Later, as the mainstream begins to adopt the product we plan to adjust the text accordingly.
- castillar76 4y agoLooks interesting, and potentially something I wouldn’t mind paying for if it works well. However, there’s a steep price differential there because you require “20 users minimum” for your $5/user/month plan. So the price goes from free to $1200/year, which is a pretty sharp step upwards.
- saaaaaam 4y agoOne of my businesses is just me. I don’t need 20 users. I’ll never need 20 users. But you don’t allow business use. My other business is 5 people. We’d never need 20 users. I’d need two or three max. I’d love to use this. But I can’t, because I’ll break your T&Cs.
- airforms 4y agoThanks for your feedback. We'll introduce an in-between plan to solve this problem.
- saaaaaam 4y agoAnother blocker: I have to sign up with a Microsoft account?! What.
- airforms 4y agoThis is for access control. If your company uses Active Directory then when when you remove an employee from your Active Directory his access will be automatically removed. If your company does not use Active Directory you can create a Microsoft account using your existing email (even gmail works). Or you can create a new @outlook.com account.
- saaaaaam 4y agoRight, but I don’t have one and don’t want yet another set of credentials to manage.
- nullfield 4y agoLook at ToolJet too.
- diceduckmonk 4y agoThe "never build another CRUD app" claim is a little too wide of a net. There's no mention of invoking 3rd party APIs here. The majority of apps aren't just backed by a single source of truth, but aggregating many. That aggregation process can be done offline rather than on-demand in real-time, but you still need a separate ETL process to pull that data.
- airforms 4y agoYou are right, 3rd party APIs are not supported. Only SQL databases are supported.
- smt88 4y agoI'm generally supportive of more tools like this, but we need to know what your hook is. How is this different from other no-code tools? What does it do uniquely well? What tradeoffs are you making that will appeal to certain users? Also, you may run into some name conflict issues with: - Airtable - Airrange - Airdev - AirOps
- airforms 4y ago> What does it do uniquely well? Building forms on top of relational databases. There are plenty of no-code tools out there, but not many that can build traditional forms for your own database + schema.
- smt88 4y ago> not many that can build traditional forms for your own database + schema That's not true in my experience. Retool has fantastic support for connecting directly to databases, including generating forms from schemas, no-code queries, and support for multiple RDBMS. It looks like Budibase[1] also supports it. My company has been looking for an admin system that we can build in dev and then deploy in our API repo so that any API deployment has an admin system deployed with it (that uses the same environment variables to connect to the database). This would help us a lot with our multi-tenant setup. It seems like your product has some qualities that would help us because of the self-hosting, headless aspects. You might find a niche of people like me. 1. https://docs.budibase.com/docs/postgresql-1 https://docs.budibase.com/docs/postgresql-1
- airforms 4y agoThere are big differences between the feature sets of Airforms and those apps. I would encourage you to take a closer look at our product!
- smt88 4y agoI see two features that Airforms has that Retool doesn't: 1. Airforms can be self-hosted 2. Airforms creates a database diagram Honestly I'm not sure #2 is useful. I've been working heavily with database for 20 years and have never found one to be useful. Laypeople might feel differently, and it doesn't hurt to have it, of course. Beyond that, Retool has all the features that Airforms has and a lot more. Retool is genuinely amazing and a mature product. I've used it extensively. That said, Retool is expensive and not great for non-coders. If non-coders can really use Airforms effectively, then that's a big differentiator. The price is too, of course.
- xupybd 4y agoHmm... there is almost no information on the company behind this. The first thing I'd be doing when evaluating a tool like this is to find out what sort of backing it has. Is it going to be around long enough for our investment in building with it to pay off? From that website my answer would be probably not, I'm not willing to risk my reputation on recommending something without solid evidence it will be here in 5 years.
- airforms 4y ago> solid evidence it will be here in 5 years Fair point. However, note that there is no guarantee that a product or service from even Google [1] or Microsoft [2] will be there in 5 years. [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ [2] https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
- xupybd 4y agoYes but no one gets fired for picking Google or Microsoft. All you really need is a little background about the company running the thing. That would be enough for someone like myself to cover my ass for picking your tool.
- airforms 4y agoWhat you really want to see is a reputable VC (preferably from Sand Hill Road) backing the company. That might be coming in the future, but for now we are doing well without VCs.
- xupybd 4y agoNot so much. A company name, address and some people's names behind it tick most of the boxes. A back story is even better. This is a perfect example of the kind of page I'm talking about. https://www.cadcode.com/content/about-us https://www.cadcode.com/content/about-us
- 4y ago
- aamoscodes 4y agoIs there a way to sign in without an Outlook account? Totally fine if not, but that seems like a blocker to early adoption
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shaftway 4y agoThis might be the perfect use-case for a database that I'm looking to build for tracking a personal collection, but it's hard to see the full feature set. I assume that's because it's still rapidly evolving. Do you support image fields alongside the typical string / int / float / boolean fields? Any additional features here, like limiting image size and scaling images that are too large? I'm comparing this to MementoDB, which has similar features on image storage.