Show HN: Sortabase, a collaborative, visual database builder for communities (opens in new tab)

We're doing something a bit similar at DoltHub, where databases are managed with a GitHub like workflow, and where you get the pros and cons of that kind of system. Our hospital price database (work ongoing daily) is community built: https://www.dolthub.com/repositories/dolthub/transparency-in... (context: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NifwgKHBCeF35ZRZsfpgg4bE...)

On HN months ago, I made a list [1] on publishing small databases, and I remember that I could not find a good service under "List sharing" (maybe one). Yours fills that slot perfectly.

I have some suggestions: For initiating the DB, offering import (csv/sheets...) would help creators jump in. Then, for collaboration, you could offer the option to add without any account at all (just send the "under review" form to the moderators), or maybe also add more signup alternatives.

As for monetization, I suggest in the future you limit only "private" DBs (= me and other moderators) , so people can still create unlimited public ones (good for spreading the word).

Good luck!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561292

wow this looks amazing. Do you mind shedding some light on how you built this? especially how you organize taxonomy and product metadata for each category

I am working on an e-commerce platform that would benefits a lot from your experience here

This feels like a combination of Airtable (before the push to be a no-code app platform) and Reddit. This seems way better than the public Google Sheets that make their way around the latter site.

I'm curious though. How do you plan to make money from this project (premium subscription option, affiliate links for product-focused databases, etc.)? Will it remain free to use?

Regardless, it seems like an interesting project!

Finally, a good source of penguin repellent. Now I can get rid of the penguins in my basement and get my herring back!

[*] https://www.sortabase.com/PenguinRepellent

Is there a way to view each group of cards as a list? Just like what Airtable or Retable has for example?

The website looks really good!

For the search criteria filters, are you using a library or did you make that yourself?

The closest thing I can think of is

https://react-select.com/home

Looks super cool. I am working on something similar.

edit: Dumb question. deleted

Smart, seems like a great way to make some money on affiliate commissions and provide a useful product to the creators and the end users at the same time. Nice!

What's the license on the data? Needs grid view and export/api.

I like it,

Can the list of databases also be a database? like can it have the same interface and sort able features?

Also what does a user get i they login/sign up? is that just to create databases or do you get a subscribe feature or something?

very cool. UI to compare items is a little clunky. Would like to select multiple items to compare from the main grid view. Right now it jumps me to the dedicated compare screen as soon as I select one item, and then I have to search to add new ones. I want to filter a list through facets and select a subset of the items on that list for detailed comparison.

This is pretty cool, except that every database looks like a commerce site. It might be good to have some different layouts available that look less commercial?

There are some databases that have entries with a long text description. Putting a snippet of that up front would make that clearer. Also, a single-column layout would look more like a blog.

Compare with an archive page on Substack.

This is the thing that reddit should have done years ago. Great product.

This is really cool