Hi,
I selfhost a lot of tools for personal (and professional) use, so this surprised me, but maybe I am missing something regarding simple tools that are “open source enough” for relational databases.
My (small, broke) company has a problem with tools, and I figured that open source would be the answer, but if I look at the usual suspects that would allow for a simple way to create/update/sort/search clients and missions, that everyone could use, everything seems either very limited or very expensive (or both!).
I looked at the pricing for Baserow, Grist, NodoDB, Nocobase, and for 100 users and 5000 rows, it means around 12 000 euros per year to get something usable. And the open source selfhosted versions are quite limited everytime. I saw someone rage about open core some months ago, but never realized how true this was.
The only thing that seems truly open source (and a lot more limited than the others) is Mathesar. Maybe it will be good enough. There isn’t much content about it, I will have to look at the documentation to get a better feeling of what it can offer.
Is there some truly open source no code relational database tools around? Enough to create rows, have advanced (AND OR) search, and a tag system to look for “all clients in country X with type of mission Y in sector Z in 2024” or “all missions for clients A or B”
For those wondering, of course we have a tool to manage missions, clients, billing, etc. but it is truly awful, and I was hoping to propose something simple to manage search of past references, but nothing seems as easy as I thought it would.


There is no such thing as no code, just code that someone else wrote. Not that such code isn’t trivial to get from a basic LLM that you can run locally for pennies a year.
https://blog.mlc.ai/2024/04/20/GPU-Accelerated-LLM-on-Orange-Pi
Just setup a standard PostgreSQL database and then work with the LLM to write some C# code to connect to it and create, update and delete data per your own system needs. Hire a part time programmer if you need more help. They usually can get you where you want to be cheaply if they are FSF developers and you don’t restrict them from using the code they write for you.
For more discussion on the value of the term “No code” I can recommend this: https://vger.to/lemmy.ml/post/35466470
Thank you for the recommendation.