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Show HN: Airforms – never build another CRUD app (airforms.com)

31 points by airforms ↗ HN
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.

36 comments

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thedangler
Need 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
To 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
It 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
Good 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
Looks 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.
airforms
Thanks for your feedback. What would be more reasonable, in your opinion?
melony
Offer a flat rate per user. At $5 dollars per month you are not losing money. Don't overprovision your backend. You can increase it to $6/7 per seat depending on what users are willing to pay.
saaaaaam
One 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
Thanks for your feedback. We'll introduce an in-between plan to solve this problem.
saaaaaam
Another blocker: I have to sign up with a Microsoft account?! What.
airforms
This 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
Right, but I don’t have one and don’t want yet another set of credentials to manage.
diceduckmonk
The "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
You are right, 3rd party APIs are not supported. Only SQL databases are supported.
smt88
I'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
> 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
> 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

airforms
There 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
I 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.

interlocutor
Does Retool have a query builder? Does it support query parameters? If not how do you find the record you want to update? Does it support displaying fields from lookup tables (i.e., tables joined via foreign key)? How do you pick a record from a foreign table (when you want to update the foreign key itself)?
smt88
> Does Retool have a query builder?

Yes. It may not be exactly like the one in Airforms. You can do CRUD operations/mappings without writing any SQL, or you can drop into SQL (with autocomplete and a schema browser) if you need more complexity.

> Does it support query parameters?

Yes.

> Does it support displaying fields from lookup tables (i.e., tables joined via foreign key)?

Yes.

> How do you pick a record from a foreign table (when you want to update the foreign key itself)?

There are multiple ways to do it. The easiest way is to run a query to get the IDs (and labels) from the table you're joining and then add that to some kind of input (list, table, etc.)

Like I said in a previous comment, a lot of this stuff requires knowing how to code or at least some technical understanding of databases, which might be a differentiator.

xupybd
Hmm... 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
> 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/

[2] https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

xupybd
Yes 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
What 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
Not 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

Qtips87
Nowadays a lot of companies are 100% remote with no physical address.
ano88888
Gosh, this is a very bad sign of arguing wiht potentail customers who simply give good advice on telling a little about who is behind the company (like address, etc). Why do you want to hide such info?
interlocutor
I am a founder myself and I haven't put founders' info on our website for a simple reason... one of the cofounders has not yet quit his day job and he doesn't want his employers to know he is moonlighting.
xupybd
Just put the story of why you're doing what you're doing. You need the appearance of people behind the product.
aamoscodes
Is there a way to sign in without an Outlook account? Totally fine if not, but that seems like a blocker to early adoption
airforms
Currently we require a Microsoft account. What is your preferred way to login? We are open to adding additional ways to log in.
shaftway
I'd like to see a sign in with Google, because that's my authorizer of choice, and probably one of the biggest.
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shaftway
This 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.