Ultorg: The User Interface for Relational Databases (ultorg.com)

> From September 2026, Mathias Breistein has taken over as CEO, with a focus on new customer acquisition

Mathias, if you are here and listening, I'm interested but $35 / month is the wrong price point for this. $420 for year.

I can buy DataGrip for $261 for three years and it has a perpetual fallback license that would let me pay for the first year and then stop and just not get updates.

IMO, to start, you want your product to be so good and so reasonably priced that it's easy for someone to decide to give it a try. You are coming in with a uber premium price and I think that's going to severely hinder your customer acquisition efforts.

Also, I almost never get a license to a tool like this where I'm not entitled to keep using it if I stop paying for it. There is just too much incentive on the part of the vendor to just keep driving the price up to the breaking point. With a fallback license like JetBrains has, if they get unreasonable about price, I can just exit.

Finally, in the age of LLMs, if this gets popular and the price point is wrong, someone is going to do a good job of producing a competitor and make it open source or much less expensive. Make the official version a reasonable enough price that there is no reason to not support you to make it better.

Just my $0.02 but hope it helps at some level.

Finally, I looked at the website and there was no way to contact you to tell you this personally. So...might want to fix that. Small org, easy contact should be part of the perk.

Would definitely use this if I was a data person. Overkill for a web developer tough.

Eirik Bakke's Ultorg (SIEUFERD) is amazing and inspirational research, and I'm glad to see that it's finally available to the public after 17 years. It's one of those things that really makes you sit up and take notice of how much better our everyday software could have been.

However, I wouldn't be willing to try it under proprietary-software terms. Last week, I was thinking about eliciting open-source software with the Ultorg look and feel from an LLM, thus replicating Bakke's HCI research and enabling other HCI researchers to build on it, which won't be possible under a proprietary license.

My notes on Ultorg may be of interest; you can

  git clone http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git

and read sieuferd.md (5200 words).

The introduction:

> Eirik Bakke’s [SIEUFERD][0] (or, as he sometimes spells it, SIUEFERD) is a really interesting and promising generic database frontend, a “schema-independent database UI”. The elevator pitch is “a new kind of graphical query interface [with] the power of SQL but the ease-of-use of a spreadsheet”. (Unfortunately, he forgot to implement the DDL part of SQL, just doing the DML part.)

I can highly recommend Bakke's 5-minute talk on it from 10 years ago at https://vimeo.com/173726371.

I think the novel thing here, that I have not yet seen in any other database app, is the realization that normal SQL joins are not quite what you want in most cases.

Often, you are interested in nested results. "Give me all my customers with a list of their orders." However, when you do this with a join, you get a list of the orders with a copy of the customer information attached to each, instead. In Ultorg, you actually get the customer with a list of their orders nested in their row as a sub-table, but with that sub-table's headers cleverly floated to the top, so they're not repeated for each customer.

As a second trick, Ultorg manages to remember the relations, so the data is editable in the nested tables. (There are some limitations to this, I believe.)

I used the trial version of Ultorg at the beginning of the year (the example in the 2.1.4 changelog is based on my use case), and it was tons of fun to use. Ultorg is great. I wish I had discovered it right at the start of that small project.

Unfortunately, I do not have a regular use case for this, and for personal use and occasional unpaid hobby projects, Ultorg's license is not a good fit. So I check the website from time to time whether there's been a change to it; no luck so far.

I am no business expert, and I do not know how well Eirik is doing with the current model. However, I do have the impression that he underestimates how many people would have a use case in their private life for it, but not at $35/month. I think this could also help attract new commercial users. After all, it's much easier to convince your boss of purchasing a software if you have already built expertise by using it personally.

Previously used it and it's AMAZING given you have data stored with good practices, e.g. with unique IDs that are consistent among many databases/sheets. I found it's easier to begin with Ultorg's usecase in mind than to migrate existing files to fit its use.

And I do agree with the criticisms mentioned in the thread. Ultorg is solving a lot of problems of data organisation and context awareness, so starting a business with a perpetual license would be awesome.

Guess I just don't wanna lose access to the tool once I have all the tailored files and fail to pay again.

Should mention that Eirik is a joy talk to and will quite possibly accommodate you. All the best to him.

A small desktop app that is a subscription rubs me the wrong way.

Someone just posted an open-source alternative earlier today. Its UI looks better too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50427934

What's the patent situation?

It is interesting that somebody is still making software. The innovation here is mostly in the UX, which I suppose is hard to protect. Kinda sad.

I like its flexibility but nothing beats LINQPad and its .Dump() method on that front.

Wild that it supports just about everything except SQLite, the most widely used database in the world and the easiest to support

Isn’t this like a pivot table, that many advanced BI solutions (that have a modeler inside) already have ?

Question: Is there any way to customise the interface like add extra buttons, for example to export an invoice?

I've wanted something like this for a really long time. Unfortunately I'll never use this because there's no way I'm going to pay for it, let alone pay an ongoing subscription fee, but it looks pretty cool.

Any features worth to switch from DBeaver?

Or you can use open-source DBFlux https://dbflux.dev/

Sheesh, and they said Apple was doomed for putting small icons inside dropdown menus. Who designed this monstrosity?