indiDatabase 1.0: Your Own Database, Your Whole Office, One Purchase

Somewhere in a lot of small offices there’s a computer nobody is allowed to replace, because it runs the database. Maybe it’s a Lotus Approach file that hasn’t had an update in over a decade. Maybe it’s FileMaker, and the bill now arrives every month for every person who uses it. Maybe it’s a spreadsheet that quietly became a database and is one bad sort away from scrambling a customer list.

The people running those offices kept asking the same thing: I just want to make my own database, keep it on my own computer, and let the rest of the office use it. Why is that a subscription now?

It isn’t anymore. indiDatabase 1.0 is out today.

A database you design yourself

You don’t need to know what a schema is. You make a table, give it fields — a name, a phone number, an amount, a date — and indiDatabase builds a grid you can type straight into. Behind that grid is everything a real database should have:

Forms the way Approach drew them. Lay out a card for each record with a point-and-click designer: fields, labels, boxes, buttons, and panels showing related records. Press Find and the same form blanks out and takes criteria in its own boxes. That’s how Lotus Approach did it, and it’s still the fastest way anybody has found to ask a database a question.
Six kinds of reports. Grouped lists with exact totals, certificates, mailing labels with Avery presets, form letters, crosstabs, and charts. A report can ask a question when it runs — which month, which region — and the page follows the answer.
Summarise without a formula. Group and total any table by example, and keep the worksheet to run again tomorrow.
Calculated and summary fields, validation rules, and relationships — checked when you save the design, so a typo in a formula is caught then and not at month-end.

An app for each part of the business

Your invoicing, your mailing list, and your equipment loans are different jobs. They shouldn’t be three different files that each keep their own copy of the customers.

In indiDatabase they’re apps inside one file. Switch between them like separate programs; each one shows only its own tables, forms, and reports. But they share the customers, so a change made in Invoicing is already there in the mailing list.

And you don’t have to start from nothing. Ten templates arrive as working apps, with forms, reports, and saved finds ready: Customer Manager, Inventory, Job / Work Order Manager, Membership Manager, Contacts / CRM, Asset Tracker, Property Manager, Sales / Orders, Parts Catalog, and Donor / Nonprofit Manager. Make any app your own and save it as a template file to hand to someone else.

Your whole office, on one license

Press Start sharing and the database answers on your own network. Other computers pair with a short code read across the room, sign in, and work in the same file, live. There’s no server product to install, nothing hosted, and no cloud in the middle. The file never leaves the machine that owns it.

One purchase covers every desk. Multi-user is $399, once. Not per seat, not per month, not per year.

The comparison is worth spelling out. Five people on FileMaker Pro at Claris’s listed pricing is around $1,260 a year. Five on Airtable’s Team plan is about $1,200 a year. Both need their servers for the sharing. Over three years that’s $3,600 to $3,800 against $399, and in year four indiDatabase is still costing nothing.

Multi-user works like an actual office, not just “several people can open the file”:

Open a record someone else is editing and you’re told by name — “Ida Roth is editing this record” — before you start typing, not after.
Every screen catches up within a few seconds of someone’s save, and keeps whatever you were halfway through typing.
Roles decide who sees what, down to individual records and fields. The front desk can look up a member without seeing what they’ve donated.
Every record is stamped with who made it and who last changed it.
Every connection is encrypted and pinned to the host machine. If a laptop walks off, you revoke that computer, and nobody changes a password.

Your data is yours

The whole database — tables, records, apps, forms, reports, and users — is one file. Copy it, back it up, and keep it wherever you keep important documents.

indiDatabase works completely offline. It takes automatic backups while you work and lists them as restore points you can go back to. And it refuses to open a database from a shared network drive or a Dropbox folder, because that’s how database files get corrupted. It tells you to share the file from one computer instead, which is the thing that actually works.

We spent the last stretch before release on the details that decide whether you trust a database with your work:

Nothing unsaved is lost without asking. Switch tables, open another database, or close the window with changes pending, and indiDatabase offers to save them first — your records and your form and report designs.
No orphaned records by accident. Delete a customer who still has invoices and you’re told, before anything is saved, exactly which records would be left pointing at nothing.
Dates mean what they say. A date that never happened, like February 31st, is refused as you type. Times show in your own time zone.
Your old data comes with you. The import wizard reads CSV and legacy dBase files, including the .dbf files Approach kept its data in, and offers to join them back up afterwards. You see a preview, fix column types and headings, and nothing is written until you’ve seen exactly what you’re getting. Zip codes keep their leading zeros.

And if you stop paying, you don’t lose anything. After the trial, every database stays readable, printable, and exportable forever. Only saving changes needs a license. Your data is never held hostage.

Getting it

indiDatabase 1.0 is on our download page for Windows 10 and 11 (code-signed) and Linux (AppImage,.deb, and .rpm), and a Flathub listing is on its way. macOS is coming later.

Single-user is $199. Multi-user, with every computer in the office, is $399. Start with single-user and outgrow it? Upgrade from inside the app for the $200 difference, never full price twice. Updates are free for all of 1.x.

Every copy starts with a 30-day free trial with everything turned on, sharing included, and no credit card. Import your old file and see it on your own forms before you decide.

Buy it once. It keeps working.