Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
Congrats on the launch!<p>Lots of really good stuff going on here, a few bits of feedback, ideas, etc, and also responding to some of the comments in other threads.<p>* The quick explanation of how this works is pretty strong, but I think the differentiator&#x2F;value over other services maybe isn&#x27;t called out as well. To me, this seems pretty clearly ideal for smaller teams all in on JAMstack&#x2F;serverless with a lean stack that don&#x27;t&#x2F;won&#x27;t have an easy place to create an automated process for synchronization, and are more likely to be using a planetscale&#x2F;supabase&#x2F;neon where this model is more attractive. I would suggest adding some of that info, not only to help target customers better recognize the value prop, but also help discovery via SEO.<p>* While the landing page gives a good overview, as a dev, before I sign up, I want more details of how it works, more complete examples, etc. For SaaS apps targeting the general market, after landing&#x2F;product pages,the most visited pages are generally use cases, success stories, industry specific info, etc. But from my experience and talking with many others, for dev audience, docs are the next thing people visit (if they aren&#x27;t ready to sign up). You don&#x27;t need every doc at once, but things like a quick start guide, concept overview, feature overview, etc can all be high value docs that you generally need anyways for your first customers<p>* With docs, you can better address and explain the security side of things. I would do less on the landing page in regards to security and push that to more in depth detail in the docs. Talk about best practices of creating a read-only user. Create guides for most popular db vendors, etc<p>* As has already been mentioned, you will get concerns about any access to the db and &quot;why not an API&quot;. I think these commenters are right that this will be a deal breaker for many companies, but I don&#x27;t agree that you want an API. Not only because I think that reduces some of the value prop but also because then you would need to store customer data. I obviously don&#x27;t know what you are storing today, but I would think that this model <i>could</i> have a big advantage if you didn&#x27;t need to store <i>any</i> PII data in cc.dev. The complexity of dealing with compliance and regulatory requirements is no small part of why something like MailChimp is expensive is that burden. I don&#x27;t know if this is something you currently consider a value prop (or if you have engineered to support this)... But I certainly would :)<p>* To address the reality of private dbs&#x2F;giving access to a db, I would look at potentially implementing an agent. This agent would then run the queries (still provided by the user) and just-in-time deliver the results when needed. Getting the model of this right that works across different companies view of security will mean this is probably best to do with a handful of potential customers.<p>* As far as deployment and monetization model... I would only open source it if you are giving up on commercialization or if you can open source a subset that can be useful enough to build a community.  Once again, returning to JAMstack, maybe solve in open source (but integrate) some problem unique to those teams. As far as a paid self-hosting, given that this seems like a one man show, I would resist it. Trying to do SaaS and support of self-hosting is rough, even for well funded VC backed teams..<p>Quite a bit here, but if you want follows up on anything, my email is in profile or will reply to comments.<p>Congrats again and hope it goes somewhere :)