So you copied something that someone spent time on designing, decided to open-source, and now you're killing the steam for James' pre-order campaign by posting everywhere. You are the reason we cannot share publicly the projects we work on.
Great questions! In Notion you can have as many workspaces as you want, but you only have to pay for workspaces that are shared with your team. So for example, you can create a new personal workspace and use unlimited blocks for free.
Notocat only uses Notion as an editor. If Notion folds, than Notocat will most likely be pivoted to an in-house editor instead. It will definitely affect the business targeting though. This is because services like Notocat are marketed toward Notion users, as you mentioned.
I'm Raz, the creator of Notocat and I'm excited to share that I just launched my new product and it's live for everyone to use.
The product started as a Notion to email HTML renderer that I was using for my other business. Then I saw the opportunity to reshape this as an entire product, and Notocat is the result of all the work.
It comes with a lot of features that you'd expect from a newsletter platform, including:
- Advanced issues customization
- Custom and embeddable subscribe forms
- Custom domains
- Opens & Links tracking
- Contacts API
- Best-in-class deliverability
Really happy to receive feedback, so please let me know if there is anything you'd like to share!
Grafana is an amazing product and offers a lot more features than Chartbrew. The main difference is that grafana focuses on monitoring performance metrics and Chartbrew is more tailored for business/product metrics.
Also, quite a few of our customers use Chartbrew because of the Firebase integrations
Great to hear that :) Don't hesitate to get in touch if you need help with the setup. There will be links to get in touch all over the place when you sign up haha
It's an open-source data visualization and reporting platform that I started in 2018, I abandoned in 2019, then resumed working on it more seriously in 2020.
Currently, the platform is doing $1,138 in MRR from then managed hosting service and has made over $11k in revenue so far. It's been growing steadily in the last few months but going through a rough Dec-Jan period at the moment. You can see the open page at https://chartbrew.com/open
Onwards and great job everyone at working to make side projects work for you!
Chartbrew founder here, just wanted to clarify for readers that Chartbrew doesn't store any data from the 3rd party tools so there's no silo problem. It queries the data sources, computes the data, and stores only the chart configurations.
The only storage Chartbrew does is to cache the data while building a chart so the data source is not queried too many times and the user can see changes quicker. Afterwards, Chartbrew keeps the charts updated with data coming directly from the other tools.
Looking at the license, it looks like it's possible, but you will need to release your own code under the AGPLv3 license and make it available to others. That means if you add an auth layer on top of the project, you will need to make that layer available under the same license.
> The AGPL License does not permit sublicensing of the code; that is, you cannot rework or add to the code and then close those changes off to the public. The “open source-ness” of the original code follows any update or addition. Both GPL v2 and GPL v3 contain this provision as well.
Although the platform updates the data automatically for you, it doesn't support notifications yet. Notifications are planned for Q2 this year.
I think for system monitoring, Grafana might be a better choice currently.
If you give Chartbrew a try, don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions. I'd be happy to help!
One use-case that the platform is being used for is for B2B SaaS businesses to offer their analytics through Chartbrew. So it is possible and there are people already using it like this.
Or if you're wondering if you can offer the analytics platform by itself as a SaaS, I built a SaaS layer on top of it here: https://chartbrew.com
I'm afraid I don't have that much info on PowerBI so I can't speak about its ease of use. I know for sure it has more analytics feature so it's better when it comes to digging deeper in your data.
The pricing is a bit strange since you apparently pay by the hour you show users the dashboards and monthly, it starts from $700+/m which is much more than Chartbrew as a service (which is also free to self-host).
Another thing I'm not sure PowerBI has, are templates so that you can replicate dashboards for separate clients. In Chartbrew you can create your own custom templates or use the ones already created in the platform.
But before starting to use any of the services, make sure you data sources are supported by the platform.
There is a basic transformation layer that does basic arithmetic and string concatenation. This is a continuous work in progress as I add more options the more feedback I get from customers. I actually received a request for extra transformations just yesterday. So gotta put those in the roadmap!
I'm not very familiar with PowerBI to be honest, but from what I'm seeing it's heavily integrated with Microsoft services which Chartbrew is not made for.
Chartbrew offers some different options for integrations such as custom API integrations (works with any REST API), MongoDB, and Firebase.
Also Chartbrew is not as complex as PowerBI which can be both a minus and a plus, depending on the use-case.
The main difference is that Chartbrew is tailored more for companies working with clients in need of dashboards. What this means is that Chartbrew has granular permissions on dashboard-level to allow the clients to explore the data, a templating feature to quickly create dashboards for new clients, and easy embedding to get any chart in your own product.
Not yet documented, but Chartbrew also has an API for creating dashboards from templates through its API. This will allow product owners to spin up a new dashboard whenever they get new users/clients in their platform.
User signs up -> New dashboard is created -> User is given access to the new dashboard -> Charts are made available in other apps
Another obvious difference is in the feature set that is more vast in the other two solutions. This is both a blessing and a curse. Some feedback I received was that it was easy to create visualizations because of the simplicity. I'm always improving on current visualization aspects whenever a client needs something more complex, though. I'm aware I would never be able to come close to the more mature solutions, so I'm serving other use-cases instead. Hope this all makes sense :)
In the past year I decided to change the direction of this project a bit and aim to help agencies create quick dashboards for their clients. This seemed to be the main use-case Chartbrew was being used for.
Lots of new features have been developed to make this process easy, such as the introduction of templates, multiple new integrations and Firestore support which seemed to be underserved by the other dashboarding tools.
This project has been a massive undertaking, but it's rewarding to work on it since I enjoy working in this space. This year I also started making some money with the project, which also helps for sure!
I'll be around reading any feedback you may have about the project. Thanks for dropping by!