Hi Product Hunt! 👋 Today we're launching Plato to the public. Plato is Airtable for your Postgres or MySQL database. It's the easiest way for your startup to make your database accessible for customer support, customer success, or sales operations. BONUS: You can use Plato even without your own database. For today only, log in to connect and play with our sample database of historical Product Hunt data! We created Plato because we noticed something strange. When helping our friends at a fintech startup, we saw that while they had spent weeks building an admin panel from scratch, their accountants seldom used it. They often had to run new queries and track new data that their admin panel didn’t support. Rather than waiting for features, they resorted to dumping CSVs into Airtable, which quickly grew out of sync. In short, their team needed the flexibility of Airtable when working with production data. 👀 PM needs a single view on user data? Join tables together into a single *virtual table*. ✏ Success manager needs to track ad-hoc notes and fields to support new operations? Store new fields entirely in Plato with *virtual columns*. 📝 Sales agent needs to extend a free trial? Update the trial length with *inline updates*. Providing your team with direct access to your database can be scary, which is why Plato lets you lock down your tables and never stores your row data. We’re also soon rolling out audit logs and on-prem deployment. Today’s launch is just our first milestone on the way to creating a new kind of internal tooling platform: a sandbox. A sandbox is a safe playground for anyone to build and extend their own workflow tools. Data teams already understand the importance of providing their teammates with a sandbox for analytics. We believe engineers will likewise come to see the importance of providing a sandbox for tools. Plato's mission is to be the best sandbox for internal tools, where everyone can build new tools on a reliable foundation. For many, that foundation begins at the database. Plato is free today for anyone to use. We hope we've earned your consideration today, and that you'll follow us for further developments. Have a question? Post it below and I'll respond within 10m.

Michael Gummelt

Plato

Maker

📌

2yr ago

Reconquest

I'm intrigued by Plato's mission to provide a secure sandbox where internal tools can be built and extended. The product seems like it could enable teams to respond more quickly to shifting user requirements, while making sure security isn't sacrificed in the process. I'm interested in hearing how users are able to make use of the capabilities that Plato provides, such as virtual columns and inline updates — is there a concrete example or two you could cite?

@reconquest Of course. Virtual columns are one of Plato's killer features. Operators use them to extend user tables with e.g. Notes, new tax form info, or anything else they'd like to see tracked against their DB.

Santiago Suarez Ordoñez

Momentum

Go, Michael and team! We are excited to use Plato to build some internal admins and dashboards. Crazy coincidence that we're launching on the same day LOL

@santiycr Momentum's crushing it!

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