Cloudflare Acquires Outerbase
12 comments
·April 8, 2025rafram
willsmith72
Yeah agreed. On top of the general high latency, I've had two occasions where all requests timed out for over an hour and never received a response on their community forums or their discord.
On top of that the docs say it's designed for per-user/tenant use cases, while they elsewhere say those use cases aren't ready yet.
827a
This could just be my misunderstanding of how you'd set up a per-user or per-tenant use-case on D1, but as far as I know in order to set up a binding between a Worker and a D1 database, that connection needs to be defined in your wrangler.toml. Its unclear to me how you'd, e.g., be able to automate the creation of a new tenant + a new D1 database, without touching the wrangler.toml file. Otherwise every new tenant would need a code change.
Also, afaik they still have a 10,000 database limit on paid plans. Maybe you can get that lifted if you have a personal relationship with them, but even very low scale apps would quickly hit that.
IMO D1 (hosted SQLite in general) just seems like an interesting distraction. The per-tenant use-case has some pros; security being the biggest one. But I've basically never worked on an app where that boundary was so strict, across 100% of query use-cases, that I'd be willing to make such a critical infrastructure decision to support it. Even something as simple as a business analytics dashboard starts to break down that boundary, and would require replication of the data to another database (which is something many apps do anyway, but you can get a lot of mileage out of just directing BI queries at your normal database).
The second-best thing I can say about it is that it might have an interesting cost profile, but it seems like the situations where that would surface as an advantage is quite small. Mostly just low-scale, low-cost applications. Yeah, the total iterative cost of some low-utilization tenant might literally be $0; but assuming you have some money coming in, every other database can support this for an iterative cost of like $0.10, and you don't have to deal with all the downsides of D1 and SQLite.
pier25
R2 also needs more polish. Still waiting for multi-region storage etc.
spo81rty
I like Cloudflare. I also feel they are doing too many things...
danudey
I, too, like them a lot, and I worry that eventually they're going to be "the internet" in the same way that Twitter became "the communication platform" or AWS became "the infrastructure".
We're going to see days when something goes wrong on Cloudflare's end and disrupts their whole CDN, and 2/3 the internet is going to break.
Still, at this point they're absolutely a net positive, and seem like a good steward. They even once replied to one of my e-mails saying "Based on what you've said about your use case, you should just use our free plan which you can sign up for on our website".
crowcroft
Most people are used to connecting to remote DBs over a port/SSH with DBeaver or Table Plus etc.
Connecting to Sqlite is different to MySQL and Postgres though and can feel a bit weird. If they want D1 to become a big platform something like makes a lot of sense.
wiradikusuma
I built my app (Show HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43483919 ) using Cloudflare for various functions. They seem to nail the services a typical SaaS needs (except email service), but localhost development can be challenging for some newer services.
Also, their Queues service seems to get stuck randomly, and I need to "flush" it manually from the dashboard.
But I hope they get better over time. Can't beat the ease of use and the pricing.
solarkraft
Congratulations! I hope Outerbase Studio will live on, it’s one of the nicest Database management UIs I know.
burcs
Happy to answer any questions, super excited to be part of the team and help make Cloudflare's developer experience better. Not just bells-and-whistles ;)
knowsuchagency
Why was this flagged?
phildougherty
congrats to the outerbase team! they are great people.
They really need to focus on making D1 remotely usable for real work [1] before moving to the bells-and-whistles phase.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43572511