SeekTable

Later I got some number of 'leads' (about 10 or so) that were interested in new features - primarily about reports sharing and 'administration' capabilities in self-hosted version. In this time I decided to introduce paid subscriptions and try to shift from 'free tool that exists as demo of technology' to SaaS product that generates some cash flow. That not was easy and in fact a lot of engineering efforts are spent to make this possible.

All functionality that was originally free remains free; paid subscriptions are required only for advanced features, there are 2 types of them:

• per-account: this is 'Team sharing' (unlocks possibility to share cubes/reports with other accounts in a secure way) and 'Advanced publishing' (unlocks many capabilities for reports published to web or embedded with iframes)
• per-installation: these subscriptions are possible only for self-hosted version, for example this is 'white-label mode' which allows to hide all links to SeekTable and use your own branding instead.

After release of these updates I got first paid customer very soon; just to say, most of original 'leads' that asked for new features very loudly - did not convert to paid customers :-) from this I learned that confirmations in emails is nothing, only real commitment is $$ transaction .

After launch in 2017 SeekTable evolves as a free BI tool for ad-hoc reporting, a lot of features were added like drill-down capabilities, search-driven interface (NLP) - for now it works only for CSV sources, flat-table reports, support of MongoDb/ElasticSearch as data sources.

SeekTable gets some traction and many users asked how they could use it with databases that are not accessible from internet. That pushed me to create self-hosted version of SeekTable that is distributed as docker images. I found that this is good approach to offer cloud app as on-premise installation and keep maintainability (upgrades, setup) on acceptable level.

SeekTable history starts in 2017 when it goes online as absolutely free web-based tool for pivot tables creation in several clicks. In fact this was a demo (web interface for end-users) of my another product - this is PivotData microservice - which is server app that provides web API for pivot tables/charts generation by various data sources (in the same way as you use ElasticSearch for text queries).