A Quickbase alternative you can open right now.
Flat pricing, unlimited users, no per-seat fee — the bill is the same at five people and at fifty, and there's no sales call to find out whether it's any good. The button below opens a real, working database in your browser: Microsoft's own Northwind sample, rebuilt in Bionic Forms, with its customers, orders and line items all wired together. No signup, no email, nothing to install.
Where this is up to
- Works today, on any OS, in your browser — nothing to install, and there are desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux as well.
- Windows is a download now; there is no iPhone or Android app yet. The Windows app is not code-signed yet, so the first time you run it Windows shows a blue “Windows protected your PC” box — click More info, then Run anyway. Some antivirus flags it for the same reason. A certificate is bought, not written, and we would rather ship the app and say this plainly than keep you waiting on a purchase order. The phone apps get built the moment someone needs them.
- Offline is a desktop feature. The encrypted local database ships with the desktop app — macOS, Linux and Windows. In the browser it is not true: that needs a connection, and I'd rather say so here than have you find out on a train.
- The local database file is encrypted on disk (adiantum full-file encryption), and the key lives in your operating system's own secure store rather than in the file.
- I'm not going to tell you Quickbase is bad. It is a capable product and it is actively developed. The only thing I'm claiming is a different pricing model — flat, not per user — and a different shape of app.
- Calculation fields do not calculate yet. Collections, fields, links between records, screens and permissions all work. A calculated field can be created and labelled, but nothing works out the value, so it shows as empty with a note saying why. If the worth of your app is mostly in its calculations, that is worth knowing before you move anything rather than after.
What it actually looks like
Both of these are the CRM template as it ships — one click from an empty account, no setup. They are screenshots of the running product, not mockups.
A grouped list view. Fields are changed in the app’s settings, or by asking the assistant, never by accident from the list.
The same app's dashboard. The charts read live from the records above, not a separate reporting tool.
How the pricing works
Flat, by what you build — never by how many people use it. Add the whole team, the contractor, the client who needs read access: the price doesn't move. If you've been doing per-seat arithmetic before adding anyone, that's the habit this pricing is built to break.
What happens when the person who built it leaves?
That's the question this is really built around, and it's the one I'd genuinely like to hear your answer to. A departmental app usually outlives the person who wrote it, and what's left behind is often a file nobody can safely change.
- The app is described, not codedDoc types, fields, views and workflows are structured definitions — the next person reads what it does instead of reverse-engineering a script.
- Every change is a revisionRecords keep their history, so "who changed this, and when" has an answer after the original author is gone.
- The data is a database on your machineOffline-first and encrypted, syncing when it can. If my company disappeared tomorrow, the file wouldn't.
- Roles are part of the appPermissions live in the app definition, so handing it over doesn't mean rebuilding who can see what.
You cannot work out your Quickbase bill from Quickbase’s pricing page
This is the one that sends people looking, and it is worth stating precisely rather than sneering at. Quickbase’s own plans page lists Team at $35 per user, per month and Business at $55 per user, per month, both priced annually. Underneath each, in their own words: “Cost shown does not include platform minimum.”
That sentence appears twice on the page, and the platform minimum itself is not stated anywhere on it. So the arithmetic a small team wants to do — five people times thirty-five dollars — is not the arithmetic that produces the invoice, and the missing number is the one you would need. On Quickbase’s own community forum you can find customers asking the obvious follow-up: what is a small company supposed to do when it needs ten users rather than twenty.
Their help documentation adds a second dimension most evaluators never price in: consumption is metered by an entitlement called reads, which count how often users view data. That is a perfectly reasonable way to run a platform at enterprise scale. It is a difficult way to answer “what will this cost me next year” when you are eleven people and growing.
To be fair to them, because a comparison that is not fair is not useful: Quickbase is a mature platform aimed at large operational deployments, and at that size a negotiated contract with a platform minimum is normal and the per-user number stops mattering. If you are 200 people with a procurement department, none of the above is a problem. If you are eleven people who outgrew a spreadsheet, all of it is.
The contrast, stated as arithmetic rather than adjectives
We price by entries and storage, not by people. Every plan has unlimited users: unlimited apps free with 10,000 entries in each, $29/month to lift that, with no per-seat fee, no minimum seat count and no platform minimum. Adding the warehouse team, the contractor or the part-time bookkeeper changes your bill by nothing at all.
Run the same eleven people through both models and the difference is not a rounding error: eleven Quickbase Team seats list at $385 a month before the undisclosed minimum, against $29 with us. We are not the better product for a 200-person operational rollout, and we will not pretend otherwise — but nobody should pay per-seat pricing for a team where half the seats read a page once a week.
Sourcing, plainly: the plan names, per-user prices, annual billing and the “Cost shown does not include platform minimum” wording all come from Quickbase’s own plans and pricing page, and the reads entitlement from their own help documentation, both checked on 21 August 2026. We did not obtain a quote, so we cannot tell you what the platform minimum actually is — that is the point being made, not an omission on our part. Our own prices above are the ones on our pricing section, and if they ever disagree, ours is wrong and theirs is right.
What you can do yourself, today
You don't have to wait for anyone to move your data. Quickbase exports CSV, and the app reads one directly: drop it in and it builds a collection in one step — a field per column, each typed from what the column actually holds (dates as dates, amounts as numbers, a column of a few repeated values as a dropdown), named from your data, with a meter while the rows go in. Anything it typed wrong you change afterwards in the app's settings.
Where it can't tell, it asks rather than guesses. A column of dates like 03/04/2026 could be
the 3rd of April or March 4th, and the rows it would get wrong look exactly like the rows it would get
right — so it stops and asks you which, and won't import until you answer. If one value anywhere in the
file can't be read, nothing is imported at all: a half-loaded collection is worse than an empty one,
because you can't tell which records made it and running it again duplicates the ones that did.
Import your tables into the same app, one file after another and in any order, and it looks for the links between them — an order that names a customer ID gets connected to its customer, so you can open one and see the other. If your Quickbase app is a handful of related tables, that's the shape it recreates. It only links where both the column name and every value agree; where it isn't sure, it leaves the values alone rather than guessing.
Where it stops: it moves data. It does not convert forms, reports, pipelines or formula fields. Those are a rebuild, done in the app itself — this just means your records can be in front of you in a couple of minutes rather than waiting on that.
What this is not
It isn't a Quickbase importer — there's no automatic conversion of an existing application, and I'm not going to pretend a rebuild is a click. It isn't a spreadsheet, it isn't a form builder, and it isn't finished software with a track record. It's an honest early product with a pricing model that doesn't punish you for adding people, and I'm looking for a handful of people willing to tell me where it falls short.
What it costs to find out
Nothing, and there is no call to book. Open the demo, click around a real database, and decide for yourself. If you want your own, the free tier is genuinely free and takes a minute — and putting the rest of the team on it doesn't change the price.
When you are ready to bring your own data, Quickbase exports CSV and the app reads it directly, working out how your tables relate to each other — that is the part described above, and it is self-serve. You do not need me for it.
Or do not build it yourself. Describe the app your business runs on and we will build a working version of it and show you — no fee, no card, and the app we build fits the free plan. How that works.
Bionic Forms is built by Matt Bidwell (Bionics LLC). If something here reads as overclaiming, tell me and I'll fix the page — that's a promise I can actually keep at this stage. Either way you can reach me at matt@bidwellhq.com.