Dabble DB: Amazing But Spendy Application Builder

Every so often you will find a Web site that truly amazes you, DabbleDB is one of those sites. I received an invitation to try a 30-day demo of the DabbleDB beta and after watching the seven-minute demo movie I was pretty impressed. DabbleDB lets you take information that you might normally toss into a spreadsheet to manage and create a nice Web-based application in a matter of minutes.

Simply paste in your spreadsheet data and DabbleDB turns it into a form-editable database that you can add, delete and modify your records all through a very nice looking user-interface. In less than ten minutes I was able to make a task priority list using a copy of the spreadsheet that we currently use to manage it. Once you’ve imported your data there are quite a few nice features that allow you to customize the forms and to organize your information even better. Now you can share your application with anybody you want to see it and also give them the ability to edit it if you wish.

Other than having to watch the demo movie a second time to figure out how to do something DabbleDB shouldn’t be a problem for anybody to use. Until finding out about DabbleDB I wasn’t even aware that this market already has quite a few players in it including products like Intuit’s QuickBase and Oracle’s Application Express Server. I haven’t had a chance to use QuickBase or Application Express Server but it sounds like they are geared more towards enterprise users with a little more database experience. DabbleDB seems focused on the home user and small to medium sized businesses that might be looking to make some of their processes more efficient with a shared, Web-based solution. A small business could use DabbleDB to create an online employee schedule and give each employee a custom view of their own schedule.

As much as I am completely knocked over by how easy DabbleDB is to use when you look at their pricing I begin to wonder how many people will ditch their Excel spreadsheets. If you have more than 15 employees it would cost you $150/month for that nifty employee scheduler that you just built. I’ve never priced desktop employee scheduling applications but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you could pick something up for what one month of DabbleDB would cost you. There is some discussion on the DabbleDB forum about the pricing and they say that they are going to give it some more thought. The pricing does appear to be in about the same range as competing products but if they hope to capture the market I think they’re going after I think they’ll need to think some more about what they’re charging.

With that said, I still think this is one of the cooler Web apps I’ve seen in the past year. Believe me and take seven minutes to watch the video and I’m almost positive you’ll be amazed as well.