A spreadsheet with a database underneath
You still click a cell, type, and press Enter. What is different sits underneath: every column has a type, every link points at a row that really exists, and required means required. So the mistakes that used to sit in the file for months — a word where a price goes, an order pointing at a customer who was deleted, a blank nobody noticed — are refused at the moment somebody makes them.
Free to start, no card — 5 tables and 1,000 rows, enough to move a real spreadsheet over and see whether it holds.
Orders linked to customers and products, a total that works itself out, and the saved views down the side. The dark strip is the part nobody else shows you: the exact statement behind what you are looking at. You never have to read it — it is there so no number on this screen has to be taken on trust.
The price is per workspace rather than per person, so the colleague who opens it twice a year and the accountant checking one figure both get in. Nobody is kept out of the data to keep the bill down — which is exactly how the private copy on somebody’s laptop gets started.
Along the bottom of every screen is the exact statement the server ran to produce what you are looking at. Most people will never read it. It is there because software asking to hold your business should be able to show its working on the day somebody finally asks.
Invite the next person as an admin, send them the link however you already talk, and go. Wellformed refuses to let the last admin leave until somebody else can get back in, so a workspace is never left locked with the business inside it.
A workspace is one SQLite file. Backing up is copying it, leaving is downloading it, and Python, R, Excel and a dozen free viewers already read the format. There is no export to request and no lock-in to argue about.
Per workspace, not per person. Add everyone you work with on either tier.
Enough to move a real spreadsheet over and see whether it holds.
One flat price per workspace. Add everyone you work with.
Prices exclude VAT. A workspace that reaches its limit stops taking new rows and new tables — nothing is locked, nothing is deleted, and you can still export all of it.
Move one real table over and see what it refuses. That takes about ten minutes, and it settles the question better than any page can.