OnlineDB

The Problem

While building githubme.com, I struggled to inspect records in my local PostgreSQL database. I wanted to paste a database URL into a public-facing interface and view its tables, whether the database was local or hosted through a provider such as Supabase or Neon.

The Motivation

The honest motivation was that I wanted to make money from the project. I also wanted an easier way to inspect local PostgreSQL data without writing a custom query every time. I did not know about Drizzle Studio yet, so a browser-based database viewer seemed like a useful product.

I also had no idea how payments or most of the business side worked. I decided to build the tool first and find out whether anyone would pay for it.

Mistakes

The first mistake was familiar: I did not research the existing options well enough. Drizzle Studio already made it easy to inspect a local database.

I also misunderstood what a deployed web app could reach. A server running on Vercel or elsewhere cannot connect directly to a database on a user's localhost. Exposing it required a tunnel such as ngrok, and an HTTPS tunnel was not enough for PostgreSQL. I needed TCP forwarding, which was limited on the free ngrok plan. Asking someone to pay ngrok and then pay me just to view a local database made the product difficult to justify.

Learning

The failure taught me the difference between HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP connections, and what it means to expose a local port to the web. I also learned how the same problem changes when the database is on a VPS instead of a local machine.

I learned more about databases, how to build a usable table interface, and how commands could run behind the UI. This was also the project that introduced me to Drizzle.

Achievements

I completed a technically complicated project from beginning to end. I was able to expose my local database through a TCP connection and inspect it from a web interface.

It did not become a viable business, but making that connection work was still an achievement. The finished experiment taught me far more than the original idea suggested.