It can even export as Mermaid? That's awesome. I could see that being super useful as a way to take a db schema and turn it into a chart for a github readme. Definitely bookmarking this.

Btw, the SQL import doesn't seem to work for an sqlite `.schema` dump; it breaks on the PRIMARY KEY here:

    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS "__EFMigrationsHistory" (
        "MigrationId" TEXT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT "PK___EFMigrationsHistory" PRIMARY KEY,
        "ProductVersion" TEXT NOT NULL
    );

(This is the standard migrations table that Entity Framework creates.)

W/r/t monetization, you should know there's a really powerful flowchart tool called draw.io that's already free. It's not tailored specifically towards databases the way yours is, but it can make similar graphs, so if you go too hard on monetizing you might cause people to just use that instead. Maybe there are some more B2B-oriented extensions or db integrations, or maybe a team collaboration feature you could add without compromising the core tool.

This seems like a really cool project.

Some observations...

First I'd get some legal advice for how to convert this idea / product into a thing that you own and have a stake in, but that's distinct from you. This means you'd be able to collect money and attribute that money to the product, you'd be able to sell it to someone else and walk away from it, etc. This legal construct is important; probably not _necessary_ but very useful.

You seem to have a reasonable community contributing to and using the project; that's your most valuable asset. Make up a brief roadmap of where you'd like to take the project in six and eighteen months, share that with the community. Think about how some projects, like Elastic.co, grew based on community feedback and how ultimately perhaps those companies felt they needed to change the company in ways that many in the original community disagreed with. There are lots of sides to that coin, and you as the founder need to think about how you'd want to develop the product.

Lastly, once you've got a clear accounting mechanism of how to track money from it and costs of it, you should just .... start asking people for money. "How much is a support contract worth for this?" "How much is it worth to you to focus on developing this feature instead of that?" Obviously -- be very cautious if people are offering money in exchange for fractional ownership of "the thing" but even that may be palatable... but make sure you've had someone representing your interests read the contract...

Not everything has to be monetized. You will have other ideas or maybe you’ll take this further. It’s a ton of work to build a thriving business, and you may lose some of your joy and pride along the way.

You created a useful tool and have the support of the community! That’s pretty cool. Congrats!

A suggestion based on an idea that I've been trying to implement for a while: consider replacing the left panel's form editing experience with an assistive command line at the bottom.

E.g. rather than clicking table, "add field", clicking the name, typing, clicking the type drop down etc., just start writing something like:

    : users.add_column
    name: email
    type: varchar
    length: 200

etc., with some assistive auto complete

or, if you're inclined to using an LLM:

   add column email to users table, varchar(200)

or, for those who want strict sql:

   alter table add column...

I experimented with this for five minutes, and so far it looks great. The one thing missing, or that I didn't see in five minutes, is that when I uploaded the schema for one of our SQLite databases, the tables came out perfectly, but the views were ignored. There are a lot of views, and we would want them in the diagram. I will definitely be coming back to it. As I say, what I saw was great.

Congratulations on releasing the product and its success.

You will likely have to compete with Supabase's diagram editor (there might be other competitors too), which has AI integrated. You can check it out and see if you can improve your system. Their product is open source as well, so you can review the code.

The simplest monetization path would be to keep it free and charge users for AI access. However, don’t hire a team, as it may not be viable against other big players in the long run.

Awesome work! We've been searching for something to switch away from MySQL Workbench for years, but the one feature we need is the automatic generation of SQL migration based on a current and a new schema.

As someone who is afraid to release personal projects I think what you have done is amazing. Id love to learn From your experience. You are being too humble but this kind of growth is very hardly an accident!

I'm not a monetization expert by any means so take all this with a pinch to salt. If money is not an urgent factor for you you can see how far you can take it especially towards "other verticals". If you can displace any existing incumbants doing so would be easier without the responsibility of supporting paying customers.

Looks very very cool!

Think about enterprise features you can charge for, and see what your community thinks.

If 100 people per month can pay 50$, that's 5k which is very nice for a side project!

For myself, I absolutely would love this as a Django plugin!

Very cool. Which library do you use for the drag&drop part?

Good