I built a Mac database client you can chat with

Indie hacking is dead.

At least, that’s what the internet keeps telling me.

AI can build almost any app in an afternoon now, so why would anyone pay for one?

This week I launched a $99 Mac app to find out.

Meet Chatable - a macOS database client that lets you query and manage your database in plain English.

I built it because I run 10–20 throwaway database queries every day to answer support questions, investigate usage patterns or find some obscure piece of data I’ll probably never need again.

It’s a huge pain in the ass.

So I put the AI inside the database client.

Why not just use Claude or Cursor?

I don’t use an IDE for most database tasks, I like to see the tables and data and use a visual editor, not a black box.

Chatable gives you one workspace to ask questions, inspect the results, browse tables, edit rows and manage data without constantly jumping between two apps.

It costs $99. Once. No subscription.

If you work with databases on a Mac and want to spend less time writing queries, take a look and get 50% off today.

The experiment

I think the argument that AI has killed indie hacking misses the point.

People don’t buy software only because they can’t build it. They buy it because a finished, maintained tool is cheaper than building and maintaining one themselves.

For a developer billing $300 an hour, $99 is roughly 20 minutes of work.

Could they build, publish and maintain Chatable in 20 minutes with AI?

Maybe a rough prototype.

Would they even want to?

That’s what I’m testing. People told me no developer would ever buy a boilerplate because they can do it themselves, but thousands of developers paid for and used my boilerplates.

One launch isn’t going to prove if indie hacking is dead, but it will tell me something important about the product, positioning and audience.

I’ll share the launch strategy, numbers and results next week.