Beekeeper Studio Community Edition

Yes. Although our Community Edition is intended for students, individuals, non-profits and small businesses with fewer than 10 employees and/or annual revenue below $1m. If your organization is larger, we ask that you purchase a paid license.

Yes. Beekeeper Studio is open source. View the source on GitHub.

We charge money for some features and databases because making good software is expensive and we’re in it for the long haul.

We would love to….but open source projects without a clear sustainability plan are quickly abandoned, regardless of the good intentions of the maintainers.

We think a fully open core with paid extras is the best model for long term sustainability. So far it’s working - we’re stable and profitable with a full time team. We make a lot of features open & free, probably more than we should financially (shh, don’t tell our accountant).

No. There’s one app download, available here. Paid features can be enabled within the app with a free trial or paid license. Your data is safe when switching between different editions.

By you, our customers. We don’t have investors, corporate overlords or rich parents. Beekeeper started in 2019 and was funded by sweat equity for several years until we launched our paid plans in 2022. We’re now a stable and profitable company, thanks to you.

No. We use AI coding tools responsibly, making sure there’s always a real software engineer who owns the code end-to-end. We have no AI mandates or other nonsense.

Yes. Our app has full feature parity across MacOS, Windows, and Linux. No OS is an afterthought.

2019 was the first commit into the Beekeeper Studio repo, we soft launched a year later in 2020, and it’s been non-stop growth since then. I guess other developers wanted an easy-to-use database manager too :-).