Why we made Adminmate 100% free

Adminmate is now free. Every feature, for every team: custom actions, dashboards, teams and permissions, activity log, collaboration. There is no paid plan, no “contact sales” tier and no credit card to enter.

When a tool that touches your production database is free, the right reaction is suspicion. So here are the honest answers to the questions you are probably asking.

We are our own biggest user

Charles and I also run Penida, a studio of Shopify apps used by more than 22,500 stores in over 85 countries. Every day, our support and operations go through Adminmate: finding a store, checking its subscription, fixing a setting, running an action on a group of accounts.

We built Adminmate because we needed it, and we keep improving it because we use it. Making it free does not change that: the product would exist and evolve even with zero paying customers.

Your data is not our cost

Most back-office tools are expensive to run because they sit between you and your data: they connect to your database, run your queries, cache your records and store your files on their servers.

Adminmate works differently. The Data API runs on your infrastructure, next to your database, and the browsers of your team talk to it directly. Our servers only store the configuration of your projects: teams, permissions, layouts, dashboards, comments and the activity log.

That architecture was designed for privacy — your data never leaves your servers — but it has a nice side effect: hosting a project costs us very little, whether your database has a thousand rows or a billion.

No investors to please

Adminmate is not VC backed. Nobody expects us to turn every free user into revenue within 18 months, so we can make the choice that is good for the product: removing the paywall and letting as many teams as possible use it.

More users means more feedback, more edge cases found early, and a better tool for everyone — us included.

What if we stop one day?

It’s a fair question to ask about any free tool, so here is what would happen:

• Your data would not move. It never left your database in the first place.
• The Data API is yours. It runs on your servers, and its npm packages are open source under the GPL-3.0 license.
• You would lose the Dashboard, the interface hosted by us. Annoying, but nothing would be locked in or lost.

That’s a much smaller risk than with tools that hold a copy of your data.

What we ask in return

Nothing mandatory. But if Adminmate saves you time, you can help us a lot by:

• telling us what is missing, from the chat at the bottom right of this page;
• starring the project on GitHub;
• recommending it to another team that is still building its admin panel by hand.

Create your free account and connect your first database in a few minutes. The documentation will guide you.