Monospace from Directus - The governed API layer for every app, person, and agent
by•
Monospace sits between enterprise data and everyone who builds on it. Connect any data source, and your developers, business teams, and AI agents get live, read-write access to it. All under the same granular permissions model, with no data copied or moved. Your oldest databases weren't built with AI or modern apps in mind. Monospace generates interfaces directly from them, as they are, introspecting the schema and queries in real time, so they don’t need to be rebuilt.
Replies
The idea of a governed API layer for both apps and ai agents is pretty interesting especially with the no code side on top of SQL databases
@shivam_kushwaha16 Databases as a source is cool, but I think it is also amazing to connect to SaaS system APIs, keeping all the business logic of key tools, but allowing multi-datasource app builds to stop swivel chairing, searching the same key records in multiple systems, etc and safely building it in a much shortened dev cycle.
What should @Directus build/improve/fix from your perspective?
I’m stoked it’s finally out 😁 I genuinely feel we’re the “Linear for data in enterprise”: a data UI that connects between databases and APIs, doesn’t get in your way, doesn’t have the quirks of other products — snappy.
Not many products are built by teams that understand both UX and enterprise, but this one is and I think it really shows ❤️ There’s such a difference between features that exist and features that work well and I really think this will let lots of teams go beyond!
@bgeron love it! you're in the right direction for sure, keep up the great work
After putting Monospace through the ringer over the last 6 weeks - it's impossible to not get excited when building with this tool.
There are hard problems and then there are hard problems... And live data federation across databases, APIs, and services that:
is self hostable
is super performant and memory efficient (thanks Rust! 🦀)
doesn't require ETL or data warehouses
can allow flexible yet granular access policies for every type of caller
scales easily for production workloads
and most important - makes life simpler for developers like myself....
is indeed a very hard problem to solve.
And as the head cheerleader over here at Directus, I just wanted to pop in and congrats to our freaking awesome team for bringing this idea into reality. There's far too many names to name so I'll just call out the engineering ring leader - @hanneskuettner - massive congrats to the team my friend. 🍻
@hanneskuettner @bryantgillespie S/O for the launch, ?makers! keep up the great work, and keep launching. @Product Hunt really pays off in the long term.
Okay investor hat on! Who are your main competitors in this space? no pun intended. And how do you compete? whats your differentiator against the competition?
@alchemist_studio Great question! It's easy to mistake Monospace for one of the many tools out there that focusses on pulling a bunch of data to then visualize for business intelligence etc. Monospace focusses a lot more on helping you get the data to your own apps and agents and is therefore better compared to a Hasura or Supabase in terms of day-to-day usage, with our federated querying engine and management studio being the big differentiators 🚀
@alchemist_studio Oh and almost forgot! It's fully self-hostable. We strongly believe in data sovereignty and the importance of owning your critical data and where it flows to/from :)
@rijkvanzanten Thats the way! you get my upvote alone for supporting that product ethos!
@rijkvanzanten @alchemist_studio haha lfg!
Hey everyone, Florian here, Staff Software Engineer on the Monospace frontend team, working on the Studio experience.
My colleagues have covered the why and the how, so I'll just share what I'm most excited about: what comes next.
What we're launching today is the foundation. We spent a lot of time getting the basics right, and now that they're in place, we can move a lot faster. You'll see us ship more and more from here, so if today got you curious, stay tuned. This is only the start 🚀
And if you try the Studio, I'd love to hear what you'd want it to do next.
Such a good way of putting it!
@_f_c_w_ so excited for next steps in the studio. Be great to organize and nest collections 🐱
Looking forward to the future launches!
Hey all, Max here, engineer on Monospace. Super excited to finally see this live! I worked on horizontal scaling so that performance keeps up with high demand. Really proud of what the team built!
@maxence_maire Max! Absolute pleasure building this with you!
We've used Directus internally at Directus for years now and have it powering many of our internal teams and systems. It's been amazing to dogfood our own product for so many years and learn, iterate and adapt with both our users and ourselves in mind.
However, these separate systems are just that, separated. I am excited to see Monospace can bring these together as we continue to iterate on both products and see how they work together.
Congrats to the whole team. 👏
#dogfooding
@tessak22 strong +1. @benhaynes @rijkvanzanten @hanneskuettner @bethloft and team are doing a stellar job here.
Hey, I'm Hugo, Frontend engineer at Monospace 👋
Thank you all for the support 🙏
To the team: I'm so proud of what we've built together.
To everyone checking out Monospace, thank you for taking the time to explore it, share feedback, and ask the hard questions. It genuinely helps us build a better product.
@_zooly S/O for the great work, enjoy your launch day!
Hey, I'm Gaetan, engineer at Monospace !
Really proud to finally share what we've been building. I've been working on both sides of the product, the Rust engine and the Studio, and what I love the most is how quickly you go from your database to a real API and an app your whole team can use.
Huge thanks to the team, it's been a crazy ride to get here. And to everyone trying it today: play with it, push it to its limits, ask the hard questions and tell us what's missing, we read everything !
@gaetansenn S/O for the great work, enjoy your launch day!