Show HN: Briefer – multiplayer notebooks with schedules, SQL, and built-in LLMs

Great work Lucas;

You're going in the right direction! for the near future, I suggest you to add a cli, connectors, simple symbolic calculation on notebooks (take some inspiration from calca http://calca.io/examples), offline support and fully encrypted namespaces.

That will put you miles away from everyone else in the field :)

You're probably busy with the launch, but you can contact me if you wanna discuss the list above,

Abraços

From my own startup & corporate experience,

1. product managers will try to make things dead easy, by setting up simple excel formulas & charts. Taking screenshots etc

2. data engineers will do more technical but opensourced solutions like superset & dbt

3. corporates usually tends to build the end UI themselves. I remember sth that (maybe?) Pinterest opensourced.

I deeply understand how hard it is to build a notebook like this. And there are indeed some problems lying in the collaboration and UX.

It's just so hard to propose those features, given the problem is usually the data itself and a highly competitive market. Popsql does not thrive as I remembered.

Congrats on the launch! This is such an interesting project, as it could bridge the gap between analysis in the business world and engineering. Our organization has been making use of Streamlit extensively, but small changes require involvement of someone on the software side. This potentially makes a possible for anyone to do fairly complicated analyses and produced meaningful dashboards once groundwork has been laid.

Honestly, I’d love to start trialing this as our dashboard creation to the platform today.

On the downside, after setting up an account and creating a couple notebooks, my experience has been unusable slow. While this is likely growing pains as there’s no cost as a user for compute resources, it’s also a nonstarter for us to actually use as an organization. What’s the roadmap to make this more usable?

Lastly, adopting a new platform like this without a data export or local deployment option gives me pause. What can I expect for the longevity of what we create - pieces that become central to business decisions? This is especially true considering how much upfront training will inevitably go into getting started.

Congrats on the launch! Hope this isn’t too OT but I’m very distracted by the 90s Mac finder chrome on your example GIFs. Consider cleaning things up (visually and semantically) by removing them!

This looks very interesting. Congrats on the launch! I’m curious how you see it developing compared to an existing tool like Hex?

Don't undersell yourselves – you might also be able to sell this as an online collaborative "next step" for non-technical orgs who build LOB trackers in Excel! (If I had a penny for every time someone here says "I wish we could have Microsoft Access but more convenient"...)

The Python/code block support looks interesting.

But Jupyter notebooks can run anywhere including local. Do you support that (via a local install or by relaying a connection to local python install)?

Or would all Python code have to run on your cloud servers (and thus not have access to things like high-end GPUs and such)?

Interesting.

I teach a lot of Python and data science (pandas, Polars, scikit learn, XGBoost...) in Jupyter.

(I also teach a bunch of software engineering best practices to folks who claim they don't want to be "software engineers".)

My experience is that with training, many of these issues go away. Just saw this again firsthand at a client last week.

My current take is that many focus on making the code newbie friendly. I think they should level up and start writing code for a professional audience, using software techniques that a professional would use. Newbies won't like this code.

I get a lot of flak on social when I post this from naysayers, but the overwhelming response from my students and those who have read my books indicates there might be something to this.

This looks like it could be a really useful tool for us building internal query catalogues and dashboards.

Does the dashboard feature support any dynamic field selectors (similar to "variables" in Grafana)?

Can you tell me how it compares to Deepnote.com please?

Nice explanation and execution. Looks super Pro ! Congrrats !

One question : how do you manage database credentials ? That's a question I've had a lot working on my project so I'm pretty sure customers will have the same for you.

Especially given the latest Snowflake security issues.

Looks amazing - congrats on the launch!

Would you consider Briefer to be a competitor to https://count.co/ ?

(Certainly, if you do, your pricing is a helluva lot more appealing...)

This looks very promising. All the best growing it.

From my brief look at the site, the product seems to allow users to query and display data only. Can we edit the data at all?

It looks like this product targets teams and not well-suited to individuals (ie private note taking app with database like Notion). I did not see any way to create new data or edit existing data, or if you even have a mobile app.

The first 2 problems you mentioned did not apply to me at all, while the 3rd problem has been my wishlist for Notion for a long time

Having built workflows myself like this, using a patchwork DAG of notebooks and cron jobs and state saving, I’m really glad someone is tackling the problem holistically!

On pricing page for annual pricing, there's a dot in the free plan "Free." There's no dot anywhere on the plans including on the monthly "Free" plan. What does the dot give you if you "pay" annually on the free plan? :D

https://briefer.cloud/pricing/

Would you say this is an alternative to https://hex.tech/, or does this fill a different niche?

> The first problem with notebooks is that they're difficult to share.

I share github links to my notebooks with my PMs

Awesome!

Question: I am in charge of financials for our condo building. The other people in charge are older than me and only know excel. How do you suggest I think about wanting to use better tools to present analysis while also making sure that everyone else can understand the work and modify?

This looks really cool.

Just minor bug; on /auth/signup the zebra background pattern is not on the entire page on my vertical display (1080x1920). You might want to fix this before release.

I've been using briefer for the past few weeks and have a few questions:

1. Do you intend Briefer to be a jupyter replacement or a metabase replacement?

2. Do you have any plans to open source briefer?

Will you be offering a Schrems II compatible alternative?

I'll stick to Livebook for the most part but know some companies that might be interested.

Will there be the ability to call an API and parse the JSON (e.g., to flatten) to use as a data source?

Congratulations on the launch, the product looks very appealing.

Would you consider an option for self-hosting?

Very interesting problem to solve. Congratulations on the launch!

Cool product! How have sales been?

How do you do your AI? Is it just a local model?

Parabéns!! Go Briefer

will give this a try for our analytics, looks v smooth

Same as Deepnote?

for some reason I absolutely love the name

enjoying it! but can't figure out how to share dashboards (publicly)?

With built-in AI, we shouldn't be writing SQL queries directly right?

dark mode?