I’m thrilled to share that Cloudflare has acquired Outerbase. This is such an amazing opportunity for us, and I want to explain how we got here, what we’ve built so far, and why we are so excited about becoming part of the Cloudflare team.
Databases are key to building almost any production application: you need to persist state for your users (or agents), be able to query it from a number of different clients, and you want it to be fast. But databases aren’t always easy to use: designing a good schema, writing performant queries, creating indexes, and optimizing your access patterns tends to require a lot of experience. Add that to exposing your data through easy-to-grok APIs that make the ‘right’ way to do things obvious, a great developer experience (from dashboard to CLI), and well… there’s a lot of work involved.
The Outerbase team is already getting to work on some big changes to how databases (and your data) are viewed, edited, and visualized from within Workers, and we’re excited to give you a few sneak peeks into what we’ll be landing as we get to work.
When we first started Outerbase, we saw how complicated databases could be. Even experienced developers struggled with writing queries, indexing data, and locking down their data. Meanwhile, non-developers often felt locked out and that they couldn’t access the data they needed. We believed there had to be a better way. From day one, our goal was to make data accessible to everyone, no matter their skill level. While it started out by simply building a better database interface, it quickly evolved into something much more special.
Outerbase became a platform that helps you manage data in a way that feels natural. You can browse tables, edit rows, and run queries without having to deal with memorizing SQL structure. Even if you do know SQL, you can use Outerbase to dive in deeper and share your knowledge with your team. We also added visualization features so entire teams, both technical and not, could see what’s happening with their data at a glance. Then, with the growth of AI, we realized we could use it to handle many of the more complicated tasks.
One of our more exciting offerings is Starbase, a SQLite-compatible database built on top of Cloudflare’s Durable Objects. Our goal was never to simply wrap a legacy system in a shiny interface; we wanted to make it so easy to get started from day one with nothing, and Cloudflare’s Durable Objects gave us a way to easily manage and spin up databases for anyone who needed one. On top of them, we provided automatic REST APIs, row-level security, WebSocket support for streaming queries, and much more.
Our collaboration with Cloudflare first started last year, when we introduced a way for developers to import and manage their D1 databases inside Outerbase. We were impressed with how powerful Cloudflare’s tools are for deploying and scaling applications. As we worked together, we quickly saw how well our missions aligned. Cloudflare was building the infrastructure we wished we’d had when we first started, and we were building the data experience that many Cloudflare developers were asking for. This eventually led to the seemingly obvious decision of Outerbase joining Cloudflare — it just made so much sense.
Going forward, we’ll integrate Outerbase’s core features into Cloudflare’s platform. If you’re a developer using D1 or Durable Objects, you’ll start seeing features from Outerbase show up in the Cloudflare dashboard. Expect to see our data explorer for browsing and editing tables, new REST APIs, query editor with type-ahead functionality, real-time data capture, and more of the other tooling we’ve been refining over the last couple of years show up inside the Cloudflare dashboard.
As part of this transition, the hosted Outerbase cloud will shut down on October 15, 2025, which is about six months from now. We know some of you rely on Outerbase as it stands today, so we’re leaving the open-source repositories as they are.
You will still be able to self-host Outerbase if you prefer, and we’ll provide guidance on how to do that within your own Cloudflare account. Our main goal will be to ensure that the best parts of Outerbase become part of the Cloudflare developer experience, so you no longer have to make a choice (it’ll be obvious!).
We’ve already done a lot of thinking about how we’re going to bring the best parts of Outerbase into D1, Durable Objects, Workflows, and Agents, and we’re going to a share a little about what will be landing over the course of Q2 2025 as the Outerbase team gets to work.
Specifically, we’ll be heads-down focusing on:
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Adapting the powerful table viewer and query runner experiences to D1 and Durable Objects (amongst many other things!)
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Making it easier to get started with Durable Objects: improving the experience in Wrangler (our CLI tooling), the Cloudflare dashboard, and how you plug into them from your client applications
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Improvements to how you visualize the state of a Workflow and the (thousands to millions!) of Workflow instances you might have at any point in time
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Pre- and post-query hooks for D1 that allow you to automatically register handlers that can act on your data
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Bringing the Starbase API to D1, expanding D1’s existing REST API, and adding WebSockets support — making it easier to use D1, even for applications hosted outside of Workers.
We have already started laying the groundwork for these changes. In the coming weeks, we’ll release a unified data explorer for D1 and Durable Objects that borrows heavily from the Outerbase interface you know.
Bringing Outerbase’s Data Explorer into the Cloudflare Dashboard
We’ll also tie some of Starbase’s features directly into Cloudflare’s platform, so you can tap into its unique offerings like pre- and post-query hooks or row-level security right from your existing D1 databases and Durable Objects:
const beforeQuery = ({ sql, params }) => {
// Prevent unauthorized queries
if (!isAllowedQuery(sql)) throw new Error('Query not allowed');
};
const afterQuery = ({ sql, result }) => {
// Basic PII masking example
for (const row of result) {
if ('email' in row) row.email = '[redacted]';
}
};
// Execute the query with pre- and post- query hooks
const { results } = await env.DB.prepare("SELECT * FROM users;", beforeQuery, afterQuery);Define hooks on your D1 queries that can be re-used, shared and automatically executed before or after your queries run.
This should give you more clarity and control over your data, as well as new ways to secure and optimize it.
Rethinking the Durable Objects getting started experience
We have even begun optimizing the Cloudflare dashboard experience around Durable Objects and D1 to improve the empty state, provide more Getting Started resources, and overall, make managing and tracking your database resources even easier.
For those of you who’ve supported us, given us feedback, and stuck with us as we grew: thank you. You have helped shape Outerbase into what it is today. This acquisition means we can pour even more resources and attention into building the data experience we’ve always wanted to deliver. Our hope is that, by working as part of Cloudflare, we can help reach even more developers by building intuitive experiences, accelerating the speed of innovation, and creating tools that naturally fit into your workflows.
This is a big step for Outerbase, and we couldn’t be more excited. Thank you for being part of our journey so far. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve got in store as we continue to make data more accessible, intuitive, and powerful — together with Cloudflare.
We’re planning to get to work on some of the big changes to how you interact with your data on Cloudflare, starting with D1 and Durable Objects.
We’ll also be ensuring we bring a great developer experience to the broader database & storage platform on Cloudflare, including how you access data in Workers KV, R2, Workflows and even your AI Agents (just to name a few).
To keep up, follow the new Cloudflare Changelog and join our Developer Discord to chat with the team and see early previews before they land.
