Matthew Rathbone

Matthew Rathbone is a Dallas-based software engineer best known as the creator of Beekeeper Studio, a cross-platform, open-source SQL editor and database manager. He runs it as an independent business that keeps a free Community Edition and sells paid features to keep development going.

Rathbone spent years in data engineering. He built a real-time analytics engine at Drop.io (acquired by Facebook), worked on data infrastructure at Foursquare, ran an engineering team at Shoutlet, and was VP of engineering at Kickbox. He also raised venture money for a data analytics startup called Beekeeper Data, which shut down in 2018, and built and sold 99Inbound, a form API and form-builder app. He holds an MS in Computer Science from NYU's Courant Institute and an LLB law degree from Northumbria University, and runs a consultancy, Rathbone Labs, helping companies with Hadoop, Spark and Kafka.

Beekeeper Studio started in 2019 because he wanted a pleasant database app for Linux and PostgreSQL after Sequel Pro, his favorite Mac tool, became abandonware. After about a year of evenings and weekends, the first version launched in early 2020 as fully free and open source, reached the front page of Hacker News and picked up thousands of users within hours. The name continues a running joke: it is the fourth thing he has called Beekeeper, the first being a Foursquare tool for Apache Hive.

Donations never covered the work. Rathbone has written that donation revenue topped out at about $30 a month even after the app crossed a million downloads, so Beekeeper Studio moved to selling a paid edition with extra features and Cloud Workspaces for teams, while keeping a strong free version. The GitHub repository has more than 23,000 stars and the app supports most popular SQL databases. He still writes much of the code and shares the business side on his blog.

His story is a practical lesson for open-source app makers: donations rarely fund a desktop app, but a generous free tier plus paid features can.