Not everything has to be monetized. You will have other ideas or maybe you’ll take this further. It’s a ton of work to build a thriving business, and you may lose some of your joy and pride along the way.

You created a useful tool and have the support of the community! That’s pretty cool. Congrats!

This looks a lot like ChartDB[0]. Is that correct? If so, how would you compare the two tools, or better yet, distinguish yours from theirs?

[0] https://github.com/chartdb/chartdb

This seems like a really cool project.

Some observations...

First I'd get some legal advice for how to convert this idea / product into a thing that you own and have a stake in, but that's distinct from you. This means you'd be able to collect money and attribute that money to the product, you'd be able to sell it to someone else and walk away from it, etc. This legal construct is important; probably not _necessary_ but very useful.

You seem to have a reasonable community contributing to and using the project; that's your most valuable asset. Make up a brief roadmap of where you'd like to take the project in six and eighteen months, share that with the community. Think about how some projects, like Elastic.co, grew based on community feedback and how ultimately perhaps those companies felt they needed to change the company in ways that many in the original community disagreed with. There are lots of sides to that coin, and you as the founder need to think about how you'd want to develop the product.

Lastly, once you've got a clear accounting mechanism of how to track money from it and costs of it, you should just .... start asking people for money. "How much is a support contract worth for this?" "How much is it worth to you to focus on developing this feature instead of that?" Obviously -- be very cautious if people are offering money in exchange for fractional ownership of "the thing" but even that may be palatable... but make sure you've had someone representing your interests read the contract...

It can even export as Mermaid? That's awesome. I could see that being super useful as a way to take a db schema and turn it into a chart for a github readme. Definitely bookmarking this.

Btw, the SQL import doesn't seem to work for an sqlite `.schema` dump; it breaks on the PRIMARY KEY here:

    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS "__EFMigrationsHistory" (
        "MigrationId" TEXT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT "PK___EFMigrationsHistory" PRIMARY KEY,
        "ProductVersion" TEXT NOT NULL
    );

(This is the standard migrations table that Entity Framework creates.)

W/r/t monetization, you should know there's a really powerful flowchart tool called draw.io that's already free. It's not tailored specifically towards databases the way yours is, but it can make similar graphs, so if you go too hard on monetizing you might cause people to just use that instead. Maybe there are some more B2B-oriented extensions or db integrations, or maybe a team collaboration feature you could add without compromising the core tool.

Just for the context, I've been making (and selling) database (migration/translation) tools for 20-ish years.

What you have built can definitely become a product supporting you with a very nice income. Free version can stay free but you can sell solo licenses and team licenses as subscriptions. Paid license users will also have your support - and that matters to companies.

As others have said, commercial features can be built on top of the OSS product, like Electron desktop client, support for more databases, for views/procedures etc.

There is no downside to trying to commercialize this. Whoever wants to use what you have built so far can continue and I guarantee that many companies would be happy to give you $50/month for a more advanced version with support.

(edit for typo)