nowfound

AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Max – a federated data query layer for AI agents (and humans)

Hey HN! I built a thing and I'm really excited to share it. EDIT: I meant to link to the github, not the website: https://github.com/max-hq/max Like many of us here, I've been commonly reaching for a pattern of "pull data into db; give it to claude" for a while, whilst doing data spelunking or building tooling - for the same reasons mentioned by thellimist over here [1] and a few other recent "CLI vs MCP" posts. To that end, about a month ago I started building a project called `max` - its goal is to cut the middleman and schematise any data source for you. Essentially,…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    Hi HN, I’m Samrith, creator of Hyperterse. Today I’m launching Hyperterse 2.0, a schema-first framework for building MCP servers directly on top of your existing production databases. If you're building AI agents in production, you’ve probably run into agents needing access to structured, reliable data but wiring your business logic to MCP tools is tedious. Most teams end up writing fragile glue code. Or worse, giving agents unsafe, overbroad access. There isn’t a clean, principled way to expose just the right data surface to agents. Hyperterse lets you define a schema over your data and…

    Feb 2026 · hyperterse.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Viberia▲146

    Hey HN, This is my take on the agent harness. Everything on an isometric map. Agents are grouped into "buildings" that run in a sequence or a loop; e.g., the CodeForge has an agent that writes a PRD, another one that implements, and a third that reviews. Everything is customizable, you build your own buildings/teams however you want. It's a Tauri app, really light (about 8x less energy than the closest competitor I benchmarked, so it actually runs from a coffee shop on battery). It's macOS only for now, but ping me if you are willing to test the Windows or Linux version. I've been…

    May 2026 · getviberia.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I've been exploring the (not so=) amazing potential of AI in coding and have compiled a list of tools. From AI-powered IDEs to code generators, this resource is my contribution to the community. I'm still on the fence about including txt2sql projects, as their functionality seems too basic to me. And I'm personally maintaining this, so your feedback is wellcome.

    2025 · aicode.danvoronov.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Trails▲81

    Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…

    Jan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Excited to share a project I’ve been building for months! Would love to receive honest feedback :) My motivation: AI is clearly going to be the interface for data. But earlier attempts (text-to-SQL, etc.) fell short — they treated it like magic. The space has matured: teams now realize that AI + data needs structure, context, and rules. So I built a product to help teams deliver “chat with data” solutions fast with full control and observability (agent tracing, quality scores, etc) — am I wrong? The product allows you to connect any LLM to any data source with centralized context…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    hello everyone, my first post! AA here, founder of ⌘ Langbase.com — we are a developer platform for building and scaling serverless AI memory agents. I know surveys can be boring, but this one’s different—it’s interactive! That's very much intentional. My team and I have been up for the last 21 hours putting together this report. This was a looot of work, so I hope y'all like it. Introducing … State of AI Agents 2024 report On Langbase, we processed 184 billion tokens and handled 786 million AI agent runs from 36K developers. From all that data plus insights from 3.4K builders who filled out…

    2024 · langbase.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hey HN! A few months ago we shared our AI dataset generator as an open source repo, and the response was incredible (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44388093). We got requests from folks who wanted to use it without the hosting overhead, so we created both options: a hosted version (https://www.metabase.com/ai-data-generator for instant use and the source code fully open (https://github.com/metabase/dataset-generator) for anyone who wants to self-host or contribute. Looking forward to seeing how you use it and what you build on top of…

    2025 · metabase.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8YA

    Hey folks! I'm a founding engineer at Yorph AI, an agentic data platform, built using ADK, that helps users (starting with product managers and analysts) join data from different sources (upload or sync), build version-controlled and reliable data workflows, and clean, analyze, and visualize data — all in one place. We're also releasing semantic layer creation later this week. The beta is live at yorph.ai/login — would love to hear your thoughts and feedback! (FYI: We're still waiting on Google app verification — you'll see a warning for a few days. Dropbox shows a similar one since…

    Nov 2025 · yorph.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Disclaimer it is a heavily AI assisted project. The goal was not to be the most performative but the kind that's easier to learn from. I wanted to share this in case there are people who had the same idea or wanted to see something like this.

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    I've been lurking on HN for years. You know the drill: interesting headline, 200+ comments, you dive in thinking "I'll just skim for 5 minutes"... and an hour later you're 36 chambers deep in a thread about memory allocation patterns in Postgres and you've completely forgotten what the original article was about. I don't just want a "summary" (which usually just shortens the noise). I want the meta-consensus: "What is the actual trade-off being debated? Who is winning the argument? Why does this matter?" So I built HNSignals. Think of it less like a "summarizer" and more like a Chief of…

    Jan 2026 · hnsignals.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey HN, I just spent the last few weeks building a database for agents. Over the last year I built PostHog AI, the company's business analyst agent, where we experimented on giving raw SQL access to PostHog databases vs. exposing tools/MCPs. Needless to say, SQL wins. I left PostHog 3 weeks ago to work on side-projects. I wanted to experiment more with SQL+agents. I built an MVP exposing business data through DuckDB + annotated schemas, and ran a benchmark with 11 LLMs (from Kimi 2.5 to Claude Opus 4.6) answering business questions with either 1) per-source MCP access (e.g. one Stripe…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12CA

    Imagine you have to make a little change in all your microservices, like changing a line in Dockerfile, but you have 50 microservices, ouch right! The PRs, pipelines, reviews... I have created a dashboard with a chatbot where you can simply ask "Update all repositories with alpine base image version X to Y", and then click next a bunch of time and see a list of PRs with their pipeline status. Hi friends I'm Daniel, the creator of Infra as AI. I was laid off from my SRE role a couple of months ago, and decided to build something that could always help me at work. My job was to keep the lights…

    2025 · infrastructureas.ai · its alternatives →

  13. 13BA

    Hey HN, For the last couple of months, we have been building an AI agent for continuous statistical analysis, and we're looking for feedback while it's still early in development. We call it BIGWIG - an autonomous agent that is specialised, and very good at, performing advanced statistical analysis, through long traces of iteration and reasoning. As it builds statistical models it also "emits" outputs back to the user that you can then interact with, iterate on and schedule for follow up analysis. While we're still in BETA, we've launched a public analysis site that showcases some of the…

    2025 · askbigwig.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi everyone, I read HN every day, but there was always more great content than I had time to read. I know there are already several HN summarizers on GitHub, and I tried some of them. They just didn't fit the workflow I wanted, so I decided to build my own. My project is a self-hosted app that automatically fetches top stories, summarizes them with AI, translates them into your preferred language, and prepares a personalized daily briefing in a nice customizable UI while you sleep. Maybe I'm not the only one who wanted this kind of workflow. I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially on what…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15WA

    Today you can easily adopt AI coding tools because you have git for branching and rolling back if AI writes bad code. We haven't seen this same capability for data and decided to build it ourselves. Nile is a new kind of data lake, purpose built for using with AI. It can act as your data engineer or data analyst creating new tables and rolling back bad changes in seconds. We support real versions for data, schema, and ETL. We'd love your feedback on any part of what we are building - https://getnile.ai/ What do you think?

    Jan 2026 · its alternatives →

  16. 16CW

    Hello HN, Lucas here. I’ve been working with BigQuery for ~5 years, mostly in large (petabyte-scale) environments. Over time we ended up spending a lot of money and engineering effort just trying to understand where costs were coming from, why and how to optimize them. At some point we decided to stop, leverage all our past experience and spend a full cycle building tooling focused on cost visibility and optimization. The main goal was to regain ownership of cost data and make it possible to understand our cost structure in under a minute, while aligning the views of engineering and FinOps…

    Jan 2026 · cloudclerk.ai · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hey HN, we built an Econ+Finance database to let AI agents do investment research. We spend a lot of tokens to organize macro releases and SEC filings into a clean format, so that your agents have more context to do actual analysis. The problem AI agents are great at data analysis. But they become ineffective if most of their context window is spent on gathering and cleaning data, instead of validating hypotheses. Data in the wild is messy and rarely standardized. Definitions and measurements change over time. This problem is compounded by a fragmented data universe. Point solutions exist…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18PS

    I didn't want to buy a standalone computer or repurpose a laptop to run constantly so I could maintain a system to sync my LLMs, so I built this. It's a simple overview of my system, laid out in a way easy to unpack and replicate for yourself. The project is meant to be configured individually, and uniquely, since one solution might not be what's best for another. If anything, maybe it gives you some ideas on how to implement things for your own project. Best wishes, Ryan.

    Aug 2026 · pacslate.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi there, I've created this side project to make it easier to find interesting repositories using AI. There's still a lot of work to be done to improve it, so any suggestions for enhancements would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

    2024 · awesome-repositories.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    The first ever AI peer reviewed research article just got approved. It’s kinda crazy how advanced AI have come to replace researchers. I've just been using Deep Research on ChatGPT and Perplexity a lot to write and research complex technical reports for my boss. He loves the reports and it has decreased my workload a ton but I still have some frustrations with it. None of them provide an API that gets me the same quality of output you would with the applications. I wanted something with more control on the LLMs, swappable with the reasoning new models that came out. Not just prompt →…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21AA

    Hey folks, I'm Yuval. I run a tiny startup called Glitter AI. It's just me full-time here, with a couple of freelances to help here and there. A couple of months ago, I went from managing zero requests to hundreds -- overnight (won Product of the day on Product Hunt). As someone who gets VERY easily distracted (maybe you relate), I had to find some sort of way of handling all the chaos if I didn't want to burn out. I came up with a pretty cool automation flow that I thought folks on HN here may be interested in reading about :) So here goes: Most of my interactions come through Intercom.…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    A few months ago I was working on a flight search engine that would include pet transport costs (I know a few by hearth but storing them and make the calculations in the UI would be nice) While I was collecting pet pricing from several airlines I strugled to extract data in a common format without hallucinated values. That's when I thought: What if I use multiple LLMs and take the most common response to improve accuracy? This idea became this new project. You provide your documents, an SQLModel schema, an LLM provider, plus what you'd like to extract and Extrai does the rest. Including…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I have a favour to ask. I’ve been working for a while on Kalavai, a project to make distributed AI easy. There are brilliant tools out there to help AI hobbyists and devs on the software layer (shout out to vLLM and llamacpp amongst many others!) but it’s a jungle out there when it comes to procuring and managing the necessary hardware resources and orchestrating them. This has always led me to compromise on the size of the models I end up using (quantized versions, smaller models) to save cost or to play within the limits of my rig. Today I am happy to share the first public version of our…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hey HN, when building ML systems for industrial AI, we have learned that data inspection is critical during the ML development process. We are also big fans of the Hugging Face ecosystem. That is why we built an integration to our data exploration tool Spotlight that allows you to interactively explore Hugging Face datasets with one line of code. Spotlight lets you leverage model results such as predictions and embeddings to gain a deeper understanding in data segments and model failure modes. Currently, many many NLP, CV, Audio and multimodal datasets are supported both locally and on the…

    2023 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

Also compare

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →