Effortless Bases

Create Your First Base

Step 1: Start a new base

From your dashboard, click Create New Base. You'll be taken to a form where you enter:

  • Display name — a label for this base in your dashboard
  • Airtable Base ID — the appXXXXXXXXX ID from your Airtable URL
  • Airtable PAT — your Personal Access Token (see Connect Airtable)

Step 2: Build

Click Build Base. Effortless Bases will:

  1. Connect to Airtable using your PAT
  2. Read your base schema (tables, fields, relationships)
  3. Create a PostgreSQL database with matching tables and columns
  4. Apply security policies (row-level security)
  5. Generate credentials for your database

This typically takes 30–90 seconds depending on the size of your base.

Step 3: Save your credentials

After a successful build, you'll be shown your database credentials:

  • Host — the database server address
  • Port — typically 5432
  • Database name
  • Username and password (admin and anon roles)
  • Connection string — a ready-to-use postgresql:// URL

Save these immediately. Credentials are only shown once at build time for security reasons. If you lose them, you can regenerate them from the base settings, but this will invalidate the old credentials.

Step 4: Connect your app

Use the connection string or individual credentials to connect any PostgreSQL-compatible tool or framework to your new database.

What's next?

Now that your base is running, read the Recommended Workflow to learn how to safely iterate on your schema without risking production data.