Features

Publish from the desktop

Author your reports with the Bistro desktop app. One click pushes the report — data, logic, and layout together — to your private workspace. No separate ETL pipeline, no manual upload steps, no fragile cron job keeping things in sync.

• Data, report logic, and page layouts travel together in a single file — nothing to wire up separately
• Transformations re-applied on every refresh, so the shapes your viewers see match what you authored
• Snapshot measures (year-end / quarter-end / month-end balances) resolved per visual, not per query — matches Power BI semantics most analysts already know
• Native builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux — Linux is a first-class platform, not an afterthought

Role-based access, billing-aware

Per-report roles that match how analytics teams actually work:

• Author — the user who first published. Can rename, delete, share, refresh, and download. Auto-stamped at publish time.
• Contributor — paid seats. Full read + write access. Can publish new reports, refresh data, share with others, annotate.
• Viewer — free seats. Read-only. Can open reports, see notes others have left, see who has access. Can't write or download.

Adding a user as a Contributor automatically updates your subscription; Viewers stay free. The math is simple: you only pay for people who write, never for people who read.

Refresh upstream data on demand

Reports stay live against your source databases:

• PostgreSQL and MySQL supported today
• Refresh re-pulls from your database, re-applies your transformations, and updates the report — viewers see the new numbers on next open
• Credentials encrypted at rest, per-user-per-report (no shared service account leaking access)
• Triggered manually by Contributors; never auto-runs without someone asking

Annotate the canvas

Reports get a comment thread, in-context. Drop a pin anywhere on a visual to start a discussion:

• Pins survive republish; the conversation outlives the underlying report version
• Drag to reposition; edit or delete your own; report Authors can moderate
• Viewers see notes others have left — turn the report into a collaborative document, not a static screenshot

Built for sharing across an organization

• Auto-grants — when someone joins your org, they get the right access to every existing report based on their role
• Cross-org access controlled — sharing happens within an org by default; no accidental external leaks
• Audit-friendly — every grant lives in the database with a timestamp; nothing relies on email forwards or share links

Coming soon

• Stripe / Lemon Squeezy partner program for accounting firms
• External-viewer share links (read-only public)
• Slack / email scheduled delivery
• More upstream connectors (Snowflake, BigQuery, MS SQL)