indiDatabase 1.0 Revives the Lotus Approach Model — With Shareable Apps and Office Sharing Built In

More than twenty years after Lotus Approach was discontinued, a local-first desktop database brings back the visual form, report designer, and shareable apps

GEORGETOWN, KY, UNITED STATES, October 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Indomitus Group today released indiDatabase 1.0, a desktop database that lets small businesses, nonprofits, and offices design tables, draw forms, and print reports without writing code — then share the result across the office without a server or subscription, and package what they build as a file others can use.

The product began with a customer request. “Do you have any future plans for a database type program that could replace Lotus Approach?” one wrote. “This program stopped being maintained in 1999 and we have been stuck on it since. Its ability to customize forms and reports in a WYSIWYG style designer has not been replicated in any other software.”

Lotus Approach was discontinued in the early 2000s, and many of its users still run it in virtual machines. The visual desktop databases that remain have largely moved to per-seat annual subscriptions, with office sharing sold separately as a server product.

One file, every job

indiDatabase stores an entire database — tables, data, forms, reports, saved finds, users, and history — in one file on the user’s own computer. There is no account, no cloud, and nothing that reports back.

Within that file, tables are grouped into apps. Invoicing, a mailing list, and equipment loans can each appear as a separate program, switched with one click, while sharing the customer records they have in common.

Build once, share it anywhere

Any app can be exported as a template file carrying its complete design — tables, joins, forms, reports, saved finds, and styles — and made again in any other indiDatabase file. Only the design travels; records never do.

An organization that builds a membership system, a work-order tracker, or a donor database can hand it to another organization, which gets the same working application in its own database, ready for its own data. indiDatabase ships with ten such templates, each a complete working app.

Sharing without a server

One click shares the open database with every computer on the local network, and the file never leaves the machine holding it. Pairing uses a short code read across the room, and every connection is encrypted and pinned to the host. A record being edited by someone else refuses by that person’s name, and every screen refreshes within moments of a save.

“The computer holding the file is the server,” said Matt Milano, founder of Indomitus Group. “There’s nothing to install on another machine, nothing hosted, and no per-seat meter running.”

For people who aren’t programmers

Browse, Find, Summarise, and Preview modes work the way longtime Approach users remember. The designer offers calculated and summary fields, validation rules written in the author’s own words, and relationships across tables, with money stored as exact decimal. Reports come in six kinds: columnar, certificates, label sheets, form letters, crosstabs, and charts.

Record- and field-level security are enforced in the database engine itself, and deleted records can be restored with their full history for twelve seconds after a save.

Bringing Approach data forward

indiDatabase imports Approach’s .dbf data files directly, including their memo files, and offers the joins between them automatically — the way Approach itself connected them — so an old application can be rebuilt one table at a time. Approach’s form and report layouts cannot be migrated and are rebuilt in the designer.

Pricing and availability

indiDatabase 1.0 is available now for Linux and Windows at www.indomitusgroup.com, with a 30-day free trial of the full product. The Windows installer is code-signed by Indomitus Group LLC.

indiDatabase — $199 one-time
indiDatabase Multi-User — $399 one-time, unlimited computers on the network
Updates within version 1.x are free, and nothing is renewed. If a license ever lapses, every screen still opens and every report still runs — only saving changes requires a key. A macOS release is planned.

About Indomitus Group

Indomitus Group is a Georgetown, Kentucky-based software company building privacy-first, one-time-purchase desktop applications. Its indiSuite line includes indiPDF, indiAccounting, indiDatabase, along with the free, open-source indiBudget and indiMailbox, the Eudora-inspired email client.

Matt Milano
Indomitus Group LLC
+1 605-644-6505
info@indomitusgroup.com
Visit us on social media:
LinkedIn