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Free. Forever. No Exceptions.
For more than thirty years, manufacturers have accepted a simple premise: if you want to store operational data, you have to pay for it. Not just once, but continuously. You pay for tags, users, interfaces, redundancy, APIs, new facilities, and every stage of growth as your data strategy becomes more successful.
Somewhere along the way, the industry stopped questioning whether any of this made sense.
Today, it doesn't.
The rise of technologies like PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, and InfluxDB proved something important. Storing time-series data is no longer the difficult part. The underlying technology has matured, storage is inexpensive, and compute is readily available. Building a high-performance time-series database is no longer a mysterious engineering challenge reserved for a handful of vendors.
Yet manufacturers still face the same problem they faced twenty years ago.
A database is not a historian.
Operations teams do not need another technology project. They need a complete solution that works on the plant floor, with industrial data collection, store-and-forward, active redundancy, and support for protocols like OPC UA, MQTT, SparkplugB, and Modbus. They need security, APIs, and trending tools that engineers can use immediately without becoming database administrators.
That gap is exactly why Timebase Historian exists.
The idea for Timebase Historian did not begin in a boardroom.
It began beside a swimming pool.
One afternoon, Timebase co-founders Graeme Welton and Jeff Knepper sat down with a notebook and started sketching ideas. What began as a casual conversation quickly became something much larger as they compared experiences from decades spent helping manufacturers collect, store, and use operational data.
Graeme came from more than twenty years as an engineering manager for a major brewing operation as well as having founded a system integrator. He had spent his career deploying historians, SCADA systems, and industrial software into real manufacturing facilities. He understood the technical challenges, but more importantly, he understood what engineers actually needed. His goal was simple: build the best historian the modern era would ever see.
Jeff brought a different perspective. Having served as Executive Director at Canary Labs and spent nearly a decade helping manufacturers deploy and use historical time-series data, he had seen the industry from both sides. He understood the value historians delivered, but he had become increasingly frustrated with the business models surrounding them. Prices continued to rise while innovation slowed, and manufacturers were still being forced to justify enormous investments simply to store and access their own operational data.
As the conversation unfolded, both realized they were describing the same problem.
Manufacturers deserved better.
By the end of that afternoon, the notebook contained the foundation of what would become Timebase Historian. More importantly, it contained two commitments that have never changed and continue to guide every decision made around the product.
First, Timebase Historian would always be free.
Second, Timebase Historian would be built specifically for the age of AI.
Everything that followed came from those two decisions.
Flow Software has spent more than fifteen years helping manufacturers transform operational data into useful information. While many companies focus on collecting and storing data, our mission has always been to help manufacturers make better decisions with confidence.
That mission started on the plant floor.
Every software engineer on our team worked in manufacturing before writing software. Every support engineer worked in manufacturing before supporting customers. Every product decision has been shaped by people who have lived with production schedules, equipment failures, shift changes, and operational accountability.
We've experienced the frustration of not having enough historian tags available to collect the information we knew mattered. We've sat through budget meetings trying to justify historian expansions and watched engineers forced to choose which assets deserved visibility because licensing costs made collecting everything impossible. We've also seen projects stall because the cost of adding another thousand tags exceeded the available budget.
Most frustrating of all, we've watched manufacturers limit their own operational visibility because the economics of traditional historians made comprehensive data collection difficult to justify.
None of that should exist anymore.
The final push came from two enterprise opportunities that never happened. Within a matter of weeks, we lost two large enterprise projects for exactly the same reason, and the pattern was impossible to ignore.
The manufacturers wanted centralized reporting, stronger data governance, AI-ready architectures, and enterprise operational intelligence. Leadership had a clear vision for where they wanted to go, but the underlying infrastructure simply wasn't there to support it.
What they did not have was adequate historian coverage across their facilities.
Some sites had historians. Others didn't. Some historians were undersized, while others were too expensive to expand. To execute the vision leadership was demanding, these organizations first needed to deploy historians across dozens of facilities, with projected investments measured in millions of dollars before a single analytics project could even begin.
Think about that.
In 2026, manufacturers are still being blocked from digital transformation because storing operational data remains unnecessarily expensive.
That realization made the decision easy.
If the industry wasn't going to solve the problem, we would.
Timebase Historian is not free for a limited number of tags, free until you reach a threshold, or free until a trial expires.
Timebase Historian is free. Today. Tomorrow. Forever.
Manufacturers should be able to deploy a modern historian architecture without asking for permission. They should be able to connect data sources, collect hundreds of thousands of tags, build redundancy, expose APIs, trend data, and securely access information without wondering which feature requires another purchase order.
Timebase Historian includes the capabilities manufacturers need to succeed: industrial data collection, store-and-forward, active redundancy, high-performance historian storage, REST APIs, MCP access, CESMII interoperability, WebSocket streaming, and integrated trending tools. These are not premium add-ons or future upgrades. They are fundamental capabilities that should be available to every manufacturer.
Why?
Because our business is not built around charging manufacturers to store data. Our business is built around helping manufacturers create value from data and move further along their digital transformation journey.
We want manufacturers to succeed. We want them to build better architectures, become more data-driven organizations, and move faster into advanced analytics, manufacturing knowledge modeling, and AI. When they are ready for those next steps, we hope we have earned the opportunity to help.
That's the entire strategy.
Create value first.
Elevate others.
Trust that good things follow.
Most historians on the market were designed long before AI became practical. Today, many vendors are trying to retrofit AI capabilities onto architectures that were never intended for them, resulting in additional middleware, cloud dependencies, subscriptions, and complexity.
Timebase Historian started with a different assumption.
AI would become a fundamental consumer of operational data.
That assumption influenced the architecture from the beginning. The historian needed to provide more context, richer metadata, modern APIs, and direct integration pathways that would allow AI agents to interact with operational information in meaningful ways.
Today Timebase Historian includes a native MCP server that allows AI agents to interact directly with operational data. They can identify coverage gaps, discover stale tags, uncover quality issues, evaluate instrumentation health, and expose operational blind spots that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The goal is not simply to store data.
The goal is to help manufacturers understand their operations better than ever before.
Manufacturers should ask harder questions.
When someone recommends a historian platform, ask whether they evaluated the alternatives. Ask whether they evaluated Timebase Historian and whether they compared capabilities, architectures, scalability, openness, and total cost of ownership. Then ask whether they're recommending the best solution available today or simply the same platforms they've recommended for the last decade.
The uncomfortable reality is that many business models within the industrial software ecosystem reward familiarity more than innovation. Some vendors continue raising prices because customers have few alternatives, while some system integrators continue recommending the same solutions because those relationships have existed for years. In other cases, ecosystems are intentionally designed to keep your data inside their boundaries because that is how future revenue is protected.
Manufacturers deserve better than that.
They deserve open architectures, modern technology, and freedom of choice. Most importantly, they deserve access to their own operational data without artificial barriers standing in the way.
The historian tax is not an engineering requirement, it is a business model.
Timebase Historian exists to prove that there is another way. The technology exists, the economics exist, and the need is obvious. Manufacturers no longer need to accept the assumption that storing operational data must come with escalating costs and restrictive licensing models.
The day of paying simply to store your operational data is over.
The only remaining question is how much longer manufacturers are willing to accept a model that should have disappeared years ago.
Timebase Historian is free because Flow Software believes manufacturers should not be charged simply to store and access their own operational data. The company's business is focused on helping manufacturers create value from data, not restricting access to it.
No. Timebase Historian is commercial software that is available at no cost. Manufacturers receive a professionally supported historian without tag limits, user limits, or licensing fees.
A time-series database stores data. Timebase Historian provides industrial data collection, store-and-forward, redundancy, security, APIs, visualization, and support for manufacturing protocols such as OPC UA, MQTT, and SparkplugB.
Yes. Timebase Historian includes native MCP support, modern APIs, rich metadata, and AI-ready architecture designed to support AI agents and large language models.
Timebase Historian can serve as an alternative for manufacturers seeking historian functionality, modern APIs, AI readiness, unlimited tags, and a no-cost licensing model. Flow Software produces additional calculation, event, and KPI tools that will enable you to build robust solutions that exceed the capability of PI AF, Canary Events and Calcs, or AspenTech solutions, without requiring historian standardization across every single plant.