Is Baselight Assistant still available in 2026?

No. The Finisterra team announced on July 7, 2026 that it was joining Chainalysis and confirmed Baselight has shut down as part of that transition. The farewell notice is now the entire site, and it is the same page that renders on /pricing, /changelog, /release-notes and /docs. There is no working query tool left to use.

What happened to Baselight Assistant and why did it shut down?

Finisterra, the team behind Baselight, announced on July 7, 2026 that it was joining Chainalysis, citing its background in distributed systems, cryptography and data infrastructure. Chainalysis turns blockchain data into intelligence used by more than 1,500 organizations for investigations and risk work. The public-datasets product was not carried over — Baselight shut down as part of the transition.

How do I export my Baselight Assistant queries or digests?

You cannot. There was no archival mode, no export path and no API left running at shutdown, and no successor product was announced. If you bookmarked a Baselight query or depended on a daily digest subscription, the work has to be redone elsewhere. Open your browser history to recover question text, then re-run those questions in Google Dataset Search or on Data.gov.

What is the cheapest Baselight Assistant tier?

There was only ever one published tier, and it was Free at $0/mo — the plan listing itself is now marked discontinued. Because it was free, there was no support contract and no commercial leverage for anyone who depended on it, which is exactly why the July 7, 2026 shutdown left users with nothing to fall back on.

What are Baselight Assistant's biggest limitations?

The decisive one is that it no longer exists — Finisterra announced on July 7, 2026 that it was joining Chainalysis and that Baselight shut down. Even before that, the product had no API access and no on-premise deployment, ruling it out for programmatic pipelines and for organizations with data-governance requirements. It was free, so there was no support contract either.

Does Baselight Assistant integrate with other tools?

There is nothing left to integrate with. The vendor's integrations page did not load anything beyond the shutdown notice this run, and Baselight shut down on July 7, 2026 regardless. If you need programmatic retrieval of public data today, look at Data.gov downloads or a warehouse-side text-to-SQL tool you can connect to your own stack.

What should I use instead of Baselight Assistant?

Two incumbents cover Baselight's lane and never charged either: Google Dataset Search for discovery and Data.gov for the underlying federal data. If you want the query layer inside your own warehouse, a text-to-SQL tool is the replacement. Pick one whose revenue comes from that product, since Baselight's free $0/mo model is what left users with no export when the Finisterra team joined Chainalysis on July 7, 2026.

Can Baselight Assistant replace Google Dataset Search or Data.gov?

Not anymore — it shut down on July 7, 2026 and cannot do anything. When it ran, Baselight indexed 70,000+ datasets across 90+ sources including Census, CDC, BLS and FBI and let you combine sources in one plain-English query, which was a useful discovery layer. But it had no export path, so Data.gov and Google Dataset Search are now the durable choices.

How long did Baselight Assistant take to set up?

Historically, close to zero — basic queries needed no account and there was nothing to install, since it ran in a browser. That convenience is gone as of the July 7, 2026 shutdown. Replacing it means either opening Google Dataset Search or Data.gov (also no installation) or wiring a warehouse-side text-to-SQL tool to your own data, which takes a connection and permissioning pass.

Is Baselight Assistant safe to depend on for a research workflow?

It is not a question of safety — the service is discontinued as of July 7, 2026, with no archive, no export and no successor after Finisterra's team joined Chainalysis. That makes it a platform-risk lesson: a free, venture-funded data tool whose roadmap ended on acquisition. Keep public-data results in your own storage so the next shutdown costs you nothing.

Is Baselight Assistant still active in 2026?

Baselight Assistant is active in 2026 but worth monitoring — liveness 67/100. Its weakest signal is how little the vendor publishes (no docs, changelog or pricing detail). It most recently shipped an update on July 7, 2026: “The Finisterra team is joining Chainalysis — Baselight shuts down”.

Baselight Assistant is live · free · last verified 8 Nov 2026 · viability monitor

Data & Analytics

Baselight Assistant

Baselight Assistant shut down July 7, 2026 — a free plain-English query tool for 70,000+ public datasets, discontinued with no export path

67/100MonitorFreeFree

Baselight Assistant is discontinued as of July 7, 2026, so the only honest recommendation is to stop depending on it. There is no export, no archive and no successor from the Finisterra team, which announced it was joining Chainalysis. When it ran, it did one job cleanly: plain-English queries across 70,000+ public datasets from 90+ sources including Census, CDC, BLS and FBI, free at $0/mo and without a login. Treat it as a platform-risk lesson and move your public-data work to Google Dataset Search for discovery or Data.gov for the underlying federal data.

Verdict generated Oct 9, 2026

Verified 5d ago · liveness 67/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/baselight-assistant

Best for

Researchers documenting what Baselight Assistant did before its July 7, 2026 shutdown
Analysts studying platform risk in free, venture-funded data tools
Anyone evaluating whether to trust a startup with a critical public-data workflow

Not ideal for

Anyone needing a working natural language query tool — the service is discontinued
Teams that need API access or programmatic retrieval from Baselight
Organizations requiring export, archival or data governance guarantees

Visit Website

Beginner-friendlyFor anyone reading this page today: zero setup is possible, because Baselight shut down July 7, 2026 and the farewell notice is the whole site. Historians of the product needed no account and no installation for basic queries — you opened it in a browser and typed a question. Replacing it means picking Google Dataset Search or Data.gov, which also need no installation, or standing up aNo public APIVerified 5d ago

Pricing

Free

FreeFree tier

Learning curve

Beginner-friendly

For anyone reading this page today: zero setup is possible, because Baselight shut down July 7, 2026 and the farewell notice is the whole site. Historians of the product needed no account and no installation for basic queries — you opened it in a browser and typed a question. Replacing it means picking Google Dataset Search or Data.gov, which also need no installation, or standing up a

Who it's for

Public-policy researcher who relied on BaselightAnalyst writing a build-vs-buy memo on data toolingData engineer scoping a text-to-SQL layer

Live sentiment

Is Baselight Assistant actually worth it?

We scan live Reddit threads, YouTube comments, X posts, G2 reviews and other communities — and hand you an honest verdict in under a minute.

Honest verdict, not marketing
Real pros & cons from real users
Attributed quotes with receipts

Run a free scan

3 free scans · no card needed

Skip it if

Skip Baselight Assistant entirely — it shut down July 7, 2026, there is no archive or export, and the Finisterra team who built it moved to Chainalysis, so there is nothing left to sign up for or migrate to.

Skip-it-if note generated Oct 9, 2026

The 30-second take

Price reality

Baselight's only published tier was Free at $0/mo, so there was never a paid upgrade to budget for — and no support contract to buy either, which is part of why the shutdown left users with no leverage. If you are sourcing public-data discovery today, Google Dataset Search and Data.gov cover similar ground at no cost, while warehouse-side text-to-SQL tooling costs real money but comes with a vendor whose revenue depends on that product.

Generated Oct 9, 2026

In short

Baselight Assistant — Baselight Assistant shut down July 7, 2026 — a free plain-English query tool for 70,000+ public datasets, discontinued with no export path. Best for Researchers documenting what Baselight Assistant did before its July 7, 2026 shutdown, Analysts studying platform risk in free, venture-funded data tools, Anyone evaluating whether to trust a startup with a critical public-data workflow. Free to use.

Compared withvs Screenplayiq vs Nectar Energy vs Geologicai

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What is Baselight Assistant?

FreeBeginner-friendlyNo API

Baselight Assistant was a free, browser-based natural language query tool for structured public data. You typed a question in plain English — census population figures, CDC disease counts, BLS employment numbers — and it pointed you at matching datasets from a library the vendor put at 70,000+ datasets across 90+ sources, including the US Census Bureau, CDC, BLS and FBI. Queries could combine data across multiple sources in one pass, and you could browse galleries of public datasets and dashboards, review your query history, and subscribe to curated daily digest emails. Basic queries needed no account, and nothing cost anything to use — the only published tier was Free at $0/mo. The Finisterra team, which built Baselight, announced on July 7, 2026 that it was joining Chainalysis — citing its own background in distributed systems, cryptography and data infrastructure — and confirmed Baselight has shut down as part of that transition. That farewell notice is now the entire site, and the same notice is what renders on /pricing, /changelog, /release-notes and /docs. Chainalysis, per the same announcement, turns blockchain data into intelligence used by more than 1,500 organizations for investigations, risk management and crypto-crime work. Finisterra's data-infrastructure skills were the fit; the public-datasets product was not carried over. There is no archival mode, no export path, no API left running, and no successor product announced. Anyone who bookmarked a Baselight query or digest subscription has nothing to migrate to — the work has to be redone elsewhere. Baselight's lane is now covered by incumbents that never charged either: Google Dataset Search for discovery and Data.gov for the underlying federal data, with warehouse-side text-to-SQL tools handling the query layer for teams that want it in-house.

Key features

Natural language query over a 70,000+ dataset library
90+ public data sources including US Census Bureau, CDC, BLS and FBI
Cross-source data combination in a single query
Public dashboards gallery
Dataset gallery for browsing the indexed library
Query history for reviewing past questions
Curated daily digest emails
No account required for basic queries
Free to use with no paid tier — the only plan was $0/mo
Browser-based with no installation
Shut down as of July 7, 2026 per the vendor farewell notice
No export or archival option offered at shutdown

Behind the verdict

What Baselight Assistant got right was the entry cost. You typed a question in plain English against a library the vendor described as 70,000+ datasets spanning 90+ sources, including the US Census Bureau, CDC, BLS and FBI, and you could combine figures from more than one source in a single pass. Basic queries needed no account, there was no paid tier to graduate into, and the whole thing ran in a browser with nothing to install. For a researcher scoping a topic, browsing the dataset and dashboard galleries, or subscribing to curated daily digest emails, that was a genuinely low-friction way to find public data without hand-searching agency portals. The structural weaknesses were visible before the shutdown. There was no API access and no on-premise deployment, which ruled Baselight out of programmatic pipelines and out of organizations with data-governance requirements. It was free, which meant no support contract and no commercial leverage if your workflow depended on it. And because it was a discovery and pointing layer rather than a warehouse, your real work still lived in a spreadsheet or a BI tool downstream. Then on July 7, 2026 the Finisterra team announced it was joining Chainalysis, citing its distributed systems, cryptography and data infrastructure background, and confirmed Baselight had shut down as part of the transition. The farewell notice now renders on baselight.app's homepage and equally on its /pricing, /changelog, /release-notes and /docs paths — a single page is the entire site. No archival mode, no export path, no API left running, no successor product. If you built saved queries or depended on a digest subscription, there is nothing to migrate; the work has to be redone. Where it fits now: nowhere, operationally. Where it still earns a page: as a clean case study in platform risk. A free, venture-funded data tool whose roadmap ended the moment the team was acquired. If you are choosing a public-data tool today, weight durability the same way you weight features — favor Google Dataset Search for discovery and Data.gov for the underlying federal data, and if you need query-over-warehouse, buy it from a vendor whose revenue comes from that product.

Limitations

The decisive limitation is that Baselight no longer exists.
Finisterra announced on July 7, 2026 that the team was joining Chainalysis and that Baselight had shut down as part of the transition, and that notice is now the entire site — the same page renders on /pricing, /changelog, /release-notes and /docs.
There is no archive mode, no data export and no successor product from the same team, so anything you built on top of it needs a replacement.
Even before the shutdown, the product carried structural constraints: no API access and no on-premise deployment, which ruled it out for programmatic pipelines and for organizations with data-governance requirements.
It was a free tool at $0/mo, which meant no support contract and no commercial leverage if you depended on it.

as of 2026-10-09

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Is Baselight Assistant still active?

Baselight Assistant is live · free · last verified 8 Nov 2026 · viability monitor.

Viability score

67/100

Monitor

How well maintained and how widely used is Baselight Assistant? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this

Recent activity

Traction

100

Site health

identity move

not measured

User sentiment

What the vendor publishes

Last calculated: November 2026

How we score →

What's new in Baselight Assistant

Checked 8 days ago

Across the latest 1 update: 1 news mention.

NewsChangelog·Jul 7Newest

The Finisterra team is joining Chainalysis — Baselight shuts down

Finisterra announced the team is joining Chainalysis, citing its distributed systems, cryptography and data infrastructure background, and confirmed Baselight has shut down as part of the transition, with no export, archive or successor product.

What do users say about Baselight Assistant?

What people actually say about Baselight Assistant — is it worth it?

We scanned public community sources for Baselight Assistant on Aug 29, 2026 and could not establish that the discussion we found is about this tool rather than something else sharing its name. Our own analysis of that scan says the posts were off-subject. Rather than publish a sentiment score built on the wrong subject, we publish nothing here and re-run the scan.

How we verified this

Every listed fact about Baselight Assistant — pricing, features, links, status — is re-read from the vendor's own pages by our verification pipeline and each change is logged with a date; the last pass ran on 8 Nov 2026. Analysis is drafted with AI models and checked against our editorial standards before publishing; see how we verify.

Verification history

We have re-verified Baselight Assistant 13 times since Jul 3, 2026. Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.

Oct 11, 2026 — changed website status
Oct 9, 2026 — changed features, use cases, switching out, setup time, pricing fit, who should skip it, summary, limitations, our verdict, switching in, description, hidden costs
Oct 5, 2026 — changed our verdict, pricing tiers, summary, who should skip it, who it suits, features, description
Sep 22, 2026 — changed SSL certificate
Sep 14, 2026 — changed pricing tiers, who it suits, description, our verdict, features, hidden costs, limitations, switching in, switching out, who should skip it, pricing fit, setup time, summary, use cases
Sep 2, 2026 — changed domain expiry

Showing the 6 most recent of 13 verification passes.

Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.

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How much does Baselight Assistant cost in 2026?

Baselight Assistant: Free to use. Pricing last verified 8 Nov 2026.

Plans compared

Every published Baselight Assistant tier, its price as the vendor publishes it, who it fits, and what it adds over the tier below. The 12-month cost projection follows.

Baselight Assistant pricing plans compared
Plan	Price	Billing	Who it's for
Free (discontinued)	Free	—	Nobody today — the tier was for researchers and analysts who wanted plain-English queries over 70,000+ public datasets without a login or a budget line.Adds: Starting tier and only tier: $0/mo, no account required for basic queries, now discontinued as of July 7, 2026.

12-month cost

Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.

Plan

Annual total

Free

Over 12 months

Effective monthly

—

Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.

Where the pricing makes sense

The company stage and team size where Baselight Assistant's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.

Hidden-cost and price-fit notes generated Oct 9, 2026

Has Baselight Assistant's pricing changed?

No plan price for Baselight Assistant has moved since we began logging in Aug 2026; the pricing page is re-read on every verification pass.

Who should pick Baselight Assistant?

Pick Baselight Assistant if you are Researchers documenting what Baselight Assistant did before its July 7, 2026 shutdown, Analysts studying platform risk in free, venture-funded data tools, Anyone evaluating whether to trust a startup with a critical public-data workflow.

Look elsewhere if you are Anyone needing a working natural language query tool — the service is discontinued, Teams that need API access or programmatic retrieval from Baselight, Organizations requiring export, archival or data governance guarantees, Users who built saved queries or digest subscriptions they still depend on.

Skip it if Skip Baselight Assistant entirely — it shut down July 7, 2026, there is no archive or export, and the Finisterra team who built it moved to Chainalysis, so there is nothing left to sign up for or migrate to.

Generated Oct 9, 2026

Real-world workflow fit

Concrete scenarios for the personas Baselight Assistant actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.

Public-policy researcher who relied on Baselight

Your bookmarked queries and daily digest stopped working after the July 7, 2026 shutdown notice replaced the site, and there is no export to recover what you saved.

Outcome: Rebuild the question list by hand in Google Dataset Search for discovery and Data.gov for the underlying federal data, then keep the results in your own spreadsheet so the next shutdown costs you nothing.

Analyst writing a build-vs-buy memo on data tooling

You need a concrete example of platform risk to argue against depending on a free, venture-funded data product for a critical workflow.

Outcome: Cite Baselight: 70,000+ datasets across 90+ sources, free at $0/mo, no API and no export, roadmap ended the day the Finisterra team joined Chainalysis. That is the argument in one paragraph.

Data engineer scoping a text-to-SQL layer

You are looking at whether a natural-language query tool can sit over your own warehouse rather than a public-data index.

Outcome: Rule Baselight out — it had no API access and no on-premise deployment even before shutdown — and evaluate warehouse-side text-to-SQL tools instead, where the vendor's revenue comes from the query layer itself.

Workflow scenarios generated Oct 9, 2026

Use cases

Historically: ask a plain-English question and get pointed at matching public datasets without manual search
Historically: combine figures from multiple government sources — e.g. Census and BLS — for cross-analysis
Historically: browse pre-indexed public dashboards and datasets to scope a research topic
Historically: subscribe to curated daily digests of public data updates
Historically: pull cleaned structured data for pasting into spreadsheets
Today: study Baselight's July 7, 2026 shutdown as a platform-risk case study when choosing free data tools

Setup time & first value

How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Baselight Assistant — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.

Switching to or from Baselight Assistant

How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.

Migrating in

→From manual agency-portal searching: Baselight collapsed Census, CDC, BLS and FBI lookups into one plain-English query box, though there is no way to import saved searches now.

Migrating out

↗To Google Dataset Search: re-run your discovery questions there, since it indexes public datasets without charging and has outlasted single-vendor tools.
↗To Data.gov: go straight to the underlying federal data for Census, BLS and similar sources and download into your own storage.
↗To a warehouse-side text-to-SQL tool: if you need the query layer in-house and under a support contract, rebuild the questions against your own tables.
↗To your own spreadsheet or BI tool: maintain the results locally from now on, because Baselight offered no export at shutdown.

Resources & guides

Documentationbaselight.app
Docs · Baselight Assistant
Full product docs from baselight.app

Tutorials & Learning

YouTube returned 6 videos for “Baselight Assistant”, and we withheld 6: 6 did not mention Baselight Assistant. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Baselight Assistant.

Official links

Official Website Changelog

What are the best Baselight Assistant alternatives?

The closest alternatives to Baselight Assistant we list are Dataset Viewer, Julius AI and Chat2DB. Ranked by direct product-type match, not category overlap.

Closest alternatives to Baselight Assistant
Alternative	Pricing	Starts at	Last verified
Dataset Viewer	Freemium	Pricing not published	—
Julius AI	Freemium	Pricing not published	—
Chat2DB	Freemium	Pricing not published	—

Alternatives to Baselight Assistant

View all

Dataset Viewer

Query any Hugging Face dataset as Parquet through a free REST API — no full download needed.

FreemiumTry

Julius AI

Julius AI turns plain-English questions about your CSV, Excel, or Postgres data into charts, statistical tests, and regression models.

FreemiumTry

Chat2DB

Chat2DB turns plain English into runnable SQL across 40+ databases — with AI text-to-SQL that keeps your rows on your own machine.

FreemiumTry

Tools that pair well with Baselight Assistant

Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Baselight Assistant, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.

Dataset Viewer

Query any Hugging Face dataset as Parquet through a free REST API — no full download needed.

Julius AI

Julius AI turns plain-English questions about your CSV, Excel, or Postgres data into charts, statistical tests, and regression models.

Chat2DB

Chat2DB turns plain English into runnable SQL across 40+ databases — with AI text-to-SQL that keeps your rows on your own machine.