Unfortunately, the OP needs to upgrade from 15, which does not qualify for the upgrade pricing.
Here’s another +1 for TapForms. My wife and I have it on both our Macs and all our iOS devices to keep a local (private, not cloud-related) record of all our medical info, as well as other info. We use one Mac as the ‘master’ and make any changes on that device. We have ‘Nearby sync’ set to sync between the devices. As soon as you have the same database open on two devices TapForms performs an almost instantaneous sync. There’s an online manual so you can read up on how it works to help you decide if you want to buy it.
The forum is very active with very helpful users, including some very knowledgeable in scripting. The forum also has a section with templates that other users have developed to give you a starting point if you need it. We are very happy with TapForms and highly recommend it.
Edit: One more thing we like about Tap Forms is the ability to attach separate documents (PDF, JPG, etc.) that are stored inside the database. This way we can have things like radiologist reports available within the app that we can bring them up whenever we see a new doctor so he doesn’t have to get it from the original source. You should see their faces light up when they see how much of our medical info we have right in front of them on our iPhone or iPad.
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Two ideas:
Get the free VMware Fusion (virtual machine) VMware Fusion Player – Personal Use License, BUT also read this: Announcement: VMware Fusion for Apple silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available - VMware Fusion Blog
This should allow you to run a VM with Mojave, which in turn can run your old FMP 15.
I use VMware Fusion to run http://www.ragtime.de/ who haven’t yet finished their 64-bit version.
Not sure I’d have enough confidence in Panorama, because the decision has to last for a long time.
My 2nd idea: Some people buy FMP without having a clue what an RDBMS is and what it isn’t. Soon they flog it off on eBay. This might give you a lic that you CAN upgrade to v19.
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Not sure what the people here have against Panorama. The longevity issue is very strange. In the past few years it has been completely rewritten to be compatible with current Mac hardware and OS. It now has brilliant sharing capabilities, and a recent update has made it fully and easily relational. All software can eventually die, and when MacOS radically changed, the developer could have abandoned Panorama; instead he dug in and rewrote it. It’s now in public beta, with continual updates, and while nobody knows when the “final” version of Pan X 1.2 will be released, it should be fairly soon.
About the payment model, like so much of Jim Rea’s work, it’s very imaginative. You pay for a certain number of months in advance–1 to 3 years or more–and your account is debited only for months in which you use it. In a given month, you can use 3-1000+ hours without extra fees; and all upgrades are free.
And, as is readily discoverable, the basic concept behind the software is unique and wonderful. It makes the product extraordinarily fast, and its capabilities make it useful from very simple applications to very, very complex ones. Add to that unparalleled support, and as you can tell from this note, it’s a program that I and many others are enthusiastic about and loyal to.
It’s free to try out and has some of the most comprehensive documentation in the business, so give it a spin.
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I, too, have given up on Filemaker. I have several very complex solutions I wrote years ago one for a client, the other for me and I just can’t stomach the upgrade price. There are few alternatives to FMP unfortunately—but Panorama is certainly one. Another I’ve found though less complete is Ninox Database. It is surprisingly capable, under continuous development, very inexpensive, and there are several enthusiastic reviews from Filemaker refugees. I’ve found Ninox to be quite sufficient for the small utility databases I’ve built.
Although unquestionably expensive I continue to use FM and have found little to match its versatility and cross platform compatibility. Plugins (such as the one from MonkeyBreadSoftware) plus some persistence have helped in the development of some sophisticated solutions including image interpretation, mapping and GIS integration… and I am tyre-kicking social scientist, not a software engineer! I have also been impressed with the ease of taking solutions from a local to a server environment, although getting my head around the detail of performing scripts on the sever was a bit challenging. Try doing something similar in Access!
@silvester: few years back I found myself in your position, on the wrong side of the upgrade cycle. I ended watching eBay patiently for some time and bought a genuine license for $30 (with CD!) that was one step ahead, and then paying for the upgrade to whatever was current. You need to be careful with this approach as recently there were a lot of rip-off copies & licenses around on eBay.
Good luck!
A couple of days after getting TapForms I have a consulting Invoice solution working.
It took a few hours to get my head around the interface and terminology but I’m starting to feel a bit more comfortable. Whilst I’ve done a fair bit of programming I’ve never used Javascript but it’s a pretty readable language and TapForms provide a number of code snippets to get you started.
So far I’m liking it and I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface.
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Thank you. That was most helpful!
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I agree. LibreOffice Base has similarities to Microsoft Access and the documentation tends to be light but as a former Filemaker Support Engineer when Filemaker was the former Claris I found it to be useable as a GUI DB. It does have a learning curve but quite flexible and powerful with its SQL underpinnings. That said you cannot take issue with the price. It also has the the unique capability that it runs on 3 platforms - Mac, Windows, and Linux. Frankly I have always believed that Filemaker was overpriced. Originally the targeted audience was advanced end users but at some point, that changed to professional software developers, around the time Bento was released which was simply to anemic to be successful. In my opinion, other than early Filemaker, a general-purpose consumer/end user friendly relational database has never existed for the Mac like it has for Windows - i.e. Access. years ago, I wrote a water management software app for multiunit housing for a landscape company in Access using its GUI interface as the landscape company was supporting a Windows environment. One other app that might be a substitute for certain needs is DevonThink. It offers decent support and much flexibility for handling data but is not what I would refer to as a general-purpose relational database as programming it is quite limited to the built-in functionality. It is more like Bento on steroids. It is also expensive but Tidbits offers discounts on it to members.
I will never understand why Filemaker (Apple/Claris) essentially ignored the consumer market.
With FMP and FMP Advanced they already had the foundation to separate the products into consumer or pro editions. They could have left Filemaker as the consumer product with restricted features, no sharing, no debugging, less field options, limited calculations etc and kept Filemaker Pro for business level users.
A decent database has always been the missing piece of the Mac ‘Office (iWork)’ package. It’s just another great mystery of Apple I suppose.
About 20 years ago an FMP developer started what was meant to be a Filemaker alternative which had a similar GUI with an SQL backend. I think it was Java based and the default DB was Firebird. The name escapes me but I’m not sure if it’s still going. It’s killing me I can’t remember the name… I think it started with ‘C’.
FileMaker hasn’t, and still doesn’t, ignore the consumer market at all. However, the b2b market is extremely more profitable. It requires subscriptions for server stuff and for multiple seats. It also helps sell more Macs. However, I do think that companies like Walt Disney, whose thousands of employees span the globe, are a lot more profitable than me. I’m still on FMP 11.
The only reason why FileMaker survived, and the other Claris apps didn’t, is that even Steve Jobs couldn’t convince developers, including Microsoft, to develop and regularly update a sophisticated and easy to use Mac database. A database that could compete against Access.
FileMaker hasn’t, and still doesn’t, ignore the consumer market at all.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. FMP rolled Filemaker Pro Advanced into Filemaker Pro along with its higher price and made it prohibitively more expensive for the consumer to purchase.
The low end consumer market can be very profitable and serves as a precursor to the higher levels of applications. This is why companies life Affinity are being successful with products like Photo, Designer and Publisher. They’re demonstrating that lower price and high turnover can be a profitable model.
Bento was an attempt to complete the ‘Office’ suite but was pretty ordinary and sold as a separate product. It’s a shame as I can recall using DB modules going back to Appleworks and Microsoft Works.
There’s some irony in Apple’s approach. They provide a free Music creation app with a higher version; a free Movie editing app with a higher version and previously did a higher version of their free Photo app. Then there’s the free Spreadsheet, Word Processor and their (extremely excellent) Presentation app.
I guess Apple believes people are more likely to do presentations or make songs than they are to track things in a database.
A relational database is a very specialized product, not a general interest one like Music, Numbers, Pages, Photos, etc. that Apple gives away to sell hardware. I’ve said this before…Apple doesn’t do cheap, and Claris is an Apple spinoff. There are plenty of less expensive alternatives, including free ones like My SQL. Profitably is a big reason why Apple doesn’t play in the same ballpark as Affinity, etc. FileMaker is cross platform if you need to share databases with Windows Filemaker users. And Claris does give FileMaker Go for free to owners of Android and iOS devices, and they also support third party apps. This is a plus for families and businesses.
When I do finally decide to replace my ancient MacBook Pro, I will give Affinity a try. I have just two FMP databases that I absolutely need. I will prefer to not have to shell out the big bucks for FileMaker.
As I said, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I strongly disagree that Access was/is user friendly. Years ago I had to support and develop a couple of Access databases, and it was an abomination. A badly designed DBMS that provides just enough UI to allow non-technical people to construct databases that sort of work but have lots of issues. The only reason it is used in any meaningful numbers is because Access is ‘free’ for businesses and people who own MS Office (if you zero-rate your time 
).
I for one am glad that Microsoft never brought Access to the Mac. It being bundled with Mac Office might have killed off development of some of the excellent alternatives we now have on the Mac (see this thread 
).
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Always saw a market for a Bento Pro. I think TapForms is likely the answer for most users needing more. My son uses it and is a fan.
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Seconded.
Has in the history of the world there ever been a single case where somebody who had worked with FMP and then started using Access came to the conclusion “oh yeah, this is great too”?
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Thirded. Access is a bit easier to use if you already know how to structure SQL queries but if not it is pretty obtuse…and from a UI point of view it is difficult to make nice forms and such.
I also agree that while a DBMS is more of a niche product than some other kinds of software…Apple and their wholly owned subsidiary messed up with then didn’t keep a free to reasonably priced database available. I tried and never really liked Bento much…but a less capable version of FileMaker for the masses with some reasonable included templates like household good inventory, media inventory, serial number and license and similar seems like a good fit for the ecosystem…particularly as making a less capable Filemaker wouldn’t seem to require all that much additional coding, just removal of higher end and relational DBMS features…although leaving relational as a background ‘how it works’ thing is probably just fine but don’t expose the relational stuff to the casual free/cheap product users to protect sales of the higher end product.
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At the time, Steve Jobs’ hands were tied. Developers stopped developing and supporting Mac software like flies, and just about all of the rest of the world considered Apple to be on its late stage death throes. Software developers of all sizes and shapes were abandoning or ignoring Macs. He needed to position the Mac platform as an open state as much as he could. So Claris never developed a portfolio of new apps, or even developed a whole new suite, though it could easily have.
FileMaker, relatively speaking, has been quite successful and profitable. I think the ties to Apple are somewhat invisible but very strong. If they weren’t, they would have developed other paid software and maybe have gone public.