I think there's a real opening for a database that offers ease of use and reasonable price, and Bento might well fill that niche. Now, I think that many people who should use databases do not, instead using spreadsheets or worse. Open-source databases like SQLite or MySQL offer tremendous power, but there's a significant learning curve and they're not particularly user-friendly (try to store an image in SQLite and display it again). Commercial databases like FileMaker and its competitors are also very powerful, and may be a little easier to work with, but are still far from suer-friendly, and are more expensive than most individuals are willing to shell out for.

Bento is not a very powerful database at the moment, but it is extremely user-friendly. Most of Bento is devoted to usefull but attractive eye candy. In this case eye candy is a good thing, because the people who would benefit from a database, but who have been scared away from full-featured versions, shouldn't be afraid of Bento.

Again, this is not the database program for a mid-sized business to use; this is the database for your Uncle Roger to catalogue his 1500 bird house designs, with pictures and dates. There are millions of people who have collections of stuff with, say, a few thousand items -- knitting patterns, plasmid DNA, stuffed penguins, that sort of thing. If they don't need to be extensively cross-referenced, then Bento is a good place to store the info.

Right now, for example, I have an SQLite database for my liquid nitrogen stocks of cells -- I use the SQLite directly, and I wrote a custom wxPython GUI for it for my technician to use. But that's a waste of my time, and I don't want to write new GUIs for every other database in my lab. For $50 I can get Bento and be reasonably confident that my tech will actually use it and keep everything up to date. And I won't have to make a new GUI for the next set of data.

As Bento is basically a pretty GUI on top of SQLite, the power is presumably there and hopefully there will be a way to unlock that at some point (perhaps when AppleScripting is completed). Cross-referencing is probably the most important missing feature, and makes Bento inadequate for some of the databases I have going -- but even without that I think it's a strong competitor for this particular market.