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Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

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Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#12

Post by samcrawford »

fomojola wrote: post #10

Very interesting idea: one possibility for driving demand would be to provide free API hosting for public-domain spreadsheet data (essentially anything published by the government) and charge heavy usage users for access (they could eventually just import the source data if they cared that much, but it could help get the word out).

I've been thinking along very similar lines, but more along a Github-esque model: Host your data and APIs for free, providing you publish them publicly. If you take them private, you pay a little. Early days yet, today is mostly about gauging interest.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#13

Post by gingerlime »

This is a really clever idea. So simple and almost-obvious, yet it's the first time I come across this. Genius.

Particularly like the fact that REST APIs are pretty easy to start with providing GET access to resources, but get messy when you start doing POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH etc. In this case, it's read-only by definition. That must make things so much easier. I can anticipate people asking for update access in future, but if you can get customers without it, I'd hold off with that for as long as possible.

One thing though - I think you should definitely raise your prices. 20Gb and 10 million queries for only €15 per month??!!

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#15

Post by samcrawford »

[deleted] wrote: post #11

[deleted]

Curious, others are importing xls docs without issue, but yours is failing silently with return code 77 from libreoffice-headless (which is being used for the conversion). A quick Google shows I'm not alone here. Leave it with me, I'll reply here. In the meantime, feel free to convert to CSV or XLSX first and then import.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#16

Post by samcrawford »

gingerlime wrote: post #13

This is a really clever idea. So simple and almost-obvious, yet it's the first time I come across this. Genius. Particularly like the fact that REST APIs are pretty easy to start with providing GET access to resources, but get messy when you start doing POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH etc. In this case, it's read-only by definition. That must make things so much easier. I can anticipate people asking for update access in fu…

Thanks! I too was surprised when I couldn't find anyone else that had done it. Noted RE pricing, just testing the water for today - consider this a HN special if you want to lock it in early ;)

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#17

Post by fomojola »

samcrawford wrote: post #12
fomojola wrote: post #10

Very interesting idea: one possibility for driving demand would be to provide free API hosting for public-domain spreadsheet data (essentially anything published by the government) and charge heavy usage users for access (they could eventually just import the source data if they cared that much, but it could help get the word out).

I've been thinking along very similar lines, but more along a Github-esque model: Host your data and APIs for free, providing you publish them publicly. If you take them private, you pay a little. Early days yet, today is mostly about gauging interest.

Hehe: I was trying not to use "Like Github for APIs" in my description, but yes, that is pretty much what I was thinking.

I actually just ran the following search on Google:

inurl:.xls site:gov

and uncovered a bunch of random Excel spreadsheets (such as this one: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2...). Would be slightly more complex to do but potentially this would make any published government data instantly accessible via API and (depending on what your backend looks like) you could bake in Solr or ElasticSearch to also provide search inside the data. Maybe an easy onboarding tool to let any visitor to the site specify a publicly accessible spreadsheet and then automatically create the API?

Looking forward to seeing what you do with it!

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#19

Post by samcrawford »

samcrawford wrote: post #15
[deleted] wrote: post #11

[deleted]

Curious, others are importing xls docs without issue, but yours is failing silently with return code 77 from libreoffice-headless (which is being used for the conversion). A quick Google shows I'm not alone here. Leave it with me, I'll reply here. In the meantime, feel free to convert to CSV or XLSX first and then import.

Fixed. Was a permissions issue, libreoffice needs to write to $HOME for some documents it seems, and the user's homedir wasn't writeable by it.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#20

Post by hpagey »

gingerlime wrote: post #13

This is a really clever idea. So simple and almost-obvious, yet it's the first time I come across this. Genius. Particularly like the fact that REST APIs are pretty easy to start with providing GET access to resources, but get messy when you start doing POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH etc. In this case, it's read-only by definition. That must make things so much easier. I can anticipate people asking for update access in fu…

Actually there is a company out there called https://www.ragic.com/. Not exactly same but similar.
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