If this site does not run on top of a google sheet then don't believe it.
Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
41–50 of 83 posts
Re: Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
#42I put Google Sheets as a backend (in production) when i wanted a select non technical people to be able to see and modify the data without the cost of building a backend. I really wish auth was easier to setup for services though, i see no reason google can't provide this out of the box
You can auth with Google auth after you configure an app, what are you thinking of that would be simpler?
Re: Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
#43I have done this for my own projects for years it’s great for projects that are only for me and gives me a very good db editor also. Cool project though the only risk I see is that if the target audience are vibe coders they will you known just vibe code an integration
Thank you! The idea of our target audience just vibe coding this themselves definitely gave us pause for thought while we were building it :)
We're thinking of playing around with the pricing right now to make sure it is cheaper to just use this than to spend the time and tokens recreating the logic. We will see how it plays out.
Re: Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cloud sql lowest tier is pennies a day, this ninja platform is also not free. A spreadsheet is a misclick away from corruption, why not spend another prompt on getting Claude to configure a db?
Which works out at $100 USD / year. You might think that's trivial, but when you start provisioning multiple environments over multiple projects it starts to add up. It's a shame that Google haven't managed to come up with a scale to zero option or serverless alternative that's compatible.
Sheet Ninja is 108 USD / year and has tiny capacities for every metric. SQLite is free and would stomp this in every aspect on low budget hosting. Even a tiny API that stores CSV would be magnitudes more efficient.
But what would scare me the most, is that google can easily shut this thing down.
Re: Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
#45I put Google Sheets as a backend (in production) when i wanted a select non technical people to be able to see and modify the data without the cost of building a backend. I really wish auth was easier to setup for services though, i see no reason google can't provide this out of the box
You can auth with Google auth after you configure an app, what are you thinking of that would be simpler?
I meant to authenticate a service (that is not running on GCP) to access the sheet, it requires a service account and felt more convoluted than what it needs to be
Re: Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can auth with Google auth after you configure an app, what are you thinking of that would be simpler?
I meant to authenticate a service (that is not running on GCP) to access the sheet, it requires a service account and felt more convoluted than what it needs to be
Completely agree. Managing service account JSON keys and configuring IAM roles just to access a single sheet feels like a huge overhead for simple projects.
Re: Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
#47SQLite, SQLite + drizzle with WAL mode, push it to a VPS, do not waste your time on anything else :) Thank me when things become super easy! When things scale, SQLite will still be fine, will fit 99% of the vibe coders needs! When they don't then migrate to what ever!
This requires technical skill
If Claude can do it reasonably well then there’s another tier of technical skill that can reach.
Re: Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
#48Don’t really get the purpose for this apart from throw away projects. For vibe coders is it really “hours” setting up a database these days? GCP cloud sql + drizzle ORM is minutes and actually scales unlike a spreadsheet, heck Claude can even write you a deployment script and run it over GCP CLI.
Cloud SQL costs gazillions, sheet is free (other than selling your data)
You can fire up a burstable postgres for about $20/mo
Re: Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
#49[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders
#50Hi all - a friend and I have been dabbling in the entrepreneur space for years, but we never really pulled the trigger because of our corporate jobs. We suffer from the same thing that plagues a lot of engineers: we know how to build products, but we are weak at distribution and marketing. We feel that being able to build is becoming table stakes and the ability to actually get a product into people's hands is more i…
The "we chose a validated market so we could focus on learning distribution" framing is really smart and honestly something I wish I'd done earlier. I'm building a workspace/collaboration tool and spent way too long on the product side before realizing the distribution muscle is a completely separate skill that doesn't develop on its own.
One thing I've noticed from the sheets-as-backend pattern: the reason people keep reaching for spreadsheets is because the editing UX is instant and familiar.Any tool that wants to replace this for non-technical users needs to nail that "just click a cell and type" experience. That's the hard part honestly.