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Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

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Re: Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

#61

Post by asantalo »

BenjieGillam wrote: post #59
asantalo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benjie, I appreciate you chiming in here personally. Apologies if I oversimplified as I am not all that familiar with your product. Aside from looking at the nuances of the GraphQL engines of either product, the primary difference is that 8base is hosted and ready-to-use and PostGraphile is for someone who wants to build, deploy and manage a server application and is using Postgres. Aside from that, there are likely…

No problem; I saw 8base at one of the GraphQL conferences, looks cool. I agree: PostGraphile is intended for people who want to control their own servers (be that via serverless, containers, Heroku, or traditional servers).

Thanks Benjie, would love to connect with you at GraphQL Summit in San Francisco if you are attending in October. Let me know!

Re: Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

#62

Post by asantalo »

lisasheeran wrote: post #47
asantalo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you Lisa! Yes, you have a great vantage point, having met us about a year ago. We have been heads-down!

yes, and with years of experience watching so many startups go out too early to tell their story fully and with all their ducks lined up.Good job

Thanks Lisa. Patience is a virtue! I have never had a lot of it but with a self-service product, We are competing against the entire Internet and none of us have the time to fiddle with half baked products.

Re: Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

#63

Post by asantalo »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #51
asantalo wrote: post #2

Albert from 8base here: Between my last two companies, we raised over 100-million in VC capital that all got spent on hiring massive engineering and sales teams. I always had this dream about starting up a company that could grow exponentially with an agile team, relying on a self-service product that was so awesome it sold itself. And, that it would simplify software development for developers and businesses who rel…

I'm curious why pay for your product, when I could just use Hasura for free + the instance it's running on? Edit: I might use it if it had a freemium model not just trial. I often play w/ new technologies, forget about em, come back try em again and stick w/ the ones that stick in my mindshare, but a trial doesn't allow me that freedom -- at least for hobby projects.

Great question. 8base's developer experience is different than Hasura's, including that we provision infrastructure so that devs aren't required to have AWS/Heroku/other skills nor pay for that separately. Ease of use is a big thing. There's significant differences in the GraphQL engine itself, role-based-security, integrations of external systems and more. Our roadmaps will diverge dramatically in the next 12 months as 8base rolls out more and more application infrastructure services.

Another way to put it is that Hasura is mostly about enabling GraphQL on Postgres; 8base is the backend for powerful, enterprise-grade (when necessary) software. GraphQL is an essential design detail for us but not the business or product itself.

Regarding your comment about freemium; I've seen many backend products falter, pivot, and shut down from having unsustainable business models. We are offering a robust plan for $8 / month to start. If developers agree with us that their DX is better, then $8 shouldn't be an issue as their time is more costly. But we appreciate what you are saying and are watching this closely.

Re: Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

#64

Post by asantalo »

dosh1965 wrote: post #60
codebeast wrote: post #12

Super stoked to see 8base out here. I love JAMstack and I love how 8base fills up the data layer for my JAMstack projects nicely. You will know what I am talking about if you have spent days trying to setup a GraphQL backend for JAMstack project. I wrote about how I use 8base for JAMstack on CSS Tricks few months ago https://css-tricks.com/hey-lets-create-a-functional-calendar... . I use 8base extensively and happy t…

Easily helps with API integration challenges thru the GraphQL layer. For example, using a simple endpoint I can translate an image with a text overlay (constructed using a Cloudinary API) from English to any language (I'm in Spain at a conference now, so it's gotta be Spanish) like: Input: https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_500/l_text:Ar... Output: https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_500/l_text…

Thanks dosh1965, we love the things people have done with Cloudinary and 8base. Glad to see were are supporting in Barecelona!

Re: Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

#65

Post by andric »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #51
asantalo wrote: post #2

Albert from 8base here: Between my last two companies, we raised over 100-million in VC capital that all got spent on hiring massive engineering and sales teams. I always had this dream about starting up a company that could grow exponentially with an agile team, relying on a self-service product that was so awesome it sold itself. And, that it would simplify software development for developers and businesses who rel…

I'm curious why pay for your product, when I could just use Hasura for free + the instance it's running on? Edit: I might use it if it had a freemium model not just trial. I often play w/ new technologies, forget about em, come back try em again and stick w/ the ones that stick in my mindshare, but a trial doesn't allow me that freedom -- at least for hobby projects.

Second this.

A timed trial just feels weird. I like that Heroku, Netlify, Contentful, and Firebase have a free tier, so I can use it for small demos and to learn the platform. If I have to pay for every single tutorial or playground project I won‘t want to use the platform or even want to learn it.

It also kind of disincentivizes teachers on online platforms (like Udemy) to teach it. Because you often need to go through a few examples in order to learn something. i.e. if I do a node.js course, the course author isn’t just going to make me build 1 practice app, I’m probably gonna build a few and then host them on Heroku free dyno, the same way if I take a React course, I’m gonna build a few practice apps and host them on Netlify.

Re: Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

#66

Post by andric »

asantalo wrote: post #63
gremlinsinc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why pay for your product, when I could just use Hasura for free + the instance it's running on? Edit: I might use it if it had a freemium model not just trial. I often play w/ new technologies, forget about em, come back try em again and stick w/ the ones that stick in my mindshare, but a trial doesn't allow me that freedom -- at least for hobby projects.

Great question. 8base's developer experience is different than Hasura's, including that we provision infrastructure so that devs aren't required to have AWS/Heroku/other skills nor pay for that separately. Ease of use is a big thing. There's significant differences in the GraphQL engine itself, role-based-security, integrations of external systems and more. Our roadmaps will diverge dramatically in the next 12 months…

Being sustainable is important, but not at the expense of people’s ability to tinker/learn.

At the very least, offer a highly-limited and almost-crippled free tier, like Heroku or Glide does. Maybe you can only register a few users. Maybe the # of function calls are limited to a few a day. Or maybe dormant apps go to sleep.

Re: Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

#67

Post by asantalo »

andric wrote: post #65
gremlinsinc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why pay for your product, when I could just use Hasura for free + the instance it's running on? Edit: I might use it if it had a freemium model not just trial. I often play w/ new technologies, forget about em, come back try em again and stick w/ the ones that stick in my mindshare, but a trial doesn't allow me that freedom -- at least for hobby projects.

Second this. A timed trial just feels weird. I like that Heroku, Netlify, Contentful, and Firebase have a free tier, so I can use it for small demos and to learn the platform. If I have to pay for every single tutorial or playground project I won‘t want to use the platform or even want to learn it. It also kind of disincentivizes teachers on online platforms (like Udemy) to teach it. Because you often need to go thro…

Andric, this is great feedback and we appreciate it. As you probably know, pricing is a bit of an experiment as a company evolves so we are listening 100%.

Re: Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

#68

Post by asantalo »

andric wrote: post #66
asantalo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question. 8base's developer experience is different than Hasura's, including that we provision infrastructure so that devs aren't required to have AWS/Heroku/other skills nor pay for that separately. Ease of use is a big thing. There's significant differences in the GraphQL engine itself, role-based-security, integrations of external systems and more. Our roadmaps will diverge dramatically in the next 12 months…

Being sustainable is important, but not at the expense of people’s ability to tinker/learn. At the very least, offer a highly-limited and almost-crippled free tier, like Heroku or Glide does. Maybe you can only register a few users. Maybe the # of function calls are limited to a few a day. Or maybe dormant apps go to sleep.

Yes, we will consider these and welcome other ideas.

Re: Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

#69

Post by andric »

asantalo wrote: post #67
andric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second this. A timed trial just feels weird. I like that Heroku, Netlify, Contentful, and Firebase have a free tier, so I can use it for small demos and to learn the platform. If I have to pay for every single tutorial or playground project I won‘t want to use the platform or even want to learn it. It also kind of disincentivizes teachers on online platforms (like Udemy) to teach it. Because you often need to go thro…

Andric, this is great feedback and we appreciate it. As you probably know, pricing is a bit of an experiment as a company evolves so we are listening 100%.

Thank you for the quick response! You guys are building something really cool, I have no doubt that once you figure out pricing it has the potential to go viral.

I’m a product/frontend guy who’s trying to build a side project, and backend stuff has always been a PITA for me to figure out.

Right now I’m torn between investing time to learn AWS Amplify, or investing time to learn 8base.

8base has already captured my imagination, and I can’t wait to go further with learning it. Unfortunately I feel uncomfortable creating a few projects to practice and then later being shut out of them or be forced to pay $8/mth.

Re: Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End

#70

Post by gremlinsinc »

asantalo wrote: post #67
andric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second this. A timed trial just feels weird. I like that Heroku, Netlify, Contentful, and Firebase have a free tier, so I can use it for small demos and to learn the platform. If I have to pay for every single tutorial or playground project I won‘t want to use the platform or even want to learn it. It also kind of disincentivizes teachers on online platforms (like Udemy) to teach it. Because you often need to go thro…

Andric, this is great feedback and we appreciate it. As you probably know, pricing is a bit of an experiment as a company evolves so we are listening 100%.

Yeah that's basically my point when there's a new shiny framework or even a headless cms or something, we (devs) like to test it out a bit, and we might come back to it 5-10 times before actually pulling the trigger and using the service.

Even all the major cloud platforms have free tiers for this reason - to get devs hooked on their platform so there is no other option they'd rather use.

Not saying the free tier should be outrageous... maybe 100MB and 10k requests per month or something small like that.

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