Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder

Hi HN! I’m Constantin and together with my co-founders David and Mike we’re building Fastgen, a low code API and workflow builder with an integrated Postgres DB. You can use it to quickly build any custom business logic, cron jobs or complete backends.

We just launched our public beta, you can try it out here: https://fastgen.com/. You can find demo videos https://youtu.be/O9IM7rLYIQU and https://youtu.be/Hc1CYJDEDQw.

At our previous company, a student financing platform, we built several internal and external facing tools and encountered how tedious it can be to create and maintain myriads of APIs/CRUD operations. We especially felt that when building for edge cases and “what if” scenarios, as well as integrating with lots of third party services which receive, update and return data. In our case, a custom servicing platform which handled student repayments had to account for different student categories and repayment plans, while factoring in data we received from our KYC and ACH banking partners for each student. With Fastgen we try to eliminate boilerplate code and make it easier to adjust and share your work in a visual environment.

We’re low-code fans ourselves and believe it’s sometimes underappreciated how much complexity existing solutions can already handle, and we are excited to contribute to that market. The low-code space is crowded with front-end tools, but with a comparatively small number of backend tools. There is lots of busywork that comes with setting up a backend; we remove that busywork. Also, most low-code tools restrict users in what they are able to do. Our goal is to provide you with the flexibility and control inherent in coding, while still making it easier to use and faster to deploy.

In Fastgen you sequence 'actions' to form rest APIs and workflows through a drag-and-drop interface. Actions are essentially functions that perform specific tasks such as sending an HTTP request, checking for conditions or interacting with a database.

We support SQL for database operations, JSON for data structure, and comparison operators similar to JavaScript for decision-making in workflows. Everything you create can be deployed and tested instantly in the platform and will be hosted for you. Fastgen has a 'Debug Mode' that gives insights into the step-by-step execution of workflows. This aids in pinpointing issues and optimizing workflow performance.

While some users have created backends for full MVPs with us, others use the platform to build automations for their data/operations teams. For example, one team was missing functionality in Pipedrive for their sales team, so they created a sequence of conditions and HTTP requests to the Pipedrive API to create their own custom lead recycling process.

Other things our users have done include the creation of KYC onboarding flows, a Chinese translation app using ChatGPT, an API that retrieves a company’s financial filings from the SEC for a crowdfunding platform, a cron job that checks for the health status of all other APIs in a code base, a categorizer of well performing product launches, a sitemap checker for a SEO project, and others.

We would love for you to try out the platform and are excited for your thoughts and feedback in the comments!

Very cool!

Congrats on the launch, really nice product! How does this differ from existing solutions like hasura or similar?

I signed up and want to try it out. The one thing on the account creation page that absolutely grinds my gears, though, are the password requirements. Some use pass phrases. Please please please consider changing these rules, and use 2FA as a security guarantee instead.

It makes me dread that I'm going to get a mandatory password reset demand in a month, at which point I have to revert to cycling between insecure password versions.

From the landing page, this looks great! Can I still connect to the underlying postgres database directly?