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Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
111–118 of 118 posts
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can second that. I prefer password logins over magic links via email. It adds too much friction. I can understand that it might be easier for people who are not using a password manager. For most services I prefer a combination of password and authy-based 2FA. For very specific purposes, some kind of hardware-based authentication, for example with yubikeys makes sense.
Magic links are great because they essentially eliminate ATO attacks and allow startups to bypass SAML requirements by delegating to the mail provider. I’m 100% willing to forgo efficiency gains of passwords and managers as both a user and developer.
All you're doing is punting your security to my email provider. It's annoying how many companies assume I have absolute trust in my ISP/Google/Miscrosoft/IT.
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#113I really don't see who this is for.
It seems like I have to build most of the important things manually, like the SQL queries, and it doesn't look like anything is typed or checked. So in the end, this seems like it would only be useful for extremely simple things(like sending a message to slack when a customer signs up, or something), but that is already only a few lines of code in javascript, making the value proposition of this rather dubious to me. Especially considering that I can either a) be vendor locked into this platform and completely dependent on what it can and can't do, while all the important bits of my code are smeared all over your visual editing tool or b) write a few lines of typescript which isn't going anywhere, runs anywhere, etc etc.
> We’re low-code fans ourselves and believe it’s sometimes underappreciated how much complexity existing solutions can already handle
Just because you can stuff complexity into a thing, that doesn't automatically make it a good idea. These low code solutions scale extremely poorly(in terms of usability and maintainability) as complexity grows.
Also, is the integrated database maximum size really only 8GB for all tiers? That seems laughably small, especially considering the price you are asking past a few actions. The pricing model really seems to put you in a place where the customers you are going to get are only going to be small fish that need to send themselves text messages a few times a month, or something like that. No enterprise is going to blow $29k a month on 2 million serverless calls and an 8 gigabyte database when they can pay a single developer a fraction of that for a week of development time and a few bucks a month for serverless functions and a managed DB solution such as supabase.
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#114My question is: who is the intended customer? As a software dev who is confident with coding I would not use this because I don't want to lock myself to a platform (vendor lock-in). Someone who is a rookie might use it but it seems that it requires more than basic knowleadge (e.g. REST, SQL, auth, etc).
I started playing around with it and came to the conclusion that it needs a bit more development before it’s ready for me.
My use case: I’ve been meaning to build a simple backend for a chatbot that’s active in a community I frequent. The functions I want to add to the chatbot are just for fun, and my time on this is 100% voluntary. All I need is a backend to handle two types of requests, one which inserts a record into a persistent data store, and one which retrieves the count of records associated to the requesting user + the date of the first and the most recent records.
There’s nothing there that I don’t know how to code and deploy. But even the time it would cost me to compare prices of the various services which offer backend hosting is more than my little use case is worth. Then I still have to figure out the deployment path for my code, and stamp out the code itself.
The 1000 requests per month + 50k db records you get for free from this service would have been more than enough for what I’m doing. But unfortunately the functionality that I need isn’t quite there yet.
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#115This is so awesome, congrats on the launch. You have made a lot of this quite usable. A while back I started working on something similar (app.stitchbits.co). How do you plan on widening the breadth of integrations?
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#116This is awesome, I am building a visual tool to build frontend workflows, I'd love to talk to you to see where we can match.
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magic links are great because they essentially eliminate ATO attacks and allow startups to bypass SAML requirements by delegating to the mail provider. I’m 100% willing to forgo efficiency gains of passwords and managers as both a user and developer.
> essentially eliminate ATO attacks They kinda increase the blast radius of an ATO attack on your email account, though.
Replying too late, most likely. But with access to your email account someone could reset your password to what they want it to be and gain access.
Re: Launch HN: Fastgen (YC W23) – Visual Low-Code Backend Builder
#118if i cannot export the code as nodejs or some programming lan raw code , this is a big lock in risk and noway i will use it in a serious project