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Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

zerosheets.com

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Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#22

Post by btown »

joaovcoliveira wrote: post #12
maliker wrote: post #5

Great concept. Congrats on launching. Do you have a sense for how much usage Google will allow on a given sheet or user? I.e. will Google shut down the API after a certain usage level? (Side-note, your SSL cert seems to be having trouble, i.e. www.zerosheets.com is correctly encrypted, zerosheets.com is not.)

Hello!! Google limits for me are: 300 Read requests per minute 300 Write request per minute Since Ive just launched it, that number is far far away from being reach. (If it happens, the number can be increased). Regarding the SSL cert, some other users pointed the problem but I can`t replicated. Tried with many different browsers. Im not sure about whats happening, it`s always working for me but I will keep digging.…

Have you thought about auto-installing https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/triggers into the connected sheet, and maintaining a cache of the data that you invalidate onEdit? Would likely improve read latency dramatically, though it would make reads eventually-consistent.

To others seeing this - has anyone else ever tried this approach? Are there players out there who do this and have SOC II etc. data security measures?

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#23

Post by nativeit »

I was exploring some alternatives for templating and CMSs a few days ago, and stumbled over NPR’s internal toolkit[1] for publishing articles with data, charts, visualizations, etc., and thought it was interesting that they included Google-Sheets-as-a-CMS.

1. https://github.com/nprapps/dailygraphics-next

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#24

Post by altdataseller »

I rather use Google Sheets as the front end of my app. Have it call endpoints in my backend and populate the sheet with the data, and auto-generate charts based on that data. Easy, no-nonsense dashboard. Add in some dropdown menus and inputs and you got yourself a good enuff frontend

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#27

Post by vhiremath4 »

Funny story. Before pivoting my startup to Loom, we were a user testing company named Opentest. Instead of spinning up a DB and creating a dashboard for my co-founders to look at who requested certain user tests, I just dumped everything into a Google Sheet. It was so good. No downtime. Open access. Only 3 people looking/editing, so no conflict. Didn't have to deal with database upgrades or maintenance. I often think about this decision and feel like I've learned a bunch of "good engineering practices" that pale in comparison to how being truly scrappy can be a genius unlock at any level.

Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

#28

Post by eeue56 »

I recently made a full web app using only AppsScript and Google Sheets as the database, and wrote about it here [0], and open sourced it here [1]. It was a novel experience, but I felt particularly compelled by the idea of having a data store than non-devs can easily interact with while having a web app in front of it that didn't require a server to be set up. But, AppsScript is too slow for this kinda thing to be a nice experience. Zerosheets looks nice, and I'll investigate it further if I look into this idea again!

- [0] https://thetechenabler.substack.com/i/142898781/making-a-sim...

- [1] https://github.com/eeue56/simple-link-aggregator

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