My startup currently does this. Not as an API. I have different sheets set to populate different firebase relatime databases on a build script. I think it's the right way to go for early startups because then everyone can help build the product. I will be setting it up for our translation dictionaries.
Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
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Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#72Funny 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…
Sounds neat, let me ask permission first before I put company data into Google Sheets.
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#73I love this. I recently had an idea for an app that would allow people to share their favorite things with other people, and i left that exploration thinking how amazing it'd be to build lots of apps on Google Sheets as the backend - you own the data, it has sharing built in..etc. so not just google sheets as the backend, google sheets as your personal backend for you instance of the app.
I made a family app with similar scope using Glide and I’ve been using it with my family for several years now.
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#74I use BaseQL which is a GraphQL layer for Airtable. It's worked for 3 years. For performance reasons after we translated our catalog we had to put in postgres + hasura as middleware but we still use BaseQL all over. It's rad.
https://www.baseql.com/
Being able to get data joined across sheets is priceless.
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#75I 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…
> 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
Isn't this one of the use cases for Airtable?
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#76Great 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.…
curl is good for isolating issues. Here's requests to https://zerosheets.com & https://www.zerosheets.com: https://gist.github.com/Buzer/67adedefe59f9efdf3b16b0b8def11...
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#77Is the Google Sheets API rate limit open enough for actual production use? I thought it was pretty restrictive, no more than 60 writes per minute, but I'm not sure about the reads restrictions.
Yes. I used Google sheets as a database to build a website and ran into this issue. The worse part is, if you come across the limit there’s not much you can do but wait or rate limit.
Another problem I had is an API change one year in.
I would not use Google Sheets again. Maybe I’d try Airtable, Notion, or some other similar platform where the API access is more of a priority to the company.
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't you cache the reads? Not many usages really require real-time from their data store.
Do you really want to deal with caching logic for what should be a simple API call? Sounds like a convincing argument to use whatever this product is.
It's max a couple of hours work to cache in some local database like sqlite or in memory.
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#79I did something very similar with https://github.com/kellpossible/avalanche-report/ we started with Google Sheets because it allowed us to quickly iterate with data entry workflow. When paired with a server this also allowed us to generate custom charts/diagrams via the IMAGE function with a crafted URL query. Reads are cached in a local sqlite database.
We're in the process of migrating away from Google Sheets now as it's a little painful to set up and it's impossible to completely prevent users from editing the wrong fields in our use case. But it has served very well so far and would highly recommend this approach to start with for anyone!
Re: Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
#80My next user script project idea would require something like this. It's for my own use, but I have to fill out grade sheets using an incredibly painful web UI. The data would be far more easily entered into a spreadsheet. (That's exactly what they used to use, but in order to make things "easier" the school implemented a horrific parody of an ultra basic CRUD web app...) So I want to make a user script that reads fr…
If you’re using Google sheets then yeah you’ll have to do a normal oauth flow. Alternatively you could use excel and write a simple macro to automate the flow. The easiest thing IMO would be to skip the complicated part of the script (auth) and just copy and paste the values from the clipboard and process the data accordingly.