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Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

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Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#71

Post by prr »

samcrawford wrote: post #61
lsv1 wrote: post #59

What makes this better than using the Google Docs API? I could have anyone write to a spreadsheet and in turn it would be updated when called on their API. In fact I do that for many small business clients of mine which don't want to deal with databases for things like their product catalog and pricing lists. Additionally you get version control, busier sites get the google doc scraped X times a minute as to not reac…

For me, as the author: - Simplicity. It's fine for you to create an API via Google Docs, but I suspect it'd be tough for your (presumably) non-technical clients. - Generated API docs - Granular control of who sees what data and APIs - Usage tracking (see who's using your APIs/data and how often) - Easy integration for API clients: example code, no messing around with authenticating their Google account I don't think…

Also, size limits. https://support.google.com/drive/answer/37603?hl=en

It seems as though you offer double the 100M file size limit on your free plan?

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#72

Post by emocakes »

nodesocket wrote: post #68
tn13 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correct English spelling is Organisation. People in America using American version of English tend to spell it as Organization.

Nearly almost every American spells it organization.

nearly every American is spelling it wrong then, no surprise there though.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#73

Post by hopeless »

nodesocket wrote: post #62

Honestly I think you are giving away too much on the free plan. You should try removing the free plan and have pricing like: Hobby => $8 Business => $29 Enterprise => Contact Also, where are you located, since I noticed that you spell organization as organisation. :-)

Honestly, I'd scrap everything up to $29/mth and change the pricing basis from MB and number of queries (people who use spreadsheets have no real understanding of this) to number of spreadsheets.

I remember working for Deutsche Bank 15yrs ago when one Excel spreadsheet could make them millions of £/day — don't be afraid to charge a decent amount! People who care about data, have spreadsheets, and need some interoperability will not baulk at $29, $50 or even $200/mth. And if they're giving you a decent income, they'll trust that you'll be around for longer.

Would you expect a bank (or accountant, or FMCG company) to trust a critical part of their process to a free or £12/mth service? Hell, no.

But perhaps part of the problem is that you've build a cool thing but don't know exactly who your customers should be. When you figure that out you'll be able to write more compelling copy and price it appropriately.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#74

Post by apcherry »

emocakes wrote: post #72
nodesocket wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly almost every American spells it organization.

nearly every American is spelling it wrong then, no surprise there though.

Actually it doesn't matter - either version is correct, and in fact English spelling used organize long before it was adopted by the US.

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/03/ize-or-ise/

In fact it appears more to be laziness on the part of the UK english. Whilst the 'ize' form is derived from the greek endings, certain english verbs had to end with 'ise'. As we were too lazy to remember which ended 'ize' or 'ise' we just took the pragmatic approach and used 'ise' version for all of them.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#77

Post by samcrawford »

dqmdm2 wrote: post #76

Anything open source that does any part of what Sheetlabs does?

The closest thing I'm aware of is this: https://github.com/arcturus/node-csv2api

Edit: I should add that Sheetlabs uses loads of open source goodies under the hood. For converting inputs we use libreoffice for XLS to CSV and xslx2csv for XLSX files to CSV files.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#79

Post by sejordan »

sunsu wrote: post #52

Really cool!....Unfortunately, no business is ever going to "build APIs on top of their existing spreadsheets".

I actually think I'll be using this quite soon. I've also shown it to an excited PM, who thinks this could be useful for some clients that have been building reports from spreadsheets.

For me, I think there's a great use case for prototyping applications with a spreadsheet. I don't intend to build a service that exposes spreadsheet data as an external facing API.

Re: Show HN: Sheetlabs – Turn your spreadsheets into APIs

#80

Post by samcrawford »

chatmasta wrote: post #54

This is really cool, and a nice implementation. My question is about target customers. Presumably, you have two sides to this: non-devs writing and uploading the spreadsheet, and devs writing a client to to consume its API. I would imagine these two parties would be in the same company. e.g., Sales team wants some analytics dashboards written over their spreadsheets. So they upload a sheet and give it the API to devs…

Your two sides scenario tallies with my own, except I'd imagine they're not usually part of the same company (but other people will have different use cases, of course).

In your example, you could absolutely use an existing CSV or XLS parser to do this. The problem is that you're now responsible for making sure that you've got the latest data, have parsed it, and have imported it. As a developer, Sheetlabs allows you to put the onus back on the data publisher to ensure that they're giving you the latest data. Plus it's in an easier to consume format too!

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