71–80 of 91 posts
I literally just had the idea for something like this yesterday. Congratulations on beating me to it!
1. Why would I trust that this will stick around if I make a business on this? 2. Why would I pay someone to "generate IDs" at $1/10k requests? 3. If the DB API was performant and supported full SQL, it looks like it would cost $business I know of two orders of magnitude more than current cloud spend to switch to it. (They would not, because of compliance.) For whom is this the right pricing model for? I compared the…
1. How do you trust any startup is going to be around in the future? You can't know for sure, but something about the product calls out to you. Luckily all our services are "source available" here https://github.com/micro. Meaning if the company ever went under, you could go ahead and reuse these. We'd obviously change the licensing as required. Otherwise, we're also happy to license this technology to anyone who wants to run it themselves. Its just not "open source" by the traditional measure.
2. Maybe you wouldn't, or maybe you would depending on what kind of IDs you want to generate and how inconvenient it is for you to do otherwise. Snowflake IDs aren't the easiest to create, they require backend clustered coordination and uniqueness. But alas pricing is an art so all of this will likely change over time and be made much cheaper as we get more feedback like this.
3. If someone is looking for full SQL, they should go spin up a managed SQL database, this isn't that. We see this as a super simple and convenient persistent data storage layer that might work really well for frontend or people who were otherwise big fans of mongodb for that simplicity. It's just our first shot at some sort of CRUD layer.
4. You're right, we should do better on this. Firstly we're not selling your data and we only store whats needed purely from a customer perspective. We offload a lot of credit card and transaction processing to stripe so don't store that directly either. The product is in beta, so no SLAs just yet. Everything else, we're just learning and evolving so hopefully with helpful prodding like this we can do better.
1. Why would I trust that this will stick around if I make a business on this? 2. Why would I pay someone to "generate IDs" at $1/10k requests? 3. If the DB API was performant and supported full SQL, it looks like it would cost $business I know of two orders of magnitude more than current cloud spend to switch to it. (They would not, because of compliance.) For whom is this the right pricing model for? I compared the…
Thanks for the questioning. I'll do my best to answer. 1. How do you trust any startup is going to be around in the future? You can't know for sure, but something about the product calls out to you. Luckily all our services are "source available" here https://github.com/micro . Meaning if the company ever went under, you could go ahead and reuse these. We'd obviously change the licensing as required. Otherwise, we're…
But I see that as a challenge too, your target market is very limited. It is really cool product from dev or engineer perspective but I am not sure how you will go beyond individual developers. I think by posting your service here you might get a bias opinion, what would be really cool is if you target people who are learning to code and couple this service with that, it adds lot of value. Joy of getting an API working as a junior dev acts like a positive stimuli and your APIs are built for that. I dont think it is built for serious apps and services because the liability is high and it is very competitive too.
Love the initiative; I'm sure you'll run into some of the same lessons that I've learned building Saasify: https://transitivebullsh.it/saasify-vc-feedback Happy to chat further about this space if you're interested && keep up the great work building for devs
Would be cool to have a really lightweight auth service for registering and logging in. Could still be ephemeral on the order of hours. This seems like it would be easy to monetize (if that were desired) by just increasing quotas / limits, or adding certain features to any particular API that made QOL better.
I'm working on a product in the auth space, would love to know a bit more about your use case... also, why would you want ephemeral auth?
I'm probably missing something - some of these APIs I get, but some just seem useless. Why do I need an API to convert images? Find emojis? Convert "John" to "Hello John"? (ok the helloworld service is just a demo.) I can do that on the client using Javascript. Moreover, why this instead of something like AWS Lambda, where you code your own service? Instead of prebuilt APIs, why not make it more general? Don't get me…
This is actually SUPER useful because it means you can upload one master image and have the API automatically generate thumbnails, hover states, text overlays, face-detected cropping, effects, shapes, source sets, WEBP versions, etc. And then it manages all the caching, invalidations, CDNs, etc. too. It fits really well into serverless architectures where you don't want to have to maintain and scale your own backend instance of ImageMagick or similar. It turns hours of work into seconds.
But it's also a pretty mature field: Imgix and Cloudinary both do this much more powerfully and much cheaper. 10,000 cropped images (say, for thumbnails) would cost $100 on Micro but be free or nearly so on either Imgix and Cloudinary.
For the more complex APIs (like images, ironically), I would rather trust one of the bigger companies that have been doing that -- and only that -- for years, with more forgiving pricing.
For simpler APIs, I'd just build it as a serverless functions straight in Cloudflare Workers or similar. Much cheaper, probably faster and more reliable infrastructure, and scalable.
Do you have a roadmap for the API's you'll be adding?
Hey we don't yet have one to publicly share but will happily put one up if more people are interested with potentially user ranked priority so we get to the most requested ones first.
If it is guaranteed to stay micro, what are the migration paths to go to something less micro? Will Micro Services, Inc help me in that path?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the questioning. I'll do my best to answer. 1. How do you trust any startup is going to be around in the future? You can't know for sure, but something about the product calls out to you. Luckily all our services are "source available" here https://github.com/micro . Meaning if the company ever went under, you could go ahead and reuse these. We'd obviously change the licensing as required. Otherwise, we're…
I can give you an argument from end user perspective. It is quite some hassle to setup an AWS instances or services, you always have a feeling you are doing something wrong. With your service, it suits my needs as an individual dev. But I see that as a challenge too, your target market is very limited. It is really cool product from dev or engineer perspective but I am not sure how you will go beyond individual devel…
I think those people would get more value/experience from more integrated solutions/platforms of the "no code" family.