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Show HN: Polybit – Build, Deploy, Host Node.js APIs
- joshstrange 10y agoThis looks really interesting but I personally really dislike the pricing, maybe others will love it but to me it's nearly impossible to guess how much this will cost me. When I start a new project I have no clue how many requests or queries will be made. I get the advantage of not working about infrastructure but I'd rather pay a flat fee and then be able to scale up to handle more requests.
- keithwhor 10y agoGreat to have this feedback! Nothing's set in stone yet. This is what we're launching with but I'm sure there's a good chance we'll have something more palatable for you down the line, if you're interested! :)
- ThatMightBePaul 10y agoCongrats Keith :D I've met Keith a few weeks ago at the NodeJS NYC meetup. Great dude, who genuinely wants to make development better. Polybit seems particularly cool for front-end / designers, mobile devs, and anyone else who'd rather build an app than fret over the high availability, scalability, or etc. What I'm saying is: cool idea + Keith's very approachable if ya wanna pick his brain about the design :) Hope this goes well for ya dude!
- petercooper 10y agoI want to second this. There is no doubting Keith's enthusiasm and attitude for both development and helping end users. If you have any questions or issues to raise, I'm pretty sure Keith will do his best :-)
- keithwhor 10y agoI'm flattered! Thank you so much.
- jamesjyu 10y agoKeith is awesome. I've met him a few times to chat about Polybit and he is seriously dedicated to making a great developer product and solving the pain of standing up a backend API.
- keithwhor 10y agoThanks :). The truth to anybody reading is that James is the awesome one. Since I first met him early this year to talk about his experience at Parse, he's been one of the most supportive people I've met in Silicon Valley to date. If I can give a piece of advice to other early founders: it's tough, it never seems to magically get easy, but there are truly awesome people out there willing to help. Still a long road ahead, but I'm very, very grateful to everybody who has helped make Polybit a reality so far (mentors, advisors, and especially the developer community).
- HemanHeartYou 10y agoJust kiss already.
- CLei 10y agoAwesome website design, the fact I register using command linea is extremelly cool. Nice touch
- throwawayReply 10y agoI'm on Windows/Firefox the console only echoes back missing characters.
- keithwhor 10y agoApologies! I'll look into this ASAP. Don't spend enough time bug testing on Windows these days. :)
- webXL 10y agoPretty cool stuff. I got stuck a bit in the registration though. I always use a password manager and paste in my passwords. It's telling me it doesn't like my 16 character password because it needs to be 5 or more, and when I paste it, it's in cleartext.
- keithwhor 10y agoAh! Yeah, copy and paste issue. Don't have a handler for that for the console. Will fix it as soon as I can. Thank you for catching that!
- mxuribe 10y agoThe premise of this is a great idea. The sign up is pretty neat - def. suited to expected audience/users. However, no pricing info? I'll come back once pricing is displayed.
- saganus 10y agoI didn't found the pricing info either until I played around in the terminal, which gives us this: $ pricing Polybit offers pay-as-you-go services. Action | Cost ---------------------|--------------------------- API Request | 1 Credit Database Query | 1 Credit - FREE in Beta Project Deployment | 10 Credits - FREE in Beta Create New Project | 50 Credits Create New Database | 50 Credits Package | Credits | Price ---------|-----------------|--------------------------------- | 1,000 (x2) | FREE - Received on Registration 1 | 10,000 (x2) | $9 2 | 100,000 (x2) | $49 3 | 1,000,000 (x2) | $249 4 | 10,000,000 (x2) | $999 Limited time - purchase now with `purchase <package>` while we're in beta, receive 2x the credit Edit: Well...formatting sucks since I just copy-pasted. But it's somewhat readable I hope
- netcraft 10y agoconfused about what x2 means?
- kornish 10y agoIt means you get 2x the credits because they're in beta. So presumably 10,000 (x2) means for the price on the right column, you'd get 20,000 credits. Just a guess.
- keithwhor 10y agoThis is exactly what it means. :) We're early and we're super grateful for anybody who's willing to test drive the services. I expect I'll be giving away a lot of free use to active early adopters.
- franciscop 10y agoTotally broken for me (after writing "Register"): http://imgur.com/a/cYtZz http://imgur.com/a/cYtZz Browser: Firefox 47 (default browser) Extensions: AdBlockPlus, LastPass OS: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
- keithwhor 10y agoYeah, some other users are reporting issues with Firefox. Putting out some other fires at the moment. Hang tight! Thanks so much for your patience and for trying it out (and reporting the errors)!
- mgrennan 10y agoVery COOL! As a DBA, as fare as I'm concerned this is how databases should be used. NO! application should contain SQL. SQL should ONLY be in an API.
- crisopolis 10y agoWhat does being a DBA, Databases and SQL have to do with this Platform as a Service?
- michaelbuckbee 10y agoI think parent was trying to express approval for Polybit's "API First" philosophy - which would result in a situation where Apps call APIs which call Databases. Their experience as a DBA being what led them to this conclusion.
- asimuvPR 10y agoBug report: REPL on https://polybit.com/ https://polybit.com/ fails to display fonts. See [1] for a screenshot. Firefox 47.0 on OSX. [1]http://i.imgur.com/ty8PZT9.png http://i.imgur.com/ty8PZT9.png The console logs the keydown events per pconsole.js line number 308. I see the keys I pressed but nothing shows up. keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "h", charCode: 0, keyCode: 72 } pconsole.js:308:5 keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "e", charCode: 0, keyCode: 69 } pconsole.js:308:5 keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "l", charCode: 0, keyCode: 76 } pconsole.js:308:5 keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "l", charCode: 0, keyCode: 76 } pconsole.js:308:5 keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "o", charCode: 0, keyCode: 79 } pconsole.js:308:5 keydown { target: <textarea>, key: " ", charCode: 0, keyCode: 32 } pconsole.js:308:5 keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "w", charCode: 0, keyCode: 87 } pconsole.js:308:5 keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "o", charCode: 0, keyCode: 79 } pconsole.js:308:5 keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "r", charCode: 0, keyCode: 82 } pconsole.js:308:5 keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "l", charCode: 0, keyCode: 76 } pconsole.js:308:5 keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "d", charCode: 0, keyCode: 68 } pconsole.js:308:5 :)
- unchaotic 10y agoIntrigued by the whois information :) Creation Date: 20-dec-1999 Expiration Date: 20-dec-2025
- udkl 10y agoI'm reminded in some sense of RoR/CakePHP with scaffolding. What are some other tools that provide similar functionality ?
- Roodgorf 10y agoI'm confused on my credit balance after signing up. The pricing printout shows a 1,000(x2) for the registration tier, and below the table seems to indicate that these (x2) markers represent the double credit offer for beta users. However, the account I just registered shows a balance of only 1,000 credits. Is the credit bonus only applied to credits which were paid for? If so the (x2) in the first row is a bit misleading. That being said, I'm excited to check out this service and don't mean to complain about getting something for free.
- keithwhor 10y agoMy bad. Misprint. Happy to honor it though, and give you an extra 1,000 credits. This goes to anybody on HN - E-mail me (keith at polybit) with the e-mail you used to sign up and I'll add the credits by the end of the day!
- Roodgorf 10y agoOh, no need, I figured it was a misprint and just wanted to make sure you didn't get any unexpected complaints about it. Thank you for being so cool about it though!
- kimmshibal 10y agoDo you have bug bounty? :)
- keithwhor 10y agoPolybit Credits perhaps. Mind emailing me with your find?
- johns 10y agoLove the idea. I think you really need an about page though. People need to know why they can't trust you.
- frank_jaeger 10y ago>People need to know why they can't trust you. Why can't people trust him? Seems like a good guy to me.
- mmanfrin 10y agoLooks very similar to Zeit: https://zeit.co/ https://zeit.co/
- crisopolis 10y agoZeit (now) doesn't have database related stuff... then again why have your database mismanaged by a non-DBA PaaS?
- joshdickson 10y agoNode JS developer here. The idea of the project is great. It can be difficult to get folks up to speed on various Node JS topics, and one of the big ones (like with any code deployed on a web framework, really) is getting people up to speed on deployment. Anything that is working on making that easier, especially for new/young developers, is great. That being said, I really do not like the pricing strategy because I think it completely incentivizes bad behavior and optimizing your API/apps for weird things at anything past micro-project scale. Things like when database queries happen are also not entirely opaque to developers, especially new developers, which is going to lead to them not understanding charges (for instance, would a new developer understand that on a fairly basic installation of Passport and Express, every page request, logged in or not, would result in DB activity as Passport tries to figure out if the session is logged in or not? That's likely to far overshadow the single API credit needed for the API hit.) I think that Heroku's free tier would be much more attractive for small projects, and for anyone more advanced than that, a $5 Digital Ocean droplet is simple enough to learn very basic server administration and quickly deploy your application. There are a number of other Node platforms (Modulus) who will give you good service for < $15/month. I think it would make a lot more sense to structure this more like EC2's burstable instances, which accrue CPU credits for times when they do not run at their allotted CPU, and then can expend those credits to burst above that CPU for smaller amounts of time. That achieves a lot of the good things you're working on, but doesn't push people toward minimizing trips to and from the DB or instance.
- keithwhor 10y agoThanks for the insight. :) I don't disagree. Database queries don't use credits right now. We're going to be playing around with what makes the most sense for our customers. Expect things to change as we grow!
- stockkid 10y agofeedback: the console in the home page doesn't seem to do anything. (Chrome Android)
- dazhbog 10y agoI am surprised Nodal still uses 90% of Nordic Semiconductor's logo :/ Love the website design!
- vittore 10y agoWhat would be alternative deployment approach for nodal apps? It is still just node.js app so I should be able to deploy it to phusion passanger or dokku, right?