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Albert from 8base here: Between my last two companies, we raised over 100-million in VC capital that all got spent on hiring massive engineering and sales teams

Albert from 8base here: Between my last two companies, we raised over 100-million in VC capital that all got spent on hiring massive engineering and sales teams. I always had this dream about starting up a company that could grow exponentially with an agile team, relying on a self-service product that was so awesome it sold itself. And, that it would simplify software development for developers and businesses who relied on it. Now, after 2-years of hard work and many lessons learned, I'm excited to share 8base with everyone. It's a ready-to-use serverless back-end that generates a GraphQL API based on the developer's database schema. We've had developers building on 8base since October 2018. We've made refinements galore since. We'd love nothing more than honest feedback from the HN community!

gremlinsinc 7y ago
I'm curious why pay for your product, when I could just use Hasura for free + the instance it's running on? Edit: I might use it if it had a freemium model not just trial. I often play w/ new technologies, forget about em, come back try em again and stick w/ the ones that stick in my mindshare, but a trial doesn't allow me that freedom -- at least for hobby projects.
- asantalo 7y ago
  Great question. 8base's developer experience is different than Hasura's, including that we provision infrastructure so that devs aren't required to have AWS/Heroku/other skills nor pay for that separately. Ease of use is a big thing. There's significant differences in the GraphQL engine itself, role-based-security, integrations of external systems and more. Our roadmaps will diverge dramatically in the next 12 months as 8base rolls out more and more application infrastructure services. Another way to put it is that Hasura is mostly about enabling GraphQL on Postgres; 8base is the backend for powerful, enterprise-grade (when necessary) software. GraphQL is an essential design detail for us but not the business or product itself. Regarding your comment about freemium; I've seen many backend products falter, pivot, and shut down from having unsustainable business models. We are offering a robust plan for $8 / month to start. If developers agree with us that their DX is better, then $8 shouldn't be an issue as their time is more costly. But we appreciate what you are saying and are watching this closely.
  - andric 7y ago
    Being sustainable is important, but not at the expense of people’s ability to tinker/learn. At the very least, offer a highly-limited and almost-crippled free tier, like Heroku or Glide does. Maybe you can only register a few users. Maybe the # of function calls are limited to a few a day. Or maybe dormant apps go to sleep.
    - asantalo 7y ago
      Yes, we will consider these and welcome other ideas.
- andric 7y ago
  Second this. A timed trial just feels weird. I like that Heroku, Netlify, Contentful, and Firebase have a free tier, so I can use it for small demos and to learn the platform. If I have to pay for every single tutorial or playground project I won‘t want to use the platform or even want to learn it. It also kind of disincentivizes teachers on online platforms (like Udemy) to teach it. Because you often need to go through a few examples in order to learn something. i.e. if I do a node.js course, the course author isn’t just going to make me build 1 practice app, I’m probably gonna build a few and then host them on Heroku free dyno, the same way if I take a React course, I’m gonna build a few practice apps and host them on Netlify.
  - asantalo 7y ago
    Andric, this is great feedback and we appreciate it. As you probably know, pricing is a bit of an experiment as a company evolves so we are listening 100%.
    - andric 7y ago
      Thank you for the quick response! You guys are building something really cool, I have no doubt that once you figure out pricing it has the potential to go viral. I’m a product/frontend guy who’s trying to build a side project, and backend stuff has always been a PITA for me to figure out. Right now I’m torn between investing time to learn AWS Amplify, or investing time to learn 8base. 8base has already captured my imagination, and I can’t wait to go further with learning it. Unfortunately I feel uncomfortable creating a few projects to practice and then later being shut out of them or be forced to pay $8/mth.
      - asantalo 7y ago
        Andric, please email me at albert@8base.com as I'd like to chat with you about this some more. Thank you.
    - gremlinsinc 7y ago
      Yeah that's basically my point when there's a new shiny framework or even a headless cms or something, we (devs) like to test it out a bit, and we might come back to it 5-10 times before actually pulling the trigger and using the service. Even all the major cloud platforms have free tiers for this reason - to get devs hooked on their platform so there is no other option they'd rather use. Not saying the free tier should be outrageous... maybe 100MB and 10k requests per month or something small like that.

gremlinsinc 7y ago

I'm curious why pay for your product, when I could just use Hasura for free + the instance it's running on? Edit: I might use it if it had a freemium model not just trial. I often play w/ new technologies, forget about em, come back try em again and stick w/ the ones that stick in my mindshare, but a trial doesn't allow me that freedom -- at least for hobby projects.

asantalo 7y ago
Great question. 8base's developer experience is different than Hasura's, including that we provision infrastructure so that devs aren't required to have AWS/Heroku/other skills nor pay for that separately. Ease of use is a big thing. There's significant differences in the GraphQL engine itself, role-based-security, integrations of external systems and more. Our roadmaps will diverge dramatically in the next 12 months as 8base rolls out more and more application infrastructure services. Another way to put it is that Hasura is mostly about enabling GraphQL on Postgres; 8base is the backend for powerful, enterprise-grade (when necessary) software. GraphQL is an essential design detail for us but not the business or product itself. Regarding your comment about freemium; I've seen many backend products falter, pivot, and shut down from having unsustainable business models. We are offering a robust plan for $8 / month to start. If developers agree with us that their DX is better, then $8 shouldn't be an issue as their time is more costly. But we appreciate what you are saying and are watching this closely.
- andric 7y ago
  Being sustainable is important, but not at the expense of people’s ability to tinker/learn. At the very least, offer a highly-limited and almost-crippled free tier, like Heroku or Glide does. Maybe you can only register a few users. Maybe the # of function calls are limited to a few a day. Or maybe dormant apps go to sleep.
  - asantalo 7y ago
    Yes, we will consider these and welcome other ideas.
andric 7y ago
Second this. A timed trial just feels weird. I like that Heroku, Netlify, Contentful, and Firebase have a free tier, so I can use it for small demos and to learn the platform. If I have to pay for every single tutorial or playground project I won‘t want to use the platform or even want to learn it. It also kind of disincentivizes teachers on online platforms (like Udemy) to teach it. Because you often need to go through a few examples in order to learn something. i.e. if I do a node.js course, the course author isn’t just going to make me build 1 practice app, I’m probably gonna build a few and then host them on Heroku free dyno, the same way if I take a React course, I’m gonna build a few practice apps and host them on Netlify.
- asantalo 7y ago
  Andric, this is great feedback and we appreciate it. As you probably know, pricing is a bit of an experiment as a company evolves so we are listening 100%.
  - andric 7y ago
    Thank you for the quick response! You guys are building something really cool, I have no doubt that once you figure out pricing it has the potential to go viral. I’m a product/frontend guy who’s trying to build a side project, and backend stuff has always been a PITA for me to figure out. Right now I’m torn between investing time to learn AWS Amplify, or investing time to learn 8base. 8base has already captured my imagination, and I can’t wait to go further with learning it. Unfortunately I feel uncomfortable creating a few projects to practice and then later being shut out of them or be forced to pay $8/mth.
    - asantalo 7y ago
      Andric, please email me at albert@8base.com as I'd like to chat with you about this some more. Thank you.
  - gremlinsinc 7y ago
    Yeah that's basically my point when there's a new shiny framework or even a headless cms or something, we (devs) like to test it out a bit, and we might come back to it 5-10 times before actually pulling the trigger and using the service. Even all the major cloud platforms have free tiers for this reason - to get devs hooked on their platform so there is no other option they'd rather use. Not saying the free tier should be outrageous... maybe 100MB and 10k requests per month or something small like that.