13 ms·

Show HN: Csvbox.io – CSV import button for a web app, SaaS or API

155 points by spreadr 5y ago

spreadr 5y ago
Hello All, I'm Tejas Sangoi. I have been developing Shopify apps for the past 5 years. Currently working on a new project csvbox.io to solve a common problem that I have faced many times. There have been many applications where we needed to accept spreadsheets from the end customers. Building an importer from scratch is time consuming and maintaining it is another headache. Moreover, the import process for the customers is messy because they have to read the docs and follow the upload templates. In many cases, after long support email threads we ultimately have to manually accept, clean and input the data. As a solution I built the csvbox.io import widget. Its a no code, drop-in widget that allows you to accept files in minutes. Users can upload files, match columns, validate data all in a few clicks. You receive ready to use data in your app. A better experience for your customers, fewer headaches for your team! I launched it only a few days ago. Happy to receive feedback on everything - UI/UX, features, pricing etc.
- adamhp 5y ago
  Typo on the main page: Featues? :)
  - spreadr 5y ago
    Corrected now :)
- xmpirate 5y ago
  It would be nice to have the ability to send data to API in batches instead of sending all data in bulk. This is really helpful when sending huge csv/excel files.
  - xmpirate 5y ago
    Or an ability to stream the data rows
    - spreadr 5y ago
      If you configure chunk size = 1 then the data will be pushed one row at a time.
  - spreadr 5y ago
    Thanks for writing. We do have that option. You can even configure the chunk size that defines the number of rows to be pushed in each POST request.
- airblade 5y ago
  This is a nifty idea for a product. Does / will your system import images in spreadsheets?
  - spreadr 5y ago
    Thank you! Currently, the widget does not support images. Honestly, we havent yet thought about it. Now that you have raised this point, we will surely discuss it.
- futhey 5y ago
  Looks nice! Seems like you've thought of all the basics. Easy to miss the drop target though (testing this at a bit past midnight) – seems like it would be easy to make that larger (or just make the whole window a drop target for the CSV)
  - spreadr 5y ago
    Thank you for the feedback. Making the entire window a drop target is a neat idea. I am noting it down for implementation.
- hndl 5y ago
  It looks neat! Are you SOC2 compliant?
  - spreadr 5y ago
    Thank you! Not SOC2 complaint yet. We'll take on this once we hit a few milestones.
- taf2 5y ago
  Ah very cool I built something like this for our application and used a web worker to offload validation etc… did you do something similar?
  - spreadr 5y ago
    Great! We are not using webworkers. Instead first we upload the files to our backend and then push them to the destination app.
robbiejs 5y ago
Looks like a nice tool! Does it also allow editing-in-place, like https://editcsvonline.com https://editcsvonline.com?
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thanks. It does allow editing the cell data before file is submitted. The app validates the spreadsheet data against the data model rules configured by the developer and shows the errors to the users. The users can edit the data in the widget itself to resolve the validation errors before submitting the file. This ensures that the submitted data is clean and ready-to-use.
flippyhead 5y ago
This seems like a great idea. It's a hassle to do this and for a bunch of use cases I can see outsourcing it like this as very useful.
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you! I am already using it in 3 of my other apps.
tunaisnotfree 5y ago
The highest tier limit of 100K rows is unfortunate as I've a number of imports that often range closer to 400k which would cause me to have to pass on this. I like the idea though!
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you for your feedback. We are already testing for higher limits and will soon introduce/update plans accordingly.
jhunter1016 5y ago
This is fantastic! Building an importer is not fun at all. Really smart product.
- spreadr 5y ago
  Absolutely, I hated building importers and more so, maintaining them!
nwhatt 5y ago
Very cool idea. I recently gave one pass at a Jira CSV import and went with the API instead. Excel is the ultimate no-code solution.
scottoreilly 5y ago
Typo in headline: should be “validate data” instead of “valid data”. Otherwise, looking good!
- ericcholis 5y ago
  Another typo in the javascript in "Code" tab when editing a sheet "There was a porblem uploading the sheet"
- spreadr 5y ago
  Corrected. Thank you :)
Raed667 5y ago
I built complex CSV/Excel importers for 3 companies so far. The business really needed and benefited from it, but it was some of the most boring coding I have ever done. Great idea to make it its own product! Best of luck!
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you!
dividuum 5y ago
Having built a CSV import pipeline handling a few thousand different CSV files from almost the same number of different providers: I've probably seen almost everything one can mess up while writing out data: Invalid or missing escaping, double or per column string encoding, truncated columns, BOMs, EANs in E notation, Month names instead of numbers and so on. Out of curiosity: do you handle any of that?
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thats a great question. We handle most of it, except: 1. Escaping in csv 2. Month names will be treated as string. This has got us thinking for more such scenarios. Thank you!
  - stephenhuey 5y ago
    Pretty cool how you offer this as a widget. 18 years ago I built a handy importer for CSV and tab-delimited files in a logistics company’s traditional Java web app with no JavaScript/AJAX, and it enabled the users to map columns in a multi-page workflow. CSV was new to me and of course all the edge cases were surprising, but on top of that all the data consisted of shipping addresses, and I was amazed at how many different ways address fields would be presented! So it definitely felt like a double whammy of CSV inconsistencies and address inconsistencies!
    - simlan 5y ago
      Same in the sciences. Every instrument manufacturer invents their own esoteric format. Simple x,y,y2,y3 is the exception. Sometimes they call it tsv, csv but no commas or tabs were intended. Multiple datasets in the same csv but instead of adding extra columns put in some breaks in one long column. So you start scanning for empties, skip some metadata and start reading again... Sometimes it is wild.
- codeulike 5y ago
  Great point, there are so many gotchas with CSV. Could the app handle this one? "First Name","Last Name","Address","Town","Postcode" David,O'Leary,"12 Acacia Avenue",London,NW5 3DF June,Robinson,"14, Abbey Court","Putney",SW6 4FG Greg,Hampton,"",, Stephen,James,"""Dunroamin"" 45 Bridge Street",Bristol,BS2 6TG Daisy,Smith,"Flat 6, Porchester Court, 24 Dragon Road",Newcastle,NE3 4FG (i.e. some fields enclosed in speechmarks and some not, commas in text, blank values, escaped speechmarks, carriage returns) edit: I tried it with the csvbox.io demo - it seemed to deal with it ok!
mushufasa 5y ago
Neat! Is there a FOSS or self-hosted version of this, for environments that have strict data compliance requirements?
- spreadr 5y ago
  We do not yet have a self-hosted version. Its in the development pipeline for sure.
devops000 5y ago
Very nice!
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you!
bottled_poe 5y ago
I’m speculating, but feel that your pricing model should be more strictly based on number of rows processed. Not sure why a 100k row limit is imposed on the top tier. I suspect this model would better reflect where your costs are and the customer would have a precise way to estimate costs. I wonder why the pricing model is more complicated than this?
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you for your feedback. Our costs are a function of number of rows processed and the total imports. We factored that in the pricing. We will soon be introducing plans with higher row limits as well.
config_yml 5y ago
Congrats on building this! I've had the exact same idea and pain for many of the projects I've worked on, so happy to see this out there and I hope you'll be successful with it!
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you!
PeterWhittaker 5y ago
How does this compare with some of the available FOSS alternatives, e.g., https://github.com/mholt/PapaParse https://github.com/mholt/PapaParse ?
- spreadr 5y ago
  PapaParse is a great library for parsing csv files. Whereas csvbox.io is a no code widget that can directly we installed on your site to help you get started in minutes. PapaParse has no built is validations. With csvbox you can define a data model in the admin. The users can match columns, validate data and submit the file without you having to write a single line of code.
yunyu 5y ago
Congrats on the launch! How do you differentiate yourself from hosted competitors like https://flatfile.io/ https://flatfile.io/?
- spreadr 5y ago
  Flatfile is a fantastic service. In fact, I was one of their early users. 1. We are focused on indie developers and startups. Our pricing is reflective of that. 2. csvbox is a no code widget. The entire column model and validation requirements can be defined in the app admin without the need to write a single line of code.
  - mchusma 5y ago
    I can say I looked at flat file and I think their pricing is just out of whack for what it does. Just being a cheaper version seems like a good market to me. P.S. others promote self hosted, but I wouldn't bother if we're you. I did esignatures and lots of people asked for it, so we built it, but no indie/startup dev ever bought it. The only people who only ever truly implemented self hosting were enterprises. My 2 cents.
  - sammiesoso 5y ago
    I'm missing something here, Flatfile does that too?
    - spreadr 5y ago
      With flatfile you have to define the data model and the validation criteria in the client side code. Whereas csvbox.io is no-code - you can define the data model and attach validations right inside the app admin with a few clicks.
fyp1 5y ago
basic bootstrap UI? no thank you!
- spreadr 5y ago
  Its a bootstrapped startup :) Your point is well taken. We will upgrade in the future.
granshaw 5y ago
One feature I’ve needed to build into all my csv parsers is to be tolerant of some “junk” rows at top, and automatically find the row where the actual headers are, which might not be the first row. Do you handle this case? Eg Mac Numbers app is really bad about this where it will sometimes insert the file name as a “title row”
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thats great feedback. We do not yet have this option. I am adding it to your to-do list. Currently, once the users upload the file, they have the option to delete any rows that they do not want, by clicking the remove button in the widget itself. Once the data is clean they can submit the file.
richardkmichael 5y ago
I think this is a great idea. I've had to solve this on almost every web app I've worked on. I've just gone though your `example.csv`, and have this feedback: - the (row) "Remove" action seemed like data column to me, because it is placed adjacent to the data. I would separate the actions completely from the data. I'd probably avoid the "X" within the column, as again, it looks like data. Admittedly, users probably know the content of the CSV they are uploading, so this might not be too big a concern. But the UX/semantics of styling the "actions" the same as "data" seems like it will lead to confusion. At the moment, the only action is "Remove", so I might drop the Remove "column", just put a button labelled "Remove"; after all, the "X" is already a "button" (as a link). That said, bulk actions a chore to implement and so I suspect getting this working nicely will probably be a big draw for your target market. Whether it's checkbox boxes with a single select drop down to apply an "action", or a select drop down on each row (painful UX, I'd think). Hopefully you already have a revision on your roadmap. - The wording "File has 1 invalid rows. Please resolve the errors before uploading." is occurring after the user has already uploaded the CSV, so I think it should be adjusted. At this point in the workflow, I'd probably stop referring to "File" (the user is only concerned with the data at this point). I'd suggest more succinct wording, perhaps: "1 invalid row must be resolve before continuing."; or "...before you may continue.", if you prefer using the second person in the app messages. - The full screen modal for a small number of rows forces the user to hunt for the buttons and mouse a far distance. I realize for most data, the modal is likely to be the entire screen (and multi-page), but nevertheless, I would probably make the modal shrink to the data. As a consideration for your market: I've written apps which use CSV for only ~25 rows, and I would still consider using this because the user interaction for sanity and clean-up was still code I would've prefer to skip writing. - I would increase the number of rows permitted at the lower tiers. Maybe you are analyzing the imports and have a lot of information about the pricing breakpoints and segmentation, but my hunch would be that fewer imports with more rows might entice people. I can think of apps which might have only 5 or 10 imports per month, but need more than 50K rows per import, but it's a pretty big jump to Basic, so you might miss those customers. - I would make the corrected/edited CSV available for download (by the customer) at the end of the import. If anyone needs to re-import, it will surely be annoying to re-correct it during import; or even to remember all the corrections they made during import and go back and correct their original spreadsheet (or other data source). - Would be nice to see PostgreSQL on your destination roadmap :-) Again, this seems like a really good idea to me. I wish you success!
onion2k 5y ago
There are a lot of assumptions being made about the shape of the data in the client side validation rules, and seemingly no way to control them. For example, in the example.csv file there's an "Age" column that has to be completed by the user in order to submit the data, and no way to turn that off. I don't think that would work at all for any production system; often you just don't have the data available. This would force you to put dummy placeholder data in.
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you for your feedback. The validation rules for any sheet can be controlled via the admin dashboard. You can choose to mark any column as required/not required. To demonstrate the validation capability we enforced 'required' validation on the 'Age' column in the demo.
deedubaya 5y ago
I want this. I want this so bad. But I'm not giving your systems my customer data -- sorry. I'd pay $XXX/year for a self hosted version.
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thanks for writing in the first place. I completely understand your position. Self hosted version is in our long term development pipeline. Data security is important to us. We have the option to get the data deleted as soon as it is pushed to your app. Please check our note on user data - https://help.csvbox.io/legal/data-policy https://help.csvbox.io/legal/data-policy
fareesh 5y ago
Maybe sell a lifetime subscription with the caveat that you give a self-hosted version if you stop offering the service.
- spreadr 5y ago
  Interesting idea. It will inject cash flow at the initial stage.
- stevoski 5y ago
  My experience is, don’t sell lifetime subscriptions, and don’t sell self-hosted versions. Neither of them work out, business-wise.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    The promise to open source if it goes bust adds more confidence though that a customer won’t be screwed. I agree about lifetime. I’m suspicious of lifetime offers. I don’t think you are really going to support me in 2060! Is there anything from 1980 like this that is still supported?
enahs-sf 5y ago
I think this product is cool, but honestly you should charge more. The lowest tier after the free should be at least $19. Maybe more. The folks who are purchasing this product are likely not paying for it with their own money (business expense) and therefore can justify a higher cost.
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you for the feedback. This is our introductory pricing that will evolve over time. Here is our dilemma - on one hand we want to target indie developers, side projects, bootstrapped startups (that are cost conscious) and on the other hand we want to maximize the earning potential and also not look like a low value product.
  - AlexDanger 5y ago
    I also think you are undercharging for a very useful product. The utility of what you are offering is significant. If I'm a 'cost conscious' startup and I need CSV upload functionality then I either write the functionality myself (30+ hours of dev time + ongoing maintenance?) or I use your service. If the product works as advertised, you could charge $19/month for a basic plan and that will always be better value than 30+ hrs of time a developer will have to put into the CSV problem with all its annoying edge cases. My suggestion is to modify the free plan such that users can upload 10k+ rows per upload, but only 20-30 times per month. Then your 'cost conscious' startup with only 5 customers can test your solution, know that it works for non-trivial amounts of data, and happily fork out $19/month when they hit 20+ customers a month and become less 'cost conscious'.
    - spreadr 5y ago
      Thank you for the feedback. It makes a lot of sense. This is a common advice received from a few folks here. We are sure to work on it.
deleted 5y ago
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admissionsguy 5y ago
Oh dear, I had the exact same idea near the top of my list. Glad to see it is being well received, and nicely done, too. Good speed to you! When I use the test file, it makes all fields required. It should probably accept empty/unknown values, no? (I just saw you commented on that elsewhere) In my experience, the manual validation feature is not that useful for most use cases, where the sheets have lots of rows. My clients have always preferred to have a list of validation errors / row numbers, modify the source spreadsheet itself using all the power of Excel, and reupload. I think the true value of this tool will be in how well it deals with messy data. A common problem is character encoding. At the moment, when I put in Polish characters in the file "EACĄŚŽĄĘĆĄ", it gets displayed as "EACÄÅÅ½ÄÄÄÄ" - need to fix that. The validation could be more robust. Common data types (age, first names) could easily have their own specific rules. At the moment, you can put negative or out of range values for the age, or special characters for the name. And what would be really valuable is detection of outlier values - to tell the user if a value is three times longer than other values in the same column, contains unusual characters, etc. As for features, I would like a PDF import (you can just take one of the open source pdf2excel libraries, then write a bit of smart code to detect&strip the headers and footers - took me 3 days to implement last time and the client loved it ;) Doesn't need to cover all cases to be very useful. And of course, file upload is a must, ideally allowing multiple columns IMAGE1, IMAGE2, etc.
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you for the awesome suggestions! You can configure the validation criteria for each column via the app admin. Simply mark the column as 'not required' to accept empty values. I have noted down all your feedback for fast implementation. Cant thank you enough!
stevoski 5y ago
Great idea. Charge more. Get rid of the $9/plan. Saying this as a SaaS operator who could use something like this, and who pays much more for other apps.
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you! I just got a very similar suggestion. What according to you should be the minimum pricing tier?
  - stevoski 5y ago
    A good place to start with pricing is tiers at $49/$99/$249. (As recommended in Jason Cohen’s classic and awesome talk “Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business”: https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw) Customers at very low price points (such as $9/month) tend to churn quickly, and, counterintuitively, send more customer support interactions per customer than at higher points. You’ll never earn enough from them to cover your customer acquisition costs. Getting rid of the cheap plan also removes the, shall we say, more difficult customer.
    - spreadr 5y ago
      Thank you so much for this!
- unknown_error 5y ago
  TLDR, IMHO: Get rid of the Small plan, make the Sandbox tier a much more generous free tier (1k/10k with logo), and charge more for the bigger plans. "First one is always free" kinda thing, so that devs can use your service for small projects (that don't cost you much) but then upsell it for broader enterprise-wide adoption on bigger projects. As a dev, I have the opposite opinion: The low-end pricing is a barrier to adoption. $9/mo isn't much, but it's the difference between "Oh cool, I can immediately use this in some of our side projects!" and "Oh, I have to request budget approval for this, explain what it is to superiors who might not be in the IT dept, answer questions about why we don't do just build it ourselves, answer questions about vendor support and lock-in, etc." It would cost more time for me to jump through all those hoops than to just use a standard CSV parsing library -- even though the workflow is vastly inferior -- because it's much less bureaucratic. Other services often provide a more generous free tier so that devs (the first ones to try something, often) can use it in a real-world project, fall in love with it, and then sell the paid version (which could be much more than $99) to their superiors only when the prototypes have proven valuable enough to make a solid sales pitch. I'm not a business consultant by any stretch, just letting you know that as a dev, I'd probably never bother using this because of the bureaucratic headaches involved with your pricing structure. Just my 2c.
imiric 5y ago
Congrats on the launch! The service looks interesting, but I'm wondering if there's a technical reason why it's a SaaS. CSVs could be parsed entirely on the client, and it should be possible for .XLS/.XLSX as well. If not with pure JavaScript+Web Workers then surely with WebAssembly. Doing this traditionally on the backend is fine of course, but as others have mentioned, trusting you with potentially sensitive data is a hurdle for many companies and individuals.
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you! To be honest, we haven't thought about the possibility to work everything client side. Its an idea worth exploring. Our aim is to integrate the importer with multiple destinations such as databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, S3 etc), APIs (custom, Zapier, GSheets, Airtable) and others (FTP, Email etc). Coding server side would be easier and faster. Moreover we plan to introduce on-premise deployment options in the future.
- pm90 5y ago
  Client side would be pretty amazing, especially considering if this is sensitive data. Then again, enterprises that deal with sensitive data don’t just allow employees to access that data via a web browser (or should not) and especially not through a modern one. So it would be a huge pain to figure out which browsers are capable of even supporting Wasm and other modern tech.
gregsadetsky 5y ago
Some notes: - in your embed code snippet, you have `There was some porblem uploading the sheet` -> the word "problem" is misspelled - the embed code includes https://js.csvbox.io/script.js https://js.csvbox.io/script.js which has two console.log debugging calls which could be removed in production - when adding columns to a new sheet, it would be neat to be able to paste the header line from a CSV file and for the columns to be created (this wouldn't help with the Column Type or Required options, but at least the Column Name would be set/wouldn't have to be typed one by one) - also, when adding columns, it would be great to press the enter key after typing a Column Name to save/close the modal I agree with most other commenters' feedback re: pricing, especially https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27133717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27133717 i.e. making the Sandbox much more generous. I was surprised to see only 5 rows imported initially, and thought it was a bug on your side (i.e. I thought only the first 5 rows were parsed) Congrats on the launch!
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thanks for your feedback and actually trying out the app in the first place. I will get the bugs fixed. I have also noted down the suggestions on column name and Keypress. We will implement them soon. Pricing restructure is also on the cards. Once again, thank you!!!
  - gregsadetsky 5y ago
    More feedback :-) How are you dealing with character encoding? I uploaded a CSV file that has an utf-8 character in the name of a column, and in your import flow, under "File Columns", the column name appeared incorrectly encoded (i.e. it's been latin-1'ized) My file is most probably missing the UTF-8 BOM. I'm not sure what a good option is here. Have an advanced setting for Sheets (on your site) and pre-set the uploaded files' encoding?
    - spreadr 5y ago
      We have a preset of utf-8 and will probably have to find a way for managing encoding.

155 points by spreadr 5y ago

Hello All, I'm Tejas Sangoi. I have been developing Shopify apps for the past 5 years. Currently working on a new project csvbox.io to solve a common problem that I have faced many times. There have been many applications where we needed to accept spreadsheets from the end customers. Building an importer from scratch is time consuming and maintaining it is another headache. Moreover, the import process for the customers is messy because they have to read the docs and follow the upload templates. In many cases, after long support email threads we ultimately have to manually accept, clean and input the data. As a solution I built the csvbox.io import widget. Its a no code, drop-in widget that allows you to accept files in minutes. Users can upload files, match columns, validate data all in a few clicks. You receive ready to use data in your app. A better experience for your customers, fewer headaches for your team! I launched it only a few days ago. Happy to receive feedback on everything - UI/UX, features, pricing etc.

adamhp 5y ago
Typo on the main page: Featues? :)
- spreadr 5y ago
  Corrected now :)
xmpirate 5y ago
It would be nice to have the ability to send data to API in batches instead of sending all data in bulk. This is really helpful when sending huge csv/excel files.
- xmpirate 5y ago
  Or an ability to stream the data rows
  - spreadr 5y ago
    If you configure chunk size = 1 then the data will be pushed one row at a time.
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thanks for writing. We do have that option. You can even configure the chunk size that defines the number of rows to be pushed in each POST request.
airblade 5y ago
This is a nifty idea for a product. Does / will your system import images in spreadsheets?
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you! Currently, the widget does not support images. Honestly, we havent yet thought about it. Now that you have raised this point, we will surely discuss it.
futhey 5y ago
Looks nice! Seems like you've thought of all the basics. Easy to miss the drop target though (testing this at a bit past midnight) – seems like it would be easy to make that larger (or just make the whole window a drop target for the CSV)
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you for the feedback. Making the entire window a drop target is a neat idea. I am noting it down for implementation.
hndl 5y ago
It looks neat! Are you SOC2 compliant?
- spreadr 5y ago
  Thank you! Not SOC2 complaint yet. We'll take on this once we hit a few milestones.
taf2 5y ago
Ah very cool I built something like this for our application and used a web worker to offload validation etc… did you do something similar?
- spreadr 5y ago
  Great! We are not using webworkers. Instead first we upload the files to our backend and then push them to the destination app.

robbiejs 5y ago

Looks like a nice tool! Does it also allow editing-in-place, like https://editcsvonline.com https://editcsvonline.com?

spreadr 5y ago
Thanks. It does allow editing the cell data before file is submitted. The app validates the spreadsheet data against the data model rules configured by the developer and shows the errors to the users. The users can edit the data in the widget itself to resolve the validation errors before submitting the file. This ensures that the submitted data is clean and ready-to-use.

flippyhead 5y ago

This seems like a great idea. It's a hassle to do this and for a bunch of use cases I can see outsourcing it like this as very useful.

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you! I am already using it in 3 of my other apps.

tunaisnotfree 5y ago

The highest tier limit of 100K rows is unfortunate as I've a number of imports that often range closer to 400k which would cause me to have to pass on this. I like the idea though!

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you for your feedback. We are already testing for higher limits and will soon introduce/update plans accordingly.

jhunter1016 5y ago

This is fantastic! Building an importer is not fun at all. Really smart product.

spreadr 5y ago
Absolutely, I hated building importers and more so, maintaining them!

nwhatt 5y ago

Very cool idea. I recently gave one pass at a Jira CSV import and went with the API instead. Excel is the ultimate no-code solution.

scottoreilly 5y ago

Typo in headline: should be “validate data” instead of “valid data”. Otherwise, looking good!

ericcholis 5y ago
Another typo in the javascript in "Code" tab when editing a sheet "There was a porblem uploading the sheet"
spreadr 5y ago
Corrected. Thank you :)

Raed667 5y ago

I built complex CSV/Excel importers for 3 companies so far. The business really needed and benefited from it, but it was some of the most boring coding I have ever done. Great idea to make it its own product! Best of luck!

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you!

dividuum 5y ago

Having built a CSV import pipeline handling a few thousand different CSV files from almost the same number of different providers: I've probably seen almost everything one can mess up while writing out data: Invalid or missing escaping, double or per column string encoding, truncated columns, BOMs, EANs in E notation, Month names instead of numbers and so on. Out of curiosity: do you handle any of that?

spreadr 5y ago
Thats a great question. We handle most of it, except: 1. Escaping in csv 2. Month names will be treated as string. This has got us thinking for more such scenarios. Thank you!
- stephenhuey 5y ago
  Pretty cool how you offer this as a widget. 18 years ago I built a handy importer for CSV and tab-delimited files in a logistics company’s traditional Java web app with no JavaScript/AJAX, and it enabled the users to map columns in a multi-page workflow. CSV was new to me and of course all the edge cases were surprising, but on top of that all the data consisted of shipping addresses, and I was amazed at how many different ways address fields would be presented! So it definitely felt like a double whammy of CSV inconsistencies and address inconsistencies!
  - simlan 5y ago
    Same in the sciences. Every instrument manufacturer invents their own esoteric format. Simple x,y,y2,y3 is the exception. Sometimes they call it tsv, csv but no commas or tabs were intended. Multiple datasets in the same csv but instead of adding extra columns put in some breaks in one long column. So you start scanning for empties, skip some metadata and start reading again... Sometimes it is wild.
codeulike 5y ago
Great point, there are so many gotchas with CSV. Could the app handle this one? "First Name","Last Name","Address","Town","Postcode" David,O'Leary,"12 Acacia Avenue",London,NW5 3DF June,Robinson,"14, Abbey Court","Putney",SW6 4FG Greg,Hampton,"",, Stephen,James,"""Dunroamin"" 45 Bridge Street",Bristol,BS2 6TG Daisy,Smith,"Flat 6, Porchester Court, 24 Dragon Road",Newcastle,NE3 4FG (i.e. some fields enclosed in speechmarks and some not, commas in text, blank values, escaped speechmarks, carriage returns) edit: I tried it with the csvbox.io demo - it seemed to deal with it ok!

mushufasa 5y ago

Neat! Is there a FOSS or self-hosted version of this, for environments that have strict data compliance requirements?

spreadr 5y ago
We do not yet have a self-hosted version. Its in the development pipeline for sure.

devops000 5y ago

Very nice!

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you!

bottled_poe 5y ago

I’m speculating, but feel that your pricing model should be more strictly based on number of rows processed. Not sure why a 100k row limit is imposed on the top tier. I suspect this model would better reflect where your costs are and the customer would have a precise way to estimate costs. I wonder why the pricing model is more complicated than this?

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you for your feedback. Our costs are a function of number of rows processed and the total imports. We factored that in the pricing. We will soon be introducing plans with higher row limits as well.

config_yml 5y ago

Congrats on building this! I've had the exact same idea and pain for many of the projects I've worked on, so happy to see this out there and I hope you'll be successful with it!

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you!

PeterWhittaker 5y ago

How does this compare with some of the available FOSS alternatives, e.g., https://github.com/mholt/PapaParse https://github.com/mholt/PapaParse ?

spreadr 5y ago
PapaParse is a great library for parsing csv files. Whereas csvbox.io is a no code widget that can directly we installed on your site to help you get started in minutes. PapaParse has no built is validations. With csvbox you can define a data model in the admin. The users can match columns, validate data and submit the file without you having to write a single line of code.

yunyu 5y ago

Congrats on the launch! How do you differentiate yourself from hosted competitors like https://flatfile.io/ https://flatfile.io/?

spreadr 5y ago
Flatfile is a fantastic service. In fact, I was one of their early users. 1. We are focused on indie developers and startups. Our pricing is reflective of that. 2. csvbox is a no code widget. The entire column model and validation requirements can be defined in the app admin without the need to write a single line of code.
- mchusma 5y ago
  I can say I looked at flat file and I think their pricing is just out of whack for what it does. Just being a cheaper version seems like a good market to me. P.S. others promote self hosted, but I wouldn't bother if we're you. I did esignatures and lots of people asked for it, so we built it, but no indie/startup dev ever bought it. The only people who only ever truly implemented self hosting were enterprises. My 2 cents.
- sammiesoso 5y ago
  I'm missing something here, Flatfile does that too?
  - spreadr 5y ago
    With flatfile you have to define the data model and the validation criteria in the client side code. Whereas csvbox.io is no-code - you can define the data model and attach validations right inside the app admin with a few clicks.

fyp1 5y ago

basic bootstrap UI? no thank you!

spreadr 5y ago
Its a bootstrapped startup :) Your point is well taken. We will upgrade in the future.

granshaw 5y ago

One feature I’ve needed to build into all my csv parsers is to be tolerant of some “junk” rows at top, and automatically find the row where the actual headers are, which might not be the first row. Do you handle this case? Eg Mac Numbers app is really bad about this where it will sometimes insert the file name as a “title row”

spreadr 5y ago
Thats great feedback. We do not yet have this option. I am adding it to your to-do list. Currently, once the users upload the file, they have the option to delete any rows that they do not want, by clicking the remove button in the widget itself. Once the data is clean they can submit the file.

richardkmichael 5y ago

I think this is a great idea. I've had to solve this on almost every web app I've worked on. I've just gone though your `example.csv`, and have this feedback: - the (row) "Remove" action seemed like data column to me, because it is placed adjacent to the data. I would separate the actions completely from the data. I'd probably avoid the "X" within the column, as again, it looks like data. Admittedly, users probably know the content of the CSV they are uploading, so this might not be too big a concern. But the UX/semantics of styling the "actions" the same as "data" seems like it will lead to confusion. At the moment, the only action is "Remove", so I might drop the Remove "column", just put a button labelled "Remove"; after all, the "X" is already a "button" (as a link). That said, bulk actions a chore to implement and so I suspect getting this working nicely will probably be a big draw for your target market. Whether it's checkbox boxes with a single select drop down to apply an "action", or a select drop down on each row (painful UX, I'd think). Hopefully you already have a revision on your roadmap. - The wording "File has 1 invalid rows. Please resolve the errors before uploading." is occurring after the user has already uploaded the CSV, so I think it should be adjusted. At this point in the workflow, I'd probably stop referring to "File" (the user is only concerned with the data at this point). I'd suggest more succinct wording, perhaps: "1 invalid row must be resolve before continuing."; or "...before you may continue.", if you prefer using the second person in the app messages. - The full screen modal for a small number of rows forces the user to hunt for the buttons and mouse a far distance. I realize for most data, the modal is likely to be the entire screen (and multi-page), but nevertheless, I would probably make the modal shrink to the data. As a consideration for your market: I've written apps which use CSV for only ~25 rows, and I would still consider using this because the user interaction for sanity and clean-up was still code I would've prefer to skip writing. - I would increase the number of rows permitted at the lower tiers. Maybe you are analyzing the imports and have a lot of information about the pricing breakpoints and segmentation, but my hunch would be that fewer imports with more rows might entice people. I can think of apps which might have only 5 or 10 imports per month, but need more than 50K rows per import, but it's a pretty big jump to Basic, so you might miss those customers. - I would make the corrected/edited CSV available for download (by the customer) at the end of the import. If anyone needs to re-import, it will surely be annoying to re-correct it during import; or even to remember all the corrections they made during import and go back and correct their original spreadsheet (or other data source). - Would be nice to see PostgreSQL on your destination roadmap :-) Again, this seems like a really good idea to me. I wish you success!

onion2k 5y ago

There are a lot of assumptions being made about the shape of the data in the client side validation rules, and seemingly no way to control them. For example, in the example.csv file there's an "Age" column that has to be completed by the user in order to submit the data, and no way to turn that off. I don't think that would work at all for any production system; often you just don't have the data available. This would force you to put dummy placeholder data in.

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you for your feedback. The validation rules for any sheet can be controlled via the admin dashboard. You can choose to mark any column as required/not required. To demonstrate the validation capability we enforced 'required' validation on the 'Age' column in the demo.

deedubaya 5y ago

I want this. I want this so bad. But I'm not giving your systems my customer data -- sorry. I'd pay $XXX/year for a self hosted version.

spreadr 5y ago
Thanks for writing in the first place. I completely understand your position. Self hosted version is in our long term development pipeline. Data security is important to us. We have the option to get the data deleted as soon as it is pushed to your app. Please check our note on user data - https://help.csvbox.io/legal/data-policy https://help.csvbox.io/legal/data-policy

fareesh 5y ago

Maybe sell a lifetime subscription with the caveat that you give a self-hosted version if you stop offering the service.

spreadr 5y ago
Interesting idea. It will inject cash flow at the initial stage.
stevoski 5y ago
My experience is, don’t sell lifetime subscriptions, and don’t sell self-hosted versions. Neither of them work out, business-wise.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  The promise to open source if it goes bust adds more confidence though that a customer won’t be screwed. I agree about lifetime. I’m suspicious of lifetime offers. I don’t think you are really going to support me in 2060! Is there anything from 1980 like this that is still supported?

enahs-sf 5y ago

I think this product is cool, but honestly you should charge more. The lowest tier after the free should be at least $19. Maybe more. The folks who are purchasing this product are likely not paying for it with their own money (business expense) and therefore can justify a higher cost.

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you for the feedback. This is our introductory pricing that will evolve over time. Here is our dilemma - on one hand we want to target indie developers, side projects, bootstrapped startups (that are cost conscious) and on the other hand we want to maximize the earning potential and also not look like a low value product.
- AlexDanger 5y ago
  I also think you are undercharging for a very useful product. The utility of what you are offering is significant. If I'm a 'cost conscious' startup and I need CSV upload functionality then I either write the functionality myself (30+ hours of dev time + ongoing maintenance?) or I use your service. If the product works as advertised, you could charge $19/month for a basic plan and that will always be better value than 30+ hrs of time a developer will have to put into the CSV problem with all its annoying edge cases. My suggestion is to modify the free plan such that users can upload 10k+ rows per upload, but only 20-30 times per month. Then your 'cost conscious' startup with only 5 customers can test your solution, know that it works for non-trivial amounts of data, and happily fork out $19/month when they hit 20+ customers a month and become less 'cost conscious'.
  - spreadr 5y ago
    Thank you for the feedback. It makes a lot of sense. This is a common advice received from a few folks here. We are sure to work on it.

deleted 5y ago

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admissionsguy 5y ago

Oh dear, I had the exact same idea near the top of my list. Glad to see it is being well received, and nicely done, too. Good speed to you! When I use the test file, it makes all fields required. It should probably accept empty/unknown values, no? (I just saw you commented on that elsewhere) In my experience, the manual validation feature is not that useful for most use cases, where the sheets have lots of rows. My clients have always preferred to have a list of validation errors / row numbers, modify the source spreadsheet itself using all the power of Excel, and reupload. I think the true value of this tool will be in how well it deals with messy data. A common problem is character encoding. At the moment, when I put in Polish characters in the file "EACĄŚŽĄĘĆĄ", it gets displayed as "EACÄÅÅ½ÄÄÄÄ" - need to fix that. The validation could be more robust. Common data types (age, first names) could easily have their own specific rules. At the moment, you can put negative or out of range values for the age, or special characters for the name. And what would be really valuable is detection of outlier values - to tell the user if a value is three times longer than other values in the same column, contains unusual characters, etc. As for features, I would like a PDF import (you can just take one of the open source pdf2excel libraries, then write a bit of smart code to detect&strip the headers and footers - took me 3 days to implement last time and the client loved it ;) Doesn't need to cover all cases to be very useful. And of course, file upload is a must, ideally allowing multiple columns IMAGE1, IMAGE2, etc.

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you for the awesome suggestions! You can configure the validation criteria for each column via the app admin. Simply mark the column as 'not required' to accept empty values. I have noted down all your feedback for fast implementation. Cant thank you enough!

stevoski 5y ago

Great idea. Charge more. Get rid of the $9/plan. Saying this as a SaaS operator who could use something like this, and who pays much more for other apps.

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you! I just got a very similar suggestion. What according to you should be the minimum pricing tier?
- stevoski 5y ago
  A good place to start with pricing is tiers at $49/$99/$249. (As recommended in Jason Cohen’s classic and awesome talk “Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business”: https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw) Customers at very low price points (such as $9/month) tend to churn quickly, and, counterintuitively, send more customer support interactions per customer than at higher points. You’ll never earn enough from them to cover your customer acquisition costs. Getting rid of the cheap plan also removes the, shall we say, more difficult customer.
  - spreadr 5y ago
    Thank you so much for this!
unknown_error 5y ago
TLDR, IMHO: Get rid of the Small plan, make the Sandbox tier a much more generous free tier (1k/10k with logo), and charge more for the bigger plans. "First one is always free" kinda thing, so that devs can use your service for small projects (that don't cost you much) but then upsell it for broader enterprise-wide adoption on bigger projects. As a dev, I have the opposite opinion: The low-end pricing is a barrier to adoption. $9/mo isn't much, but it's the difference between "Oh cool, I can immediately use this in some of our side projects!" and "Oh, I have to request budget approval for this, explain what it is to superiors who might not be in the IT dept, answer questions about why we don't do just build it ourselves, answer questions about vendor support and lock-in, etc." It would cost more time for me to jump through all those hoops than to just use a standard CSV parsing library -- even though the workflow is vastly inferior -- because it's much less bureaucratic. Other services often provide a more generous free tier so that devs (the first ones to try something, often) can use it in a real-world project, fall in love with it, and then sell the paid version (which could be much more than $99) to their superiors only when the prototypes have proven valuable enough to make a solid sales pitch. I'm not a business consultant by any stretch, just letting you know that as a dev, I'd probably never bother using this because of the bureaucratic headaches involved with your pricing structure. Just my 2c.

imiric 5y ago

Congrats on the launch! The service looks interesting, but I'm wondering if there's a technical reason why it's a SaaS. CSVs could be parsed entirely on the client, and it should be possible for .XLS/.XLSX as well. If not with pure JavaScript+Web Workers then surely with WebAssembly. Doing this traditionally on the backend is fine of course, but as others have mentioned, trusting you with potentially sensitive data is a hurdle for many companies and individuals.

spreadr 5y ago
Thank you! To be honest, we haven't thought about the possibility to work everything client side. Its an idea worth exploring. Our aim is to integrate the importer with multiple destinations such as databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, S3 etc), APIs (custom, Zapier, GSheets, Airtable) and others (FTP, Email etc). Coding server side would be easier and faster. Moreover we plan to introduce on-premise deployment options in the future.
pm90 5y ago
Client side would be pretty amazing, especially considering if this is sensitive data. Then again, enterprises that deal with sensitive data don’t just allow employees to access that data via a web browser (or should not) and especially not through a modern one. So it would be a huge pain to figure out which browsers are capable of even supporting Wasm and other modern tech.

gregsadetsky 5y ago

Some notes: - in your embed code snippet, you have `There was some porblem uploading the sheet` -> the word "problem" is misspelled - the embed code includes https://js.csvbox.io/script.js https://js.csvbox.io/script.js which has two console.log debugging calls which could be removed in production - when adding columns to a new sheet, it would be neat to be able to paste the header line from a CSV file and for the columns to be created (this wouldn't help with the Column Type or Required options, but at least the Column Name would be set/wouldn't have to be typed one by one) - also, when adding columns, it would be great to press the enter key after typing a Column Name to save/close the modal I agree with most other commenters' feedback re: pricing, especially https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27133717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27133717 i.e. making the Sandbox much more generous. I was surprised to see only 5 rows imported initially, and thought it was a bug on your side (i.e. I thought only the first 5 rows were parsed) Congrats on the launch!

spreadr 5y ago
Thanks for your feedback and actually trying out the app in the first place. I will get the bugs fixed. I have also noted down the suggestions on column name and Keypress. We will implement them soon. Pricing restructure is also on the cards. Once again, thank you!!!
- gregsadetsky 5y ago
  More feedback :-) How are you dealing with character encoding? I uploaded a CSV file that has an utf-8 character in the name of a column, and in your import flow, under "File Columns", the column name appeared incorrectly encoded (i.e. it's been latin-1'ized) My file is most probably missing the UTF-8 BOM. I'm not sure what a good option is here. Have an advanced setting for Sheets (on your site) and pre-set the uploaded files' encoding?
  - spreadr 5y ago
    We have a preset of utf-8 and will probably have to find a way for managing encoding.