12 ms·

Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

356 points by joaovcoliveira 2y ago

Hello everyone! At a company I worked for, we needed to develop an MVP (basically a web page) and apply certain business logic to a Google Drive spreadsheet that was frequently updated by the Sales team. In this case, we had two options: Develop a backend to replace the current spreadsheet and have the sales team use it as a new "backoffice" - This would take a very long time, and if the hypothesis we were testing was wrong, it would be time wasted. Create the web page and use Google's SDK to extract data from the spreadsheet. We chose to go with the second option because it was quicker. Indeed, it was much faster than creating a new backoffice. But not as quick as we imagined. Integrating with Google's SDK requires some effort, especially to handle the OAuth logic, configure it in the console, and understand the documentation (which is quite shallow, by the way). Anyway! We did the project and I realized that maybe other devs might have encountered similar issues. Therefore, I developed a tool that transforms Google spreadsheets into "realtime APIs" with PATCH, GET, POST, and DELETE methods. Since it's a product for devs, I think it would be cool to hear your opinions. It's still quite primitive, but the basic features already work. https://zerosheets.com https://zerosheets.com

kentbrew 2y ago
Nice work! Small typo: there should be no apostrophe in "Your APIs," as shown on https://www.zerosheets.com/docs https://www.zerosheets.com/docs.
john9090 2y ago
[dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ctrlaltdylan 2y ago
Is the Google Sheets API rate limit open enough for actual production use? I thought it was pretty restrictive, no more than 60 writes per minute, but I'm not sure about the reads restrictions.
- r00fus 2y ago
  Couldn't you cache the reads? Not many usages really require real-time from their data store.
  - RockRobotRock 2y ago
    Do you really want to deal with caching logic for what should be a simple API call? Sounds like a convincing argument to use whatever this product is.
    - internetter 2y ago
      client = (APIcall) => redis.get(sha1(APIcall)) || { res = api(APIcall); redis.set(sha1(APIcall),res) return res } Not that hard. Like 10 lines of code to get a decentish cache going.
      - hot_gril 2y ago
        Assuming you have Redis
        internetter 2y ago
        Redis uses like 5mb of baseline RAM and can be deployed in a few lines of docker-compose.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        hot_gril 2y ago
        I'm not allowed to do that where I work. License is a no-no, can't run jobs without red tape, and there's no Docker either.
        internetter 2y ago
trollied 2y ago
There's a help page that gives you all the code you need to do this. https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/quickstart/js https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/quickstart/js
- joaovcoliveira 2y ago
  Yep, if you want to implement it from scratch, thats an option (way more painfull then using zerosheets) :)
maliker 2y ago
Great concept. Congrats on launching. Do you have a sense for how much usage Google will allow on a given sheet or user? I.e. will Google shut down the API after a certain usage level? (Side-note, your SSL cert seems to be having trouble, i.e. www.zerosheets.com is correctly encrypted, zerosheets.com is not.)
- joaovcoliveira 2y ago
  Hello!! Google limits for me are: 300 Read requests per minute 300 Write request per minute Since Ive just launched it, that number is far far away from being reach. (If it happens, the number can be increased). Regarding the SSL cert, some other users pointed the problem but I can`t replicated. Tried with many different browsers. Im not sure about whats happening, it`s always working for me but I will keep digging. Thank you for your comment bro :)
  - hankjacobs 2y ago
    I get an error on Chrome as well. From what I see, the Common Name for the cert at https://zerosheets.com https://zerosheets.com is `*.ip-66-228-52-143.cloudezapp.io` rather than zerorsheets.com. It's issued by Let's Encrypt. www.zerosheets.com is issued by Amazon. Hope that helps.
  - btown 2y ago
    Have you thought about auto-installing https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/triggers https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/triggers into the connected sheet, and maintaining a cache of the data that you invalidate onEdit? Would likely improve read latency dramatically, though it would make reads eventually-consistent. To others seeing this - has anyone else ever tried this approach? Are there players out there who do this and have SOC II etc. data security measures?
    - jpgvm 2y ago
      Disclaimer: I work at Glide but not on Google Sheets integration. Triggers/AppScript - not that I am aware of right now... Everyone I know doing stuff with GSheets (including Glide) is using a full-sync approach with an optimistic write layer of some sort. GSheets API frequently reports being unable to do things, sometimes because it's calculating (common for huge sheets), sometimes just because it's down, other-times because rate limits My impression is it's not a great API to build on directly. A trigger based system that captured writes and wrote them to an outbox sheet could drastically speed up the sync process however. The reason why we don't use that approach is there isn't APIs sufficient to setup this sort of thing automatically (last time I checked at least) and it makes changes to the users sheets which isn't impossible to live with but is distasteful.
office_drone 2y ago
I'd like to plug PocketBase [0] for a similar use case. Last week I was looking for a place to store random data with API access, and was looking at making a Google Sheets backend, but PocketBase was easy and didn't have a 60 rpm quota [1]. Deploying to a cheap VPS was very easy with CapRover. [0] https://pocketbase.io/ https://pocketbase.io/ [1] https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/limits https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/limits
- hgyjnbdet 2y ago
  I was looking at pocketbase but I didn't really understand how to use it. I know sqlite and am good at SQL, but couldn't work out how to use it.
  - phantompeace 2y ago
    You need to query/write using HTTPS requests
  - crashabr 2y ago
    You will probably enjoy Datasette more for this use case
- joaovcoliveira 2y ago
  I loved your product!! My infrastructure is 100% focused in scale so I think we can work together, we just need to share the costs. Please send me a message here https://www.zerosheets.com/contact https://www.zerosheets.com/contact so I can get your contact.
- tonyhart7 2y ago
  one vouch for pocketbase, I use pocketbase as general collecting data and export it to csv via api and transfer it to google sheet for viewing,edit etc super easy for prototyping and getting the job done, while google sheet as a backend is nice too but I need authentication etc etc
SJC_Hacker 2y ago
Do you have any bad data entry prevention?
- joaovcoliveira 2y ago
  Yes
toisanji 2y ago
tried it, sign in and ssl doesn't work.
- billythebuum 2y ago
  same
withinboredom 2y ago
Reminds me of the days when we'd write plugins for Microsoft Office that would populate data from an API and even send edits.
barrrrald 2y ago
reminds me of fuckitdb https://pypi.org/project/fuckitdb/ https://pypi.org/project/fuckitdb/
guhcampos 2y ago
There are loads of good use cases for this. At one point in my career I had to somehow re-tag thousands of resources in multiple clouds, some were terraformed, many were manually created over the years. The solution? Export them all to a Google Sheet with one tag per column. Edit and apply-on-save. Filter, sort, summarize, pivot all the much you want. It's incredible.
ErikAugust 2y ago
Maybe we can replace Bitcoin with Google Sheets?
- progval 2y ago
  already done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35119317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35119317
nativeit 2y ago
I was exploring some alternatives for templating and CMSs a few days ago, and stumbled over NPR’s internal toolkit[1] for publishing articles with data, charts, visualizations, etc., and thought it was interesting that they included Google-Sheets-as-a-CMS. 1. https://github.com/nprapps/dailygraphics-next https://github.com/nprapps/dailygraphics-next
altdataseller 2y ago
I rather use Google Sheets as the front end of my app. Have it call endpoints in my backend and populate the sheet with the data, and auto-generate charts based on that data. Easy, no-nonsense dashboard. Add in some dropdown menus and inputs and you got yourself a good enuff frontend
- _adamb 2y ago
  Me too! I've normalized it in our organizations. We use a combination of app scripts and what we call "Single Button Apps" that are web pages that have a text box (paste the URL of the Gsheet) and a "go" button. The input and output are all in the sheet, but putting the button in a web app makes it easy to iterate on feature set as/if the application grows. https://blog.adambuilds.com/sba-not-spa-the-most-minimal-ui https://blog.adambuilds.com/sba-not-spa-the-most-minimal-ui
  - ipince 2y ago
    I read your comment and your blog post and I still don't understand what happens when I put a link to a sheet in the text box and click Go.. what happens? You say your inputs and outputs are all in the sheet.. ok.. what does the button do? Are you just calling some API and giving it the sheet as the input, and then writing the output of the call back to the sheet? So then these Single Button Apps are just API endpoints that you're calling with sheets instead of json or, say Postman (if you want a nicer UI)? I think I'm failing to see the point here :-/
    - afro88 2y ago
      Same here. If the idea was to make it so non-technical people can use the google sheets + API app, just put a script in the sheet that calls the API? It will appear in a menu inside google sheets itself
      - johtso 2y ago
        You can even put a button on a sheet to trigger a script
surfingdino 2y ago
Great stuff. I need to tell some of my friends about it. Thanks for making it!
ulrischa 2y ago
Pricing is unclear to me
- pcthrowaway 2y ago
  Pricing isn't mentioned anywhere
vhiremath4 2y ago
Funny story. Before pivoting my startup to Loom, we were a user testing company named Opentest. Instead of spinning up a DB and creating a dashboard for my co-founders to look at who requested certain user tests, I just dumped everything into a Google Sheet. It was so good. No downtime. Open access. Only 3 people looking/editing, so no conflict. Didn't have to deal with database upgrades or maintenance. I often think about this decision and feel like I've learned a bunch of "good engineering practices" that pale in comparison to how being truly scrappy can be a genius unlock at any level.
- ydant 2y ago
  Agreed. Google Sheets is a great scrappy option for a startup / small company. I've used it for a lot of system data that needs to be modified by a few people at most. With a little bit of careful code and caching (I like validating and syncing to S3) you can easily use it as a crud frontend for important system data. It also can make great adhoc dashboards - plug into APIs (even private ones if you add in custom Google Scripts code) or push data updates to the sheets. I've had rather large reports auto updated on a schedule with multiple views of the data (pivot tables, queries, lookups, etc). Fully focused customized views into the data needed to solve specific internal problems with really quick delivery times. Sure, a custom developed option should be substantially better than Google Sheets, but you won't develop it quicker. By the time you actually need something bigger/better, you should be at a place where your needs are better defined and you can afford the resources to develop something better.
  - xcrunner529 2y ago
    Yeah my client uses Google forms for some simple use cases and it goes straight to google sheets and I just pull from that for verifying submissions and such in code. Not bad at all.
  - niutech 2y ago
    Why anybody would like to store their sensitive business data on a public cloud such as Google Sheets?
- 2y ago
eeue56 2y ago
I recently made a full web app using only AppsScript and Google Sheets as the database, and wrote about it here [0], and open sourced it here [1]. It was a novel experience, but I felt particularly compelled by the idea of having a data store than non-devs can easily interact with while having a web app in front of it that didn't require a server to be set up. But, AppsScript is too slow for this kinda thing to be a nice experience. Zerosheets looks nice, and I'll investigate it further if I look into this idea again! - [0] https://thetechenabler.substack.com/i/142898781/making-a-simple-link-aggregator https://thetechenabler.substack.com/i/142898781/making-a-sim... - [1] https://github.com/eeue56/simple-link-aggregator https://github.com/eeue56/simple-link-aggregator
- enumjorge 2y ago
  > having a data store than non-devs can easily interact with while having a web app in front of it that didn't require a server to be set up Isn't this one of the use cases for Airtable?
  - canadianfella 2y ago
    [dead]
mooreds 2y ago
Wrote something similar a decade ago: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1359 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1359 Hope things have improved over that time.
sadrasabouri 2y ago
Reading the documentation, I was expecting more tbh. As I found out there is no way to customize the API. The response is always a JSON dump of that google Sheet.
- giarc 2y ago
  I found the docs pretty minimal as well. Ironic since they specifically called out Google for shallow docs in the description.
uptown 2y ago
I used to use a Google Sheet to drive a restaurant website's menu page. It was perfect. The restaurant could update the spreadsheet whenever something changed, and it'd instantly be reflected on the web. If they ever messed something up, they could just revert.
- chambored 2y ago
  A couple of weeks ago, I set up this exact thing for a restaurant. Simple and free. I had app script build the site on updates. So they could edit it any time, it would trigger a rebuild, and redeploy as a static site.
  - hipjiveguy 2y ago
    where was the site hosted? Is it available online for us to checkout ?
    - chambored 2y ago
      I set it up initially on Vercel, but now I use Firebase because I'm sure it'll be cheaper in the long run.
yegle 2y ago
Related: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-sheets.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...
trevor-e 2y ago
This looks great. I tried doing it myself a while back using existing client libraries for Python and was surprised how annoying the setup is, like the spreadsheet auth in particular. I'm also surprised Google hasn't tried to kill this use-case. That's my main hesitation for using it on anything semi-serious.
HatchedLake721 2y ago
Didn't https://www.glideapps.com https://www.glideapps.com famously start with Google Sheets backend?
- Zaheer 2y ago
  Levels.fyi as well: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-sheets.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...
- dvdsgl 2y ago
  Yes, we’ve powered millions of apps with Google Sheets.
shafyy 2y ago
Are Fortune, The Weather Channel, Fast Company, and National Geographic really your customers?
- _justinfunk 2y ago
  I had this same question. Also, are "developers all over the world" "happily using Zero Sheets"? Based on OPs description, I wonder if this company was spun up while already doing business with those companies.
  - Klonoar 2y ago
    There are far more startups/products using that tagline of "used by developers all over the world"/"used by $x company" than our industry seems to want to admit.
- giarc 2y ago
  Usually what this means is some small little team within those companies either signed up for a trial (using their @fortune.com email address) or they use it for some small little project. Pretty common marketing technique for startups. Not totally honest, but not totally false.
Zaheer 2y ago
https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet#readme https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet#readme Is the best and simplest tool for turning Google Sheets accessible quickly.
- joaovcoliveira 2y ago
  not if you need authentication...
franze 2y ago
For some of my apps I just load the full spreadsheet as Json into the app. Cache it. Check for updates after every new start. Fast efficient easy.
sfink 2y ago
My next user script project idea would require something like this. It's for my own use, but I have to fill out grade sheets using an incredibly painful web UI. The data would be far more easily entered into a spreadsheet. (That's exactly what they used to use, but in order to make things "easier" the school implemented a horrific parody of an ultra basic CRUD web app...) So I want to make a user script that reads from a spreadsheet to populate the painful-to-use web form. I haven't started yet because (1) I still haven't finished writing up my last user script experience blog post, and (2) I'm terrified of the auth nightmare. It might be easier or harder in the user script context—I am in the context of a web page, so maybe that means I can do a normal oauth flow from there or something?
- amf12 2y ago
  Have you checked out Apps Script?
- aardvarkr 2y ago
  If you’re using Google sheets then yeah you’ll have to do a normal oauth flow. Alternatively you could use excel and write a simple macro to automate the flow. The easiest thing IMO would be to skip the complicated part of the script (auth) and just copy and paste the values from the clipboard and process the data accordingly.
rjbwork 2y ago
Also recommend checking out Azure Logic Apps' Google Sheets integration. It's been a few years since I've used it but I built some pretty nifty quick and dirty tools on top of Sheets, Logic Apps, and Azure Functions for back office app work at my last company.
jumploops 2y ago
Neat! This seems very similar to Sheety[0], which I've used a bunch of times before (and found a few bugs...). Do you have any plans to open source? [0]https://sheety.co https://sheety.co
hot_gril 2y ago
The link is broken. Says "no https for this domain"
londons_explore 2y ago
Google apps script already lets you write http handlers... They seem pretty powerful.
- pcthrowaway 2y ago
  Do you know of any docs on this?
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/html https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/html
thisismytest 2y ago
I love this. I recently had an idea for an app that would allow people to share their favorite things with other people, and i left that exploration thinking how amazing it'd be to build lots of apps on Google Sheets as the backend - you own the data, it has sharing built in..etc. so not just google sheets as the backend, google sheets as your personal backend for you instance of the app.
- geraldwhen 2y ago
  I made a family app with similar scope using Glide and I’ve been using it with my family for several years now.
squigglydonut 2y ago
My startup currently does this. Not as an API. I have different sheets set to populate different firebase relatime databases on a build script. I think it's the right way to go for early startups because then everyone can help build the product. I will be setting it up for our translation dictionaries.
ninjaa 2y ago
I use BaseQL which is a GraphQL layer for Airtable. It's worked for 3 years. For performance reasons after we translated our catalog we had to put in postgres + hasura as middleware but we still use BaseQL all over. It's rad. https://www.baseql.com/ https://www.baseql.com/ Being able to get data joined across sheets is priceless.
kellpossible2 2y ago
I did something very similar with https://github.com/kellpossible/avalanche-report/ https://github.com/kellpossible/avalanche-report/ we started with Google Sheets because it allowed us to quickly iterate with data entry workflow. When paired with a server this also allowed us to generate custom charts/diagrams via the IMAGE function with a crafted URL query. Reads are cached in a local sqlite database. We're in the process of migrating away from Google Sheets now as it's a little painful to set up and it's impossible to completely prevent users from editing the wrong fields in our use case. But it has served very well so far and would highly recommend this approach to start with for anyone!
chrisallick 2y ago
wow this is now the 9th time someone has built this lol
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
adam-p 2y ago
I also used Google Sheets as a datastore backend: https://github.com/adam-p/danforth-east https://github.com/adam-p/danforth-east It's a community association membership management thing, and I wanted the (non-technical) association board members to be able to easily inspect the data and do something useful with it if I moved away. It has mostly been successful, except that sometimes someone will manually edit the sheet and break something.
hannofcart 2y ago
Nice product. Couple of suggestions/questions from using Google sheets to put enter some data that changed manually via back office admin which we then showed in a website that was accessed by thousands. 1. Will I hit rate limits if I access this API often via say GET requests from a public facing site? (What we did was used Redis as an intermediate cache) 2. Let's say the data on the sheet is changed, is there a webhook to notify the change? (What we did incorrectly initially was to rely on polling for change detection. Which was a bad idea especially as we grew increasingly reliant on this. Instead, the better way to do this is to put an 'Update' button in the sheet which then triggers an API call to an intermediate server to bust the cache I mentioned in the previous point. This also initiated a new fetch of the sheet data. A more user-friendly/better UX way to do this would be to use the Appscript Sheet APIs sheet change event handlers which can be leveraged for this if you don't want to enforce an update button on users though I haven't used this myself. [1]) In your case, I guess the way to do 2 would be to ask users to clone a sheet that has this Appscript code embedded in it when they create a new sheet that must be served with your API. No sure if the UX of that is acceptable though. Wish your product success. [1] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/script/spreadsheet-trigger-builder https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/script/s...
fujohnwang 2y ago
https://afoo.me/tools.html https://afoo.me/tools.html I built this page with several google sheets as data source，；）
fendy3002 2y ago
Based on my experience, you'll get problem when the data is somehow large, and at that point it'll be too hard of a problem to fix / optimize CMIIW. Use it for prototyping and migrate to your own backend, or make a driver compatible with google sheet api, to connect to sql.
- pimlottc 2y ago
  > CMIIW First time I’ve seen “correct me if I’m wrong” abbreviated like this, good to know.
heartbl33d 2y ago
no https for this domain
ipince 2y ago
Very opportune! I'm just building an app that needs to interface with some sort of spreadsheet. I was going to use Airtable because their API is just better than Google Sheet's, even though I kinda prefer Sheets. I'll give this a try this weekend and see how it goes!
zharknado 2y ago
2 Google Sheets backend stories: - Needed to manage vocab learning content for 60 world languages, mostly being updated by a handful of university students and a bunch of remote volunteers. Google Sheets was our source of truth, with a nightly sync into MariaDB. We even wrote some callable scripts that could detect ambiguities and other common issues. Saved us a ton of tooling effort, and stakeholders found it cool that we could update content so quickly. - Working on a new product, my boss found a Figma plugin that lets you wire up prototypes to a Google sheet. It’s report-heavy and we’re still building the real app, so to dogfood it internally I’m running a wizard-of-oz collecting data with a different tool we already built and dumping results into sheets and then sorting/filtering/calculating for all the needed views. Internal stakeholders get a real, clickable prototype with real values that closely approximates what the real product will look like. It’s been amazing!
- Solvency 2y ago
  what Figma plug-in?
  - bigfatfrock 2y ago
    Guessing: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/735770583268406934/google-sheets-sync https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/735770583268406934/go...
yangff 2y ago
You don't actaully need any fancy wrapping.. just open https://script.google.com/ https://script.google.com/ you can already access all google's APIs + you will be able to integrate your sheets with your gmail (send email), calendar (you can modify the calendar when the sheet get changes), create pages, allow inputs from form and etc..) The problem with that is the sheet will not have any .. transaction based ops like a real database so for example you want to lock certain resources.. you may fail..
- forgotmypwlol 2y ago
  Every time someone makes a simple solution for a problem on this website someone else points out that a much more complicated option already exists.
  - deepfriedbits 2y ago
    I'd like to nominate this comment for the HN Hall of Fame
    - nnurmanov 2y ago
      Is there such thing?:)
      - fragmede 2y ago
        highlights: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    It's not a simple solution if it suggests replacing one API with two APIs (sheets + this wrapper). It defeats the point of going with Sheets. Both APIs can break now.
  - nextaccountic 2y ago
    Is it more complicated, really?
jevogel 2y ago
How does this differ from AppSheet? https://about.appsheet.com/how-to-create-an-app/ https://about.appsheet.com/how-to-create-an-app/
begueradj 2y ago
Wow ! So smart and useful! Thank you for sharing.
seigel 2y ago
Great job having fun and practicing making a company. Love it. Keep going! I remember using this one https://www.sheetgo.com/ https://www.sheetgo.com/ back when they were starting. Fun to watch them grow! Good luck!
- seigel 2y ago
  Actually it was https://sheetsu.com/ https://sheetsu.com/ ! :) Good memories
matrix1010 2y ago
to use zerosheets, you need to allow it: See, edit, create, and delete *all* your Google Sheets spreadsheets.
- beachy 2y ago
  Seems like you'd want a special purpose Google account then, rather than your personal one with your financial spreadsheets in it.
yawnxyz 2y ago
I'm surprised no one's posted Spread API yet: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/ https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/ It's a free Google Sheets / Apps Script you just paste to your sheet, and it turns the sheet into a full CRUD. It's kind of rate limited though but completely free! Edit: I've thought about creating a company around Sheets before, and the problem is that once you get to the "willing to pay" stage, you also kind of outgrow Sheets. I'd rather migrate to Turso, Cloudflare D1, or Pocketbase instead of staying with Sheets or SpreadAPI, because of the limitations.
- nbbaier 2y ago
  Wow this is really cool, thanks for linking!
- johtso 2y ago
  Looks neat! Seems very limited though.. like you can't even insert multiple lines in one request?
  - altbdoor 2y ago
    Just tried it out. The script is able to handle multiple commands (GET, POST, etc) in one go, but you will have to package the payload as an array. See https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi/blob/master/spread-api.js#L57-L59 https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi/blob/master/spread-api.j... As an example: curl -L \ --data '[{ "method": "POST", "sheet": "Sheet1", "payload": { "username": "John", "age": 25 } }, { "method": "GET", "sheet": "Sheet1" }]' \ "https://script.google.com/macros/s/$APP_ID/exec" A single curl request, that POSTs a user, and then GETs the data. So you can do multiple POSTs to add multiple rows too.
- _sidewalkchalk_ 2y ago
  what are the Spread API rate limits? Wasn't able to find info about this on the site
- ziolko 2y ago
  So glad that people find my little project useful! Please keep in mind that you can always post your improvement ideas or PR's here https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi.
nikolayasdf123 2y ago
you can use Google Sheets as front-end too. lol
lolive 2y ago
To anyone using Google Sheets as its data layer: be sure never to create a primaryKey column, always use the title column. Also be sure to use one single spreadsheet with many tabs, and coreference cells by their sheet/line/column. That’s such a superb mental model of what your data represents. Of course denormalize your data without caring. Tabular model is not good at managing cardinalities, but [truth to be told] neither is our brain. Also use AppScript for formulas and business logic. Your future dev will love reverse engineer it. Then when things become hairy, hire an IT consultant and pay him well. Be sure to complain that his added value is limited wrt this Gsheet chef d’œuvre.
seanhunter 2y ago
Just beware of the modern version of the "Excel noob trap" which lots of investment banks fell into in the 80s and 90s. Spreadsheets are amazing generic calculating frameworks and you can do a ton in them, so a lot of banks ended up building a huge ediface of excel spreadsheets that ran a wide variety of risk, pricing and operational functions. With a few plugins and extensions you can really do amazing things with this type of setup. The problem is that your spreadsheets basically become an unmaintainable and impenetrable nightmare and all your business logic is held hostage in various people's personal sheets. Making wide changes becomes hard/impossible and doing something that in a traditional software framework would be easy ("Let's change the frobnicator to twizzle first and then twozzle afterwards, instead of the other way round as it does it now") become very difficult requiring many many changes in many many sheets with a lot of risk, and a lot of dilligence to be sure you have actually made a particular critical fix everywhere.
- Maxion 2y ago
  Sadly many companies WANT to be in the excel trap...
  - Yiin 2y ago
    Can you elaborate? I understand the reasoning "we need to grow no matter the cost, will deal with problems when they arise", but deliberately sabotaging yourself doesn't sound reasonable.
    - gremlinunderway 2y ago
      not op but probably because some people are so used to using spreadsheets that even if you built them a database with custom visualizations, they'd ask for spreadsheet export.
      - fendy3002 2y ago
        Not op but that's one of a milder example. Some management people prefer the look and feel administration to be excel-like, even able to do data modification like excel. Some even worse that they require the data to be in excel since that's all they know.
herrington_d 2y ago
How does it compare to teable[1], which is a postgres + airtable fusion? I can see that Google Sheet has higher availability but fewer builtin dashboards. [1] https://teable.io/ https://teable.io/
davebroio 2y ago
Website design is very nice fair play. Is there a cost to using the product? I dont see that mentioned on the site and theres no pricing page listed. That would naturally cause me to freeze a little, rather than authenticating with my google account
lucw 2y ago
What is the selling point of your solutions versus something like Baserow ?
joejohnston 2y ago
There are open source tools out there already including budibase, nocodb, joget
robertlagrant 2y ago
This is a great way to prototype. I got a moderate distance along a road of a startup idea and we were going to start with a simple Google Sheets backend.
comebhack 2y ago
levels.fyi started out using Google Sheets as a back end. Submissions were done via Google Form, inserting into the sheet. https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-sheets.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...
bronco21016 2y ago
This looks like an awesome product! I'm currently in a bit of the same problem. Make an MVP of a webapp. What makes my predicament extra annoying is that my toolbox is primarily Microsoft. I have Power Automate, SharePoint, Office365, etc available to me. I do not have Azure unfortunately. The answer is spin up a flask app with SQL and do things right. Does something like Zerosheets exist for the MS environment? Really cool product! I'm bookmarking it for future products that don't need to live in MS land.
neontomo 2y ago
I use Opensheet as the backend for storing reviews of my book. It's not CRUD, but easy enough to fetch data as JSON and display it on a website (and for free!). Highly recommended. https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet
- eiiot 2y ago
  x2, opensheet is one of those tools I use so often I forget how useful it is. It’s so nice to be able to take form responses (or just generic svg data) and display it to a user base without having to setup a SQLite database and APIs.
kipukun 2y ago
Might've been overlooked, but "fastly" should probably be "quickly" on the main page.
_akhe 2y ago
I get invalid cert but I love this concept, I'm curious what performance is like. Would love to see a side-by-side of an API/DB vs Sheet-based APIs. Can you share the tool that transforms the spreadsheet into a realtime API? Sounds creative and interesting!
meowAJ16 2y ago
Why is this quicker to implement than free-tier RDS on AWS?
niutech 2y ago
Why do you trap yourself into vendor lock-in to a proprietary Google service, instead of easy open source BI solutions such as Pretzel (https://pretzelai.github.io/ https://pretzelai.github.io/) or Datami (https://datami.multi.coop/?locale=en https://datami.multi.coop/?locale=en)?

kentbrew 2y ago

Nice work! Small typo: there should be no apostrophe in "Your APIs," as shown on https://www.zerosheets.com/docs https://www.zerosheets.com/docs.

john9090 2y ago

[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ctrlaltdylan 2y ago

Is the Google Sheets API rate limit open enough for actual production use? I thought it was pretty restrictive, no more than 60 writes per minute, but I'm not sure about the reads restrictions.

r00fus 2y ago
Couldn't you cache the reads? Not many usages really require real-time from their data store.
- RockRobotRock 2y ago
  Do you really want to deal with caching logic for what should be a simple API call? Sounds like a convincing argument to use whatever this product is.
  - internetter 2y ago
    client = (APIcall) => redis.get(sha1(APIcall)) || { res = api(APIcall); redis.set(sha1(APIcall),res) return res } Not that hard. Like 10 lines of code to get a decentish cache going.
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      Assuming you have Redis
      - internetter 2y ago
        Redis uses like 5mb of baseline RAM and can be deployed in a few lines of docker-compose.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        hot_gril 2y ago
        I'm not allowed to do that where I work. License is a no-no, can't run jobs without red tape, and there's no Docker either.
        internetter 2y ago

trollied 2y ago

There's a help page that gives you all the code you need to do this. https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/quickstart/js https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/quickstart/js

joaovcoliveira 2y ago
Yep, if you want to implement it from scratch, thats an option (way more painfull then using zerosheets) :)

maliker 2y ago

Great concept. Congrats on launching. Do you have a sense for how much usage Google will allow on a given sheet or user? I.e. will Google shut down the API after a certain usage level? (Side-note, your SSL cert seems to be having trouble, i.e. www.zerosheets.com is correctly encrypted, zerosheets.com is not.)

joaovcoliveira 2y ago
Hello!! Google limits for me are: 300 Read requests per minute 300 Write request per minute Since Ive just launched it, that number is far far away from being reach. (If it happens, the number can be increased). Regarding the SSL cert, some other users pointed the problem but I can`t replicated. Tried with many different browsers. Im not sure about whats happening, it`s always working for me but I will keep digging. Thank you for your comment bro :)
- hankjacobs 2y ago
  I get an error on Chrome as well. From what I see, the Common Name for the cert at https://zerosheets.com https://zerosheets.com is `*.ip-66-228-52-143.cloudezapp.io` rather than zerorsheets.com. It's issued by Let's Encrypt. www.zerosheets.com is issued by Amazon. Hope that helps.
- btown 2y ago
  Have you thought about auto-installing https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/triggers https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/triggers into the connected sheet, and maintaining a cache of the data that you invalidate onEdit? Would likely improve read latency dramatically, though it would make reads eventually-consistent. To others seeing this - has anyone else ever tried this approach? Are there players out there who do this and have SOC II etc. data security measures?
  - jpgvm 2y ago
    Disclaimer: I work at Glide but not on Google Sheets integration. Triggers/AppScript - not that I am aware of right now... Everyone I know doing stuff with GSheets (including Glide) is using a full-sync approach with an optimistic write layer of some sort. GSheets API frequently reports being unable to do things, sometimes because it's calculating (common for huge sheets), sometimes just because it's down, other-times because rate limits My impression is it's not a great API to build on directly. A trigger based system that captured writes and wrote them to an outbox sheet could drastically speed up the sync process however. The reason why we don't use that approach is there isn't APIs sufficient to setup this sort of thing automatically (last time I checked at least) and it makes changes to the users sheets which isn't impossible to live with but is distasteful.

office_drone 2y ago

I'd like to plug PocketBase [0] for a similar use case. Last week I was looking for a place to store random data with API access, and was looking at making a Google Sheets backend, but PocketBase was easy and didn't have a 60 rpm quota [1]. Deploying to a cheap VPS was very easy with CapRover. [0] https://pocketbase.io/ https://pocketbase.io/ [1] https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/limits https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/limits

hgyjnbdet 2y ago
I was looking at pocketbase but I didn't really understand how to use it. I know sqlite and am good at SQL, but couldn't work out how to use it.
- phantompeace 2y ago
  You need to query/write using HTTPS requests
- crashabr 2y ago
  You will probably enjoy Datasette more for this use case
joaovcoliveira 2y ago
I loved your product!! My infrastructure is 100% focused in scale so I think we can work together, we just need to share the costs. Please send me a message here https://www.zerosheets.com/contact https://www.zerosheets.com/contact so I can get your contact.
tonyhart7 2y ago
one vouch for pocketbase, I use pocketbase as general collecting data and export it to csv via api and transfer it to google sheet for viewing,edit etc super easy for prototyping and getting the job done, while google sheet as a backend is nice too but I need authentication etc etc

SJC_Hacker 2y ago

Do you have any bad data entry prevention?

joaovcoliveira 2y ago
Yes

toisanji 2y ago

tried it, sign in and ssl doesn't work.

billythebuum 2y ago
same

withinboredom 2y ago

Reminds me of the days when we'd write plugins for Microsoft Office that would populate data from an API and even send edits.

barrrrald 2y ago

reminds me of fuckitdb https://pypi.org/project/fuckitdb/ https://pypi.org/project/fuckitdb/

guhcampos 2y ago

There are loads of good use cases for this. At one point in my career I had to somehow re-tag thousands of resources in multiple clouds, some were terraformed, many were manually created over the years. The solution? Export them all to a Google Sheet with one tag per column. Edit and apply-on-save. Filter, sort, summarize, pivot all the much you want. It's incredible.

ErikAugust 2y ago

Maybe we can replace Bitcoin with Google Sheets?

progval 2y ago
already done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35119317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35119317

nativeit 2y ago

I was exploring some alternatives for templating and CMSs a few days ago, and stumbled over NPR’s internal toolkit[1] for publishing articles with data, charts, visualizations, etc., and thought it was interesting that they included Google-Sheets-as-a-CMS. 1. https://github.com/nprapps/dailygraphics-next https://github.com/nprapps/dailygraphics-next

altdataseller 2y ago

I rather use Google Sheets as the front end of my app. Have it call endpoints in my backend and populate the sheet with the data, and auto-generate charts based on that data. Easy, no-nonsense dashboard. Add in some dropdown menus and inputs and you got yourself a good enuff frontend

_adamb 2y ago
Me too! I've normalized it in our organizations. We use a combination of app scripts and what we call "Single Button Apps" that are web pages that have a text box (paste the URL of the Gsheet) and a "go" button. The input and output are all in the sheet, but putting the button in a web app makes it easy to iterate on feature set as/if the application grows. https://blog.adambuilds.com/sba-not-spa-the-most-minimal-ui https://blog.adambuilds.com/sba-not-spa-the-most-minimal-ui
- ipince 2y ago
  I read your comment and your blog post and I still don't understand what happens when I put a link to a sheet in the text box and click Go.. what happens? You say your inputs and outputs are all in the sheet.. ok.. what does the button do? Are you just calling some API and giving it the sheet as the input, and then writing the output of the call back to the sheet? So then these Single Button Apps are just API endpoints that you're calling with sheets instead of json or, say Postman (if you want a nicer UI)? I think I'm failing to see the point here :-/
  - afro88 2y ago
    Same here. If the idea was to make it so non-technical people can use the google sheets + API app, just put a script in the sheet that calls the API? It will appear in a menu inside google sheets itself
    - johtso 2y ago
      You can even put a button on a sheet to trigger a script

surfingdino 2y ago

Great stuff. I need to tell some of my friends about it. Thanks for making it!

ulrischa 2y ago

Pricing is unclear to me

pcthrowaway 2y ago
Pricing isn't mentioned anywhere

vhiremath4 2y ago

Funny story. Before pivoting my startup to Loom, we were a user testing company named Opentest. Instead of spinning up a DB and creating a dashboard for my co-founders to look at who requested certain user tests, I just dumped everything into a Google Sheet. It was so good. No downtime. Open access. Only 3 people looking/editing, so no conflict. Didn't have to deal with database upgrades or maintenance. I often think about this decision and feel like I've learned a bunch of "good engineering practices" that pale in comparison to how being truly scrappy can be a genius unlock at any level.

ydant 2y ago
Agreed. Google Sheets is a great scrappy option for a startup / small company. I've used it for a lot of system data that needs to be modified by a few people at most. With a little bit of careful code and caching (I like validating and syncing to S3) you can easily use it as a crud frontend for important system data. It also can make great adhoc dashboards - plug into APIs (even private ones if you add in custom Google Scripts code) or push data updates to the sheets. I've had rather large reports auto updated on a schedule with multiple views of the data (pivot tables, queries, lookups, etc). Fully focused customized views into the data needed to solve specific internal problems with really quick delivery times. Sure, a custom developed option should be substantially better than Google Sheets, but you won't develop it quicker. By the time you actually need something bigger/better, you should be at a place where your needs are better defined and you can afford the resources to develop something better.
- xcrunner529 2y ago
  Yeah my client uses Google forms for some simple use cases and it goes straight to google sheets and I just pull from that for verifying submissions and such in code. Not bad at all.
- niutech 2y ago
  Why anybody would like to store their sensitive business data on a public cloud such as Google Sheets?
2y ago

eeue56 2y ago

I recently made a full web app using only AppsScript and Google Sheets as the database, and wrote about it here [0], and open sourced it here [1]. It was a novel experience, but I felt particularly compelled by the idea of having a data store than non-devs can easily interact with while having a web app in front of it that didn't require a server to be set up. But, AppsScript is too slow for this kinda thing to be a nice experience. Zerosheets looks nice, and I'll investigate it further if I look into this idea again! - [0] https://thetechenabler.substack.com/i/142898781/making-a-simple-link-aggregator https://thetechenabler.substack.com/i/142898781/making-a-sim... - [1] https://github.com/eeue56/simple-link-aggregator https://github.com/eeue56/simple-link-aggregator

enumjorge 2y ago
> having a data store than non-devs can easily interact with while having a web app in front of it that didn't require a server to be set up Isn't this one of the use cases for Airtable?
- canadianfella 2y ago
  [dead]

mooreds 2y ago

Wrote something similar a decade ago: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1359 https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1359 Hope things have improved over that time.

sadrasabouri 2y ago

Reading the documentation, I was expecting more tbh. As I found out there is no way to customize the API. The response is always a JSON dump of that google Sheet.

giarc 2y ago
I found the docs pretty minimal as well. Ironic since they specifically called out Google for shallow docs in the description.

uptown 2y ago

I used to use a Google Sheet to drive a restaurant website's menu page. It was perfect. The restaurant could update the spreadsheet whenever something changed, and it'd instantly be reflected on the web. If they ever messed something up, they could just revert.

chambored 2y ago
A couple of weeks ago, I set up this exact thing for a restaurant. Simple and free. I had app script build the site on updates. So they could edit it any time, it would trigger a rebuild, and redeploy as a static site.
- hipjiveguy 2y ago
  where was the site hosted? Is it available online for us to checkout ?
  - chambored 2y ago
    I set it up initially on Vercel, but now I use Firebase because I'm sure it'll be cheaper in the long run.

yegle 2y ago

Related: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-sheets.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...

trevor-e 2y ago

This looks great. I tried doing it myself a while back using existing client libraries for Python and was surprised how annoying the setup is, like the spreadsheet auth in particular. I'm also surprised Google hasn't tried to kill this use-case. That's my main hesitation for using it on anything semi-serious.

HatchedLake721 2y ago

Didn't https://www.glideapps.com https://www.glideapps.com famously start with Google Sheets backend?

Zaheer 2y ago
Levels.fyi as well: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-sheets.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...
dvdsgl 2y ago
Yes, we’ve powered millions of apps with Google Sheets.

shafyy 2y ago

Are Fortune, The Weather Channel, Fast Company, and National Geographic really your customers?

_justinfunk 2y ago
I had this same question. Also, are "developers all over the world" "happily using Zero Sheets"? Based on OPs description, I wonder if this company was spun up while already doing business with those companies.
- Klonoar 2y ago
  There are far more startups/products using that tagline of "used by developers all over the world"/"used by $x company" than our industry seems to want to admit.
giarc 2y ago
Usually what this means is some small little team within those companies either signed up for a trial (using their @fortune.com email address) or they use it for some small little project. Pretty common marketing technique for startups. Not totally honest, but not totally false.

Zaheer 2y ago

https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet#readme https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet#readme Is the best and simplest tool for turning Google Sheets accessible quickly.

joaovcoliveira 2y ago
not if you need authentication...

franze 2y ago

For some of my apps I just load the full spreadsheet as Json into the app. Cache it. Check for updates after every new start. Fast efficient easy.

sfink 2y ago

My next user script project idea would require something like this. It's for my own use, but I have to fill out grade sheets using an incredibly painful web UI. The data would be far more easily entered into a spreadsheet. (That's exactly what they used to use, but in order to make things "easier" the school implemented a horrific parody of an ultra basic CRUD web app...) So I want to make a user script that reads from a spreadsheet to populate the painful-to-use web form. I haven't started yet because (1) I still haven't finished writing up my last user script experience blog post, and (2) I'm terrified of the auth nightmare. It might be easier or harder in the user script context—I am in the context of a web page, so maybe that means I can do a normal oauth flow from there or something?

amf12 2y ago
Have you checked out Apps Script?
aardvarkr 2y ago
If you’re using Google sheets then yeah you’ll have to do a normal oauth flow. Alternatively you could use excel and write a simple macro to automate the flow. The easiest thing IMO would be to skip the complicated part of the script (auth) and just copy and paste the values from the clipboard and process the data accordingly.

rjbwork 2y ago

Also recommend checking out Azure Logic Apps' Google Sheets integration. It's been a few years since I've used it but I built some pretty nifty quick and dirty tools on top of Sheets, Logic Apps, and Azure Functions for back office app work at my last company.

jumploops 2y ago

Neat! This seems very similar to Sheety[0], which I've used a bunch of times before (and found a few bugs...). Do you have any plans to open source? [0]https://sheety.co https://sheety.co

hot_gril 2y ago

The link is broken. Says "no https for this domain"

londons_explore 2y ago

Google apps script already lets you write http handlers... They seem pretty powerful.

pcthrowaway 2y ago
Do you know of any docs on this?
- londons_explore 2y ago
  https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/html https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/html

thisismytest 2y ago

I love this. I recently had an idea for an app that would allow people to share their favorite things with other people, and i left that exploration thinking how amazing it'd be to build lots of apps on Google Sheets as the backend - you own the data, it has sharing built in..etc. so not just google sheets as the backend, google sheets as your personal backend for you instance of the app.

geraldwhen 2y ago
I made a family app with similar scope using Glide and I’ve been using it with my family for several years now.

squigglydonut 2y ago

My startup currently does this. Not as an API. I have different sheets set to populate different firebase relatime databases on a build script. I think it's the right way to go for early startups because then everyone can help build the product. I will be setting it up for our translation dictionaries.

ninjaa 2y ago

I use BaseQL which is a GraphQL layer for Airtable. It's worked for 3 years. For performance reasons after we translated our catalog we had to put in postgres + hasura as middleware but we still use BaseQL all over. It's rad. https://www.baseql.com/ https://www.baseql.com/ Being able to get data joined across sheets is priceless.

kellpossible2 2y ago

I did something very similar with https://github.com/kellpossible/avalanche-report/ https://github.com/kellpossible/avalanche-report/ we started with Google Sheets because it allowed us to quickly iterate with data entry workflow. When paired with a server this also allowed us to generate custom charts/diagrams via the IMAGE function with a crafted URL query. Reads are cached in a local sqlite database. We're in the process of migrating away from Google Sheets now as it's a little painful to set up and it's impossible to completely prevent users from editing the wrong fields in our use case. But it has served very well so far and would highly recommend this approach to start with for anyone!

chrisallick 2y ago

wow this is now the 9th time someone has built this lol

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

adam-p 2y ago

I also used Google Sheets as a datastore backend: https://github.com/adam-p/danforth-east https://github.com/adam-p/danforth-east It's a community association membership management thing, and I wanted the (non-technical) association board members to be able to easily inspect the data and do something useful with it if I moved away. It has mostly been successful, except that sometimes someone will manually edit the sheet and break something.

hannofcart 2y ago

Nice product. Couple of suggestions/questions from using Google sheets to put enter some data that changed manually via back office admin which we then showed in a website that was accessed by thousands. 1. Will I hit rate limits if I access this API often via say GET requests from a public facing site? (What we did was used Redis as an intermediate cache) 2. Let's say the data on the sheet is changed, is there a webhook to notify the change? (What we did incorrectly initially was to rely on polling for change detection. Which was a bad idea especially as we grew increasingly reliant on this. Instead, the better way to do this is to put an 'Update' button in the sheet which then triggers an API call to an intermediate server to bust the cache I mentioned in the previous point. This also initiated a new fetch of the sheet data. A more user-friendly/better UX way to do this would be to use the Appscript Sheet APIs sheet change event handlers which can be leveraged for this if you don't want to enforce an update button on users though I haven't used this myself. [1]) In your case, I guess the way to do 2 would be to ask users to clone a sheet that has this Appscript code embedded in it when they create a new sheet that must be served with your API. No sure if the UX of that is acceptable though. Wish your product success. [1] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/script/spreadsheet-trigger-builder https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/script/s...

fujohnwang 2y ago

https://afoo.me/tools.html https://afoo.me/tools.html I built this page with several google sheets as data source，；）

fendy3002 2y ago

Based on my experience, you'll get problem when the data is somehow large, and at that point it'll be too hard of a problem to fix / optimize CMIIW. Use it for prototyping and migrate to your own backend, or make a driver compatible with google sheet api, to connect to sql.

pimlottc 2y ago
> CMIIW First time I’ve seen “correct me if I’m wrong” abbreviated like this, good to know.

heartbl33d 2y ago

no https for this domain

ipince 2y ago

Very opportune! I'm just building an app that needs to interface with some sort of spreadsheet. I was going to use Airtable because their API is just better than Google Sheet's, even though I kinda prefer Sheets. I'll give this a try this weekend and see how it goes!

zharknado 2y ago

2 Google Sheets backend stories: - Needed to manage vocab learning content for 60 world languages, mostly being updated by a handful of university students and a bunch of remote volunteers. Google Sheets was our source of truth, with a nightly sync into MariaDB. We even wrote some callable scripts that could detect ambiguities and other common issues. Saved us a ton of tooling effort, and stakeholders found it cool that we could update content so quickly. - Working on a new product, my boss found a Figma plugin that lets you wire up prototypes to a Google sheet. It’s report-heavy and we’re still building the real app, so to dogfood it internally I’m running a wizard-of-oz collecting data with a different tool we already built and dumping results into sheets and then sorting/filtering/calculating for all the needed views. Internal stakeholders get a real, clickable prototype with real values that closely approximates what the real product will look like. It’s been amazing!

Solvency 2y ago
what Figma plug-in?
- bigfatfrock 2y ago
  Guessing: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/735770583268406934/google-sheets-sync https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/735770583268406934/go...

yangff 2y ago

You don't actaully need any fancy wrapping.. just open https://script.google.com/ https://script.google.com/ you can already access all google's APIs + you will be able to integrate your sheets with your gmail (send email), calendar (you can modify the calendar when the sheet get changes), create pages, allow inputs from form and etc..) The problem with that is the sheet will not have any .. transaction based ops like a real database so for example you want to lock certain resources.. you may fail..

forgotmypwlol 2y ago
Every time someone makes a simple solution for a problem on this website someone else points out that a much more complicated option already exists.
- deepfriedbits 2y ago
  I'd like to nominate this comment for the HN Hall of Fame
  - nnurmanov 2y ago
    Is there such thing?:)
    - fragmede 2y ago
      highlights: https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
- throwaway290 2y ago
  It's not a simple solution if it suggests replacing one API with two APIs (sheets + this wrapper). It defeats the point of going with Sheets. Both APIs can break now.
- nextaccountic 2y ago
  Is it more complicated, really?

jevogel 2y ago

How does this differ from AppSheet? https://about.appsheet.com/how-to-create-an-app/ https://about.appsheet.com/how-to-create-an-app/

begueradj 2y ago

Wow ! So smart and useful! Thank you for sharing.

seigel 2y ago

Great job having fun and practicing making a company. Love it. Keep going! I remember using this one https://www.sheetgo.com/ https://www.sheetgo.com/ back when they were starting. Fun to watch them grow! Good luck!

seigel 2y ago
Actually it was https://sheetsu.com/ https://sheetsu.com/ ! :) Good memories

matrix1010 2y ago

to use zerosheets, you need to allow it: See, edit, create, and delete *all* your Google Sheets spreadsheets.

beachy 2y ago
Seems like you'd want a special purpose Google account then, rather than your personal one with your financial spreadsheets in it.

yawnxyz 2y ago

I'm surprised no one's posted Spread API yet: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/ https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/ It's a free Google Sheets / Apps Script you just paste to your sheet, and it turns the sheet into a full CRUD. It's kind of rate limited though but completely free! Edit: I've thought about creating a company around Sheets before, and the problem is that once you get to the "willing to pay" stage, you also kind of outgrow Sheets. I'd rather migrate to Turso, Cloudflare D1, or Pocketbase instead of staying with Sheets or SpreadAPI, because of the limitations.

nbbaier 2y ago
Wow this is really cool, thanks for linking!
johtso 2y ago
Looks neat! Seems very limited though.. like you can't even insert multiple lines in one request?
- altbdoor 2y ago
  Just tried it out. The script is able to handle multiple commands (GET, POST, etc) in one go, but you will have to package the payload as an array. See https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi/blob/master/spread-api.js#L57-L59 https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi/blob/master/spread-api.j... As an example: curl -L \ --data '[{ "method": "POST", "sheet": "Sheet1", "payload": { "username": "John", "age": 25 } }, { "method": "GET", "sheet": "Sheet1" }]' \ "https://script.google.com/macros/s/$APP_ID/exec" A single curl request, that POSTs a user, and then GETs the data. So you can do multiple POSTs to add multiple rows too.
_sidewalkchalk_ 2y ago
what are the Spread API rate limits? Wasn't able to find info about this on the site
ziolko 2y ago
So glad that people find my little project useful! Please keep in mind that you can always post your improvement ideas or PR's here https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi.

nikolayasdf123 2y ago

you can use Google Sheets as front-end too. lol

lolive 2y ago

To anyone using Google Sheets as its data layer: be sure never to create a primaryKey column, always use the title column. Also be sure to use one single spreadsheet with many tabs, and coreference cells by their sheet/line/column. That’s such a superb mental model of what your data represents. Of course denormalize your data without caring. Tabular model is not good at managing cardinalities, but [truth to be told] neither is our brain. Also use AppScript for formulas and business logic. Your future dev will love reverse engineer it. Then when things become hairy, hire an IT consultant and pay him well. Be sure to complain that his added value is limited wrt this Gsheet chef d’œuvre.

seanhunter 2y ago

Just beware of the modern version of the "Excel noob trap" which lots of investment banks fell into in the 80s and 90s. Spreadsheets are amazing generic calculating frameworks and you can do a ton in them, so a lot of banks ended up building a huge ediface of excel spreadsheets that ran a wide variety of risk, pricing and operational functions. With a few plugins and extensions you can really do amazing things with this type of setup. The problem is that your spreadsheets basically become an unmaintainable and impenetrable nightmare and all your business logic is held hostage in various people's personal sheets. Making wide changes becomes hard/impossible and doing something that in a traditional software framework would be easy ("Let's change the frobnicator to twizzle first and then twozzle afterwards, instead of the other way round as it does it now") become very difficult requiring many many changes in many many sheets with a lot of risk, and a lot of dilligence to be sure you have actually made a particular critical fix everywhere.

Maxion 2y ago
Sadly many companies WANT to be in the excel trap...
- Yiin 2y ago
  Can you elaborate? I understand the reasoning "we need to grow no matter the cost, will deal with problems when they arise", but deliberately sabotaging yourself doesn't sound reasonable.
  - gremlinunderway 2y ago
    not op but probably because some people are so used to using spreadsheets that even if you built them a database with custom visualizations, they'd ask for spreadsheet export.
    - fendy3002 2y ago
      Not op but that's one of a milder example. Some management people prefer the look and feel administration to be excel-like, even able to do data modification like excel. Some even worse that they require the data to be in excel since that's all they know.

herrington_d 2y ago

How does it compare to teable[1], which is a postgres + airtable fusion? I can see that Google Sheet has higher availability but fewer builtin dashboards. [1] https://teable.io/ https://teable.io/

davebroio 2y ago

Website design is very nice fair play. Is there a cost to using the product? I dont see that mentioned on the site and theres no pricing page listed. That would naturally cause me to freeze a little, rather than authenticating with my google account

lucw 2y ago

What is the selling point of your solutions versus something like Baserow ?

joejohnston 2y ago

There are open source tools out there already including budibase, nocodb, joget

robertlagrant 2y ago

This is a great way to prototype. I got a moderate distance along a road of a startup idea and we were going to start with a simple Google Sheets backend.

comebhack 2y ago

levels.fyi started out using Google Sheets as a back end. Submissions were done via Google Form, inserting into the sheet. https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-sheets.html https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...

bronco21016 2y ago

This looks like an awesome product! I'm currently in a bit of the same problem. Make an MVP of a webapp. What makes my predicament extra annoying is that my toolbox is primarily Microsoft. I have Power Automate, SharePoint, Office365, etc available to me. I do not have Azure unfortunately. The answer is spin up a flask app with SQL and do things right. Does something like Zerosheets exist for the MS environment? Really cool product! I'm bookmarking it for future products that don't need to live in MS land.

neontomo 2y ago

I use Opensheet as the backend for storing reviews of my book. It's not CRUD, but easy enough to fetch data as JSON and display it on a website (and for free!). Highly recommended. https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet

eiiot 2y ago
x2, opensheet is one of those tools I use so often I forget how useful it is. It’s so nice to be able to take form responses (or just generic svg data) and display it to a user base without having to setup a SQLite database and APIs.

kipukun 2y ago

Might've been overlooked, but "fastly" should probably be "quickly" on the main page.

_akhe 2y ago

I get invalid cert but I love this concept, I'm curious what performance is like. Would love to see a side-by-side of an API/DB vs Sheet-based APIs. Can you share the tool that transforms the spreadsheet into a realtime API? Sounds creative and interesting!

meowAJ16 2y ago

Why is this quicker to implement than free-tier RDS on AWS?

niutech 2y ago

Why do you trap yourself into vendor lock-in to a proprietary Google service, instead of easy open source BI solutions such as Pretzel (https://pretzelai.github.io/ https://pretzelai.github.io/) or Datami (https://datami.multi.coop/?locale=en https://datami.multi.coop/?locale=en)?