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Comment by sampl | Hacker News Reader

Quickly? Firebase + React.

Seriously, don’t overlook this combo. Auth just works. Hosting built in, no backend or database server to maintain. No API, just subscribe to a collection right from the view. It just works (and is easily swapped for the real deal if you need it).

I made a guide/boilerplate to show you how (includes auth, CRUD, full text search, stripe subscriptions):

http://getfirefly.org/

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Too expensive to be worth it. I'm totally fine with outsourcing stuff that is difficult and third parties can do better, but in this case the amount of stuff you're playing egregious "cloud" pricing for is too much. Just spend a handful of days learning one of the open source stacks and you'll be set for life. It's totally worth it assuming you'll be making more than 1 app ever.

Guess it depends on what you consider expensive.

For me, time I’m writing unnecessary code or learning libraries I don’t already know is time I’m not spending thinking about the product. I’m a designer who just wants to ship.

I am open to suggestions though. What would you recommend for, say, auth instead? I’ve tried rails, Django, node/mongo, etc; even hosting a small db on compose.io comes with a chunky base fee, and I still have to do way too much work for user accounts/search/APIs/ORM. There’s a reason Firebase is popular with the yoof.

Change my mind though!

My startup is betting on parse server platform [0]. For us its the most of 2 worlds.

- huge community supporting a codebase initially private

- open source now so you can host it anywhere

- 3rd party online instances to quickly start [1][2]

[0][http://parseplatform.org/]

[1][https://sashido.io]

[2][https://back4app.com]

[3][https://https://www.nodechef.com/parse-server]

Opensource alternative to firebase: couchdb . Less features but the essentials are there...

If you use couchdb+rxdb, you have the same subscribe-to-collection thing but without the google lock in

Firebase's free tier is more than enough to play with an idea, and the next tier up is (100k concurrent users) $25/month ... if that's too expensive then there's something very wrong with your pricing model. Obviously this assumes you're not storing much data per user - you wouldn't build a imgur clone with it - but it's not that expensive for any typical SaaS app.

And it's actually way cheaper for small apps if you "upgrade" to the Blaze plan and do pay-as-you-go billing. I often pay between $0 and %0.05/mo...

Full pricing: https://firebase.google.com/pricing/

Concurrent users are not the only limitation. Your app needs to fit the bandwith limits as well. I had to shutdown a very simple app with a few users because of ridiculous billing.

"Just spend a handful of days learning one of the open source stacks"

Sure, but which one? :)

While firebase has an expensive first tier, Firestore bills more for what you use, like AWS does.

This.

Maybe I am biased because I develop most of my applications in React. But if you don't want to bother with any backend application and just want to get out quickly, build your React application with Firebase. That's how I do it and that's why I also covered my whole boilerplate process in a comprehensive tutorial [0].

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/complete-firebase-authentication...

I still love the Meteor framework, even if it's not as popular these days. Auth "just works", The Mongo<->Server<->Client dataflow is super easy, and there's lots of tools to quickly and easily deploy it.

Now that React is supported, it's even easier for throwing together web apps.

I just dropped firebase after nearly a month of development. Firestore lacks so many features that i consider basic. For example you can't even do a count query on the db and have jump hoops to even achieve this simple feature.

I was gonna say the same thing. It’s cheap/nearly free if it’s just a little side project or low traffic thing. And a joy of a stack to work in.

yerp, by 2018, UI + SaaS backends is often the easiest way to get something deployed ... provided you want to deploy essentially the same thing other people already have + some customization ..

.. what's going to be neat to see is how that "essentially the same thing" changes over time.

deepstreamhub.com is another neat SaaS that's worth looking into for some cases that Firebase might not handle as well ... there are probably yet other SaaS products that cover other specifics and will be still more in the future..

.. obvious mention re. SaaS products is that they could evaporate at any time. warranty void where prohibited. all states except ... idk, AK, for some reason.

the hub product shutdown https://github.com/deepstreamIO/deepstream.io/issues/867

I'm having trouble building with this. Can you elaborate a little bit more about the steps after adding adding all three project. I can't understand this

>> " Now let's connect our databases to our app by adding their "keys" to our app's environment ("env") files. You should generally keep connection keys like this secret, so first we'll rename our environment files to keep them from getting committed into git (the new filenames are listed in .gitignore). "

My fault--I've re-added the sample env files, you can copy these, remove ".example" from the name, and add your keys:

https://github.com/sampl/firefly

Thanks for trying it out!

> Quickly? Firebase + React.

Came here to recommend this myself.

I built an SPA with React + Firebase (auth, db, hosting, and all) to help my wife and I track our kids allowance and spending in just over a day: https://parentbank.actridge.com/ (did I mention Firebase hosting allows HTTPS on custom domains?)

It's an awesome combo that is seriously under-utilized.

Good idea. Gonna look into this!

Just stripe subscription? Customers of my consultancy also require Bitcoin, Wire transfers and other payments. We use http://killbill.io/ now. It supports multi tenancy.

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