Show HN: Stacker – build web apps in your browser, without code | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Stacker – build web apps in your browser, without code

stacker.app

31 pointsskellystudios13 comments

Co-founder here. I've been working on this for about a year. I had been building platforms for several marketplace-type startups in a row, I realised that I was literally just reimplementing the same easy stuff again and again. So I quit, and built this so that the founders/product team could build whole features without needing to call me.

So far we've got a few real apps running live – a social network, a platform business, a fact-checking portal, as well as demos of a few other apps on Stacker.

This looks awesome!

How would it work with existing databases? For example - I already have a mysql database and I want to build dashboards on the data using stacker. Is that possible?

Also, how does the opposite work? Is there a python or node library to connect existing apps to stacker to send it data? Or is it all through REST?

Hey! Co-founder here, we don't support external databases today but we're working on it! We hope this makes it easier to dip into Stacker. The opposite works already, each app created in Stacker has a REST API.

Your pricing is pretty expensive compared to Bubble.is. How is your product different?

Is there a support community yet for Stacker builders?

Also, here is a good place to submit tutorials if this takes off... www.stakk.co

We’re more expensive than Bubble for individuals, but for teams we are pretty competitive I think.

In Stacker apps are made out of bigger building blocks than in Bubble so eg. not everyone has to build their own news feed from scratch. We also use flexbox rather than absolute positioning so our apps can be more responsive on different screen sizes.

No support community yet, thank you for the link, we’ll add our tutorials in there.

Does stacker generate a new set of APIs for each project? Does it have a base set of API objects/endpoints that are used across projects? Is there some mix of both?

Yes! As well as being able to build in the visual web builder, Stacker generates and hosts a flexible backend for you, so you can hook up, say, a native mobile app via REST.

How well does it work for responsive websites? Do you have an open roadmap?

From what I can gather from the demo video, it looks like it's responsive out of the box.

Making the apps you build work really well on mobile was one of our main aims. We allow mobile overrides for everything, and by using flexbox for layout, which means that 90% of the time it looks pretty great by default.

Re: Open roadmap – no, but I'd really like to add that.

I really like the demos, are they all purely built with Stacker?

All the products featured are real, functioning apps. No tricks or photoshop ;)

A few of our showcase customers are still in beta, so you can just see their landing pages.

This looks pretty neat, kinda like a flatpack build-your-own app. Can you use it with custom backend APIs?

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