Show HN: Pantry – Free JSON Storage for Personal Projects
getpantry.cloud
getpantry.cloud
Rather not go down the road of having examples for every major platform.
Pantry is a free cloud storage service that I've been building for the past few weeks. You can use the API to store & retrieve data for you and your users online for free.
Looking forward to seeing what you all think of it, and please feel free to post suggestions or AMA.
Thanks!
I believe this is a good problem to have, and perhaps one day I'll be lucky enough to face this.
I've spent some time thinking of how to monetize Pantry - perhaps a private tier, something that is more feature-rich?
Beware of Vadering your project: Figure out what you can charge for early, and never offer it for free.
Time to step away from the keyboard and think about the business side of this project.
Oh, I did add a "BuyMeCoffee" button on the About page, but its more of a donation. - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/imRohan
I might keep it as a free service for the time being and do some research to see if there's value in a paid tier. Thanks!
It was all open and fun and funny.
Then parse.com shutdown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_(platform) -- What started out as fun project for several developers turned into a dead project for us all, which by then had hundreds of users around the world, who were now getting errors instead of fun.
We all used different programming languages, nobody was able to re-engineer all of our clients into a new endpoint/api. My takeaway -- any one of us could have hosted the JSON api, but we made the mistake in thinking we would use a free 3rd party service. That decision killed the project.
- How do you deal with CORS?
- How do you deal with authentication?
Is this intended to be like the take a penny leave a penny jar? You put stuff here knowing anyone could come and destroy it at any time?
I did not sign up, I am only going off your API docs.
Is this question really appropriate? The developer is sharing a pro bono offering, where does selling anyone on it against a commercial service even come into play?
It looks like a project that must have been fun to make and could be useful for storing non-sensitive data with very little hassle. Long bucket IDs appear to leave little chance for name collision.
If you are building a piece of software that deals with anything remotely like PII or has specific availability requirements, I sincerely hope this is not something you are seriously considering (otherwise, pardon me, I hope I won’t be your user or customer), starting from the fact that you aren’t paying for it and there is no SLA.
Suppose adding those things and targeting “mobile backend as a service” or even more general “backend as service” there is still a lot to be desired. Like static html, ok you’re competition is Firebase.
How’s Firebase doing these days?
This is definitely been a learning experience for me, and I'm really not sure what the future holds for the project.
CORS was/is an issue that I've yet to fully figure out, if you have any ideas please share - I'd love to learn.
Authentication is something that I've delebratly avoided as I feel Pantry should not be used to store sensitive data, nor should it be ever used in production. It's for POC's, hackathon projects, and should be used as a development tool for rapid prototyping.
Please let me know if you have any suggestions, and please feel free to submit PR's if you'd like!
You are right, and all of your points are valid. I will definitely be looking into drafting some documents revolving around data integrity and privacy.
As for the prevention of misuse, I've added a data limit per basket and a limit of baskets per Pantry.
If you have any ideas or suggestions - I'm all ears.
Thanks!
It is quite similar to this although you just write your own data on a textarea, and get/post/put/delete to modify it.. Then you can copy-paste the result json from the backend to a text file or something like that..
It dynamically finds your objects (even nested ones) and you can CRUD them..
Currently, the PantryID (uuidv4) is the only form of security, I am thinking that in a future release perhaps another form of authorization may be required.
Do you have any suggestions - I'm all ears!
I hope you find some good use out of Pantry, very excited to see what you come up with!
In the end, I went with Heroku and it's included PostgreSQL offering and stomached the complexity, but along the way I found https://jsonbox.io/, which I thought was neat and seems very similar.
How did your project turn out btw, did the firmware developers get their mind blown by web tech?
https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/code-size-deltas
Unsure if their minds were blown, but I at least know that mine would have been if I showed it to myself a couple of years ago. During that time, I had never touched databases, migration files, or devops in general. Now that's changed, but I still try put myself in those shoes.
I have some friends who are into firmware development so ill pass this along.
Love how verbose your docs are - good stuff!
Size limits are pretty small, a little over 1mb per basket.
As for data retention, the account has a TTL of 5 days, baskets 3. Any activity on the account/bucket will result in the TTL's being refreshed.
Will be addressing this in the near future - thanks!
Accounts and Baskets that are stale are automatically removed, however, so there's that?
Will look into alternative methods of spam prevention - any tips?
Full-disclosure, I also develop a "competing" (if you can call it that) service: https://kvdb.io - my landing page isn't as nice. Our buckets offer some atomic operations on keys and Lua-based scripting (you can spit out arbitrary text or HTML and handle basic GET/POST requests with parameter parsing), which might be useful for prototyping.
You should figure out how to sustain this kind of service on $FREE. In my experience, I've found a lot of people sign up but don't use it for anything serious. One of my first customers signed up and demanded a refund immediately after he discovered "oh, your simple key-value store doesn't support SQL queries?"
Good luck!
Awesome work!
* Used e.g. for profiles sync
* Deploys to heroku - 1 click
Will fix soon, thanks!
They're really well done!