Show HN: Stackby – Spreadsheets, Databases and No-code APIs in a single platform | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Stackby – Spreadsheets, Databases and No-code APIs in a single platform

stackby.com

92 pointsrachitkhtor35 comments

Hey glad to see some more established airtable competition, however one thing you've copied from airtable which you should differentiate on is pricing of storing data. Like airtable, your most expensive self-service (non-enteprise) plan has a cap of 1 year of historic data storage. This is pathetic when compared to basically every other collaboration tool ranging from Google sheets to Trello.

Sure, charge users for gb of storage, or data transfer - but arbitrarily deleting (or hiding) data that is more than 52 weeks old from customers who are paying you $18/user/month feels very hostile.

But that applies to history, right? Like undos, revisions, etc...

Or is that "any data that is older than a year"?

For airtable, at least, yes this is just revision history. Not any data that is older than a year

Correct! Same for us as well.

The pricing page seems reasonably clear that this is just revision history and not the current data.

Yes correct, it's only revision history

So what? If I’m paying $18/user/month I expect them to keep absolutely everything.

We do keep everything. That's only revision history per row

Arbitrary limits are very frustrating. Another service we use advertises pricing at $5/user/mo to upgrade to a plan with full history.

You can have different teams including different sets of users (sales, dev, support etc).

After we upgraded we learned that the stated pricing of $5/user/mo was actually $5/user/mo/team so if you were on two or three teams the price really jumps quickly.

Luckily they didn’t automatically upgrade all of our users for all teams. The main frustration is that there is no way to read the pricing page to know this before you sign up.

Hi Steve, there are no arbitrary limits. If there's anything in particular you're confused about, please let us know - I'll get the wordings changed immediately.

For us $5 plan is a personal plan for single user or solopreneur.

For teams it starts with $9/user/month.

Both plans are for workspaces.

Hope this helps.

> Hey glad to see some more established airtable competition

Also see Baserow that featured 2 weeks ago, it is fully open source and self-hostable:

https://baserow.io

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448985

another one is 8base.com, which seems very similar.

Airtable needs to get their stuff together and expand their pretty terrible API

1 year of data is basically activity history on each row, not the row data itself. We don't delete any information that you add in tables.

Along with being a powerful yet easy to use spreadsheet-database platform, what differentiates us is the fact that we’re API first - the ability to connect columns to popular third party services to pull information directly in your tables and refresh/automate cells to bring real-time information. Without any coding, in a few clicks

Over 40+ no-code API connectors with popular services like YouTube, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads and others.

I tried to go to your pricing page on mobile and got 3 pop ups that I had to dismiss before I could see the content: two separate chats, one that made noise, and some email callout /beg.

This really turns me off of your product.

We'll change that, sorry didn't realize. Customer support wants to be noticed, it seems

I’m a big fan of Airtable and always happy to see more tools like it come to market. Curious though, why you’ve gone to such great lengths to copy their UI? There is plenty of room to leapfrog them (especially on the API side) but I think you’re hurting yourself by following so closely in their footsteps. If I were going against a rapidly growing incumbent like that I’d be looking at ways of differentiating from the start. Good luck to you and your team!

The UI being too similar to Airtable is a big turn off for me.

It reminds me of a flea market I once visited whilst travelling. The trader there was trying to push $10 Yeezys, swearing that they were "genuine", making me feel very uncomfortable.

UI is a spreadsheet, not sure how else we would have built a table. You'll continue to see our differentiation, like for the fact we're API first, automation focused tool.

We have not copied the UI. We've been used a spreadsheet style interface as the base, which is existing even before Airtable started (read Excel).

For us, the biggest differentiator is that we're API first, we're giving users a no-code way to connect columns to APIs and bring information right inside the tables and refresh/automate in real-time.

I particularly struggled in my last corporate job, juggling through spreadsheets and manually copying/pasting data from different tools in my spreadsheet where I could easily do it automatically via APIs. But again, it would require technical knowledge to do it.

We're making it easy for non-technical users to access those APIs in a no-code way and build powerful tools for their lives and work.

You will see we'll continue to differentiate both on UI and functionality as we move forward.

For a tool that manipulates my data, especially data that is important for me and my company, I really want a self-hostable version that I can deploy wherever I want. Wrapping your data, processes and workflows around a product that can easily disappear next month is not an option for me. If I ever need this kind of functionality, I will use Baserow instead.

I understand your concern, but we have been around for last 3 years and don't intend to disappear anytime.

you should really get rid of all the popups when you first get to the site... that is SO off-putting. Especially the "woop woop" sound

I read the bar on the top as as:

> Latecomers get charged 400% extra on all plans!

With Comcast and all the other gimmicks out there I've come to prefer consistent pricing. Other than that all I sometimes want is a free trial, which I will more often than not cancel.

We just want to offer a good deal for first 100 customers coming from Product Hunt and others, this month.

Curious how you handle "external users" for pricing. Say I wanted to build an app for job applicant tracking, for example. The vast amount of functionality would be for the internal team. But, you would want external people to be able to apply, check status, note that they found a different job and want to opt out, etc. Per user pricing doesn't work well for that.

We don't charge for read-only users or users who will fill the forms. So it looks you for job tracking, people who will fill the forms and do those activities like you mentioned, will not get charged.

Only your internal team with 'Editor' permissions will be counted as a paid-user.

I was curious how Stackby stacked up against Airtable and found this comparison chart provided by Stackby: https://stackby.com/airtable-alternative

Caution: The very first "missing" feature I checked, built-in automation, is wrong on Stackby's chart: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360050974153-...

Hi Charles - in Stackby. There's API column type automation, not automation like Zapier built-in yet.

Please check here: www.stackby.com/automation

Hi Rachit! Great product, I have a question, do you offer (or plan to offer) an API for developers? That kind of makes it or breaks it for me.

A beta API is apparently available: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/7317658/SzmZbfQP?vers...

Yes it is :)

Does this scale beyond the 100k row limit of Airtable?

We're trying to get there and will soon be there :)

Cool, another Excell...

Thanks, do give it a try! :)

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