Build apps on top of Google Sheets | Hacker News Reader

Build apps on top of Google Sheets

chartmat.com

5 pointscosbgn12 comments

Given Google's history I couldn't think of a worse platform on which to build a business that is responsible for putting food on your table.

When they start rate limiting and banning your users they'll be the ones demanding refunds from you.

On top of that users would need to commit their data to Google's ownership and if they're using the free versions of Sheets good luck if their account gets locked because the algorithm demands it to be so.

source?

Rate limits: https://superuser.com/questions/1453258/what-could-cause-429...

Take your pick of lockout horror stories:

https://twitter.com/Demilogic/status/1358661842147692549

https://twitter.com/raveofravendale/status/13895079282693939...

Edit: Also don't forget their Maps API change that sent many developers to the wall https://imgur.com/gallery/ZuWMooq

I think the rate limit user was simply not sending the API key correctly or having some very poor code, you get 100 request for 100 seconds for each user, you just need to use the token of the user not yours. As for the horror stories that's with everything you could argue that Stripe is a horrible idea because Visa could block them, but I do see your idea here, I'm planning to add some "spreadsheet features" directly in the app to avoid being completely dependent on them

Incredible pro-user move. I tried to get an early start-up I worked for to do this. Over the years they've spent hundreds of man hours developing a custom editing grid, and it's absolutely one of the scariest/most crazy pieces of the system. And it's no where near as powerful/flexible/well-known/robust for users.

But yeah, the comments below about rate limits & bans? I was probably wrong to try to advocate Sheets, however much technical sense it made, however good a working experience would have been.

I think rate limits & bans are mainly horror stories. Limits are 100/100 seconds per user, I think what most companies miss is that they need to send the token of the users, your token also work but it count all against your limit, while user tokens count towards user limits. In any case we are building our own simple spreadsheet (JSON to table) so companies can build directly into that without relying on Google Sheets.

I've come across Glide which is is a no-code platform for mobile apps. Not the same thing since Glide is only for mobile, but looks like building apps on top of Google Sheets is a thing.

https://www.glideapps.com/

Terrible idea, Google rate limits and bans sheets that contain too many automations.

source?

Personal experience. There used to be many horror stories on their old community site.

A company I used to work for had a Google Sheet with finance data that contained a script to scrape it from an API we ran - totally legit. Just a trigger that runs a script that pulls in the data. Google deemed this unacceptable (we never found out why) and locked the entire sheet.

We tried to get in touch but never succeeded. We nearly lost all the data in that Google Sheet, but thankfully someone had done a "Save as Copy" a few days earlier.

https://www.dronahq.com lets you build web as well as mobile apps on top of google sheets or any other database.

retool.com lets you build apps like this with a GUI and on top of Google Sheets or any other datastore.

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