Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

gkoberger

I see some serious red flags on their homepage:

* "Partners" just seem to be logo-hijacking potential hosting platforms (not actual partnerships)

* Most of the links in the footer don't work

* The testimonials use fake names + stock art

* API keys checked into a public repo

* Seems to be built by (or somehow associated with) this company (hhttps://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/312911-47), but with no links back

Please be careful using this product. Not trying to be insulting; but if you're going to use it I'd make sure you install it locally.

That being said, I love this as a concept. Airtable is so so nice as a backend/DB for simple sites, and I'm intrigued by an open source competitor!

View on HN

> * The testimonials use fake names + stock art

Wtf this is true. Reverse google image search the testimonials and you'll see the same. This blows my mind how sketchy it is. Just get your friends to put testimonials. If you have 3 users that you begged to use your product, get them to review. Fake reviews is beyond scummy.

That said, anyone know what template they use for their landing page? It's nice.

> Airtable is so so nice as a backend/DB for simple sites, and I'm intrigued by an open source competitor!

https://baserow.io/

Looks interesting but it’s only open-core: loads of important features locked behind subscription pricing, plus you lose the ability to self-host: https://baserow.io/pricing

It's kind of hard to compare the long lists on mobile but I couldn't see any features removed when you self host. What did I miss?

Yeah not easy to see on mobile. Their 5/user/mo “premium” plan adds

Features: - XML and JSON export (vs just CSV) - Row comments - Row coloring - Public logo removal

Views: - Kanban - Survey - Calendar (WIP) - Gantt (WIP)

10k rows, 5Gb storage per group.

The “Advanced” $20/user/mo plan adds:

Feature: Role-based Permissions

Support 100k rows, 20GB storage per group

You will not lose any features by self-hosting. Quite the opposite, some enterprise features like SSO are only possible for self-hosted instances. Source: I work for Baserow.

Is there an ongoing trend of sketchy "OSS" product offerings using this same website layout and similar fake quotes from users? I feel like I'm seeing this a lot recently.

edit: through "product hunt"?

further edit: looks like this isn't new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29864157 maybe it's just gotten worse and I've noticed it or its "products" in my feeds recently

Initial commit was in August and there are only 5 contributors, yet it's calling itself the "the best Airtable alternative" and filled their side with all kind of fancy screenshots? Makes it even more sketchy. Unless they ported the whole project from a previous project, there would be no way to barf out a high quality competition in such a short time with such a small team.

Without the screenshots and partner-claims I would think they are just overly enthusiastic. But the whole highly professional sales vibes for such a fresh project makes it just untrustable.

Apparently they're scraping emails from people that starred Bitwarden and then sending out misleading emails that appear to be from Bitwarden...

https://dev.to/cppshane/shady-marketing-apitable-is-scraping...

It’s also AGPL licensed but has incompatibly-licensed dependencies.

Can you point to any specific incompatibility? Most OS licensed code can be used as a dependency in AGPL code.

(A bit sad with the dubious marketing; hopefully they can get around to remove it or finish it with real testimonials as it obviously generates a negative reaction that completely overshadows the actual fairly impressive product.)

Did anyone get the "Gitpod Online Demo" to work?

https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/apitable/apitable

Takes well over 2 minutes to start up and then asks for a username/password which is written under installation: admin@apitable.com / Apitable2022

As far as I can see it is a somewhat buggy but interesting and comprehensive product. Instead of relying on Gitpod for demo, I would buy some dedicated, faster hosting and make a demo that didn't require a login.

wow yeah this is as strong of an AVOID signal as it gets.

These keys are revoked in earlier time. They are samples. The official team have remove secrets, tokens and keys.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com