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Comment by jiuren | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty tools like this, plolty dash, justpy, nicegui, lona, reflex, streamlit, just to name a few. If your app does not involve complicated interactions, streamlit is really easy to pick up. We also had a great experience with plotly dash for a more complicated application. nicegui also seems very promising.

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Also, a lot of the ones you mentioned are actually open source, no strings attached, self-hostable. I have personally used plotly dash and streamlit, still have a couple running for years. This one appears to be a closed source (?) commercial offering where you have to have an account to do anything with it.

Nothing wrong with commercial offerings, but the trend of posting a GitHub URL to fool people into an open source first impression when there’s nothing in the “repo” really irks me.

I think I understand the irk, but I feel that your presumption of our intention in posting a GitHub URL is unfair. In fact, I'm not sure how else we'd share the news that you can self-host this without posting a Github link. We've made it very clear throughout the comments that we are not an open source project and nowhere in our website or GitHub do we try to mislead people to think so.

I fail to see why the Show HN link shouldn’t be https://www.dropbase.io, which is in the very first sentence.

But maybe I’m the dinosaur. I still associate GitHub with open source, but closed source developer tool startups seem to increasingly use it as a ProductHunt.

Some context here is that our launch is mainly to developers. Other users can't even sign up from the website or use the product without self-hosting. In any case, we'd still need to post a link to Github, somewhere.

If you're saying it's ok to post a Github link to a non-open source project, but just not as the main URL, I'd understand, but I still feel that in our specific case, the Github link is the least friction path to set up for self-hosting. I think a developer who goes to a marketing site and doesn't easily find way to setup/self-host would be more frustrated.

> I think a developer who goes to a marketing site and doesn't easily find way to setup/self-host would be more frustrated.

In that case the marketing site should probably be fixed.

"If it can be self-hosted, it has to be on GitHub" is a really weird claim, considering that tons of "self-hosted" open source projects aren't on GitHub. debian.org, for instance.

Also, I personally wouldn't call something that requires an external backend API (if I'm understanding this correctly?) "self-hosted". Partially self-hosted? Not sure. It's not exactly on prem either.

These are all great tools! The use cases we are going after different than those these tools make easy. One way we think about the difference is analytics vs operations. Another way is dashboarding (streamlit) vs triggering actions (dropbase). By triggering actions we mean, triggering tasks that get/act on internal/external data, as opposed to a rearrangement/display of existing data.

There's also that library all the AI models started using that gives you a public URL to share. After researching it: https://www.gradio.app/ is the link.

It's used specifically for making simple UIs for machine learning apps. But I guess technically you could use it for anything.

Gradio is popular for machine learning but is versatile enough for interactive web apps, really easy to tinker with

I'll check this one out - it looks very interesting!

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