I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps | Hacker News Reader

I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

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708 pointscpeterso228 comments

I've built quite a few dashboards while working on proof-of-concept feature/product engineering. Even though people often think I'm joking, almost always the backend database was a Google Sheet. Google Sheets has great API support, easy to write functionality, convenient read and file dumps, works well with Pandas/SQL, and has a universally appreciated UX. Data validation can be annoying if the "admin" directly enters data, but for building a proof of concept, nothing beats Google Sheets. The data from Google Sheets would be passed through an API to a web UI/dashboard. The dashboard I built for end users was a simple Bootstrap (Vue-Bootstrap) table from the API, with enough easy-to-use filters and views to work out of the box. If the data was too large, I would use a templated snippet to convert the JSON into a card view. Ignoring long-term maintainability, this was one of the most foolproof ways to build dashboards. After that, I'd slap Firebase Auth on top, and that was it.

I haven't worked on these types of projects for nearly two years now. Folks I know use Retool or Softr with an API connectivity platform like Portable, Pipedream, or Zapier. If you're staring at a spreadsheet on a daily basis, the next step should be looking into an app builder combined with an API connection platform.

Monzo (online bank in UK) let you see all your transactions in a Google sheet (with some caveats e.g. interest earned is skipped). I wanted to make a total wealth chart over all years.

It's so damn complicated in Google sheets. In MS Excel I could simply make a pivot chart, apply any aggregation on days/weeks and be done with it. But with Sheets I had to make a new aggregate column, filter data in another new column, and make a chart on that.

Your comment does explain that API is why they export to sheets and not excel but Google sheets is way behind in ease of use.

Google Sheets can do that - https://officewheel.com/group-dates-in-pivot-table-google-sh...

This is the text book answer. Not something you can actually do on a live sheet with all transactions. If you want to use a different aggregate e.g. week instead of month or skip first year or something like that you will be making these columns all over again.

My bank just exports to CSV, which is trivially importable to Excel, Sheets, Pandas or whatever else you need.

As I understand it, the appeal of Monzo's way is it's live updating rather than having to log in to some horribly outdated online banking portal and manually export

Yes exactly. The Google sheet is live. I couldn't just add a column in live sheet either. I had to copy the sheet using a formula so that its always up to date. And still had to use to other sheets. Chart is in the 4th sheet.

In excel I would not have to do any of that.

What about just plain old query() SQL i usually find the easiest vs. mucking around with pivot tables.

SQL is fine if you don't want to play with the data interactively - but that's the real benefit of Pivot Tables.

Things like drilling through, filtering/slicing, and then generating a graph, all in SaaS without having to run anything local.

Yes exactly, excel's Pivot tables and charts are more powerful.

You're fine with Google seeing complete information about your income and spending? I'm not one of those truly paranoid, but this seems like a bit too much.

What’s your risk model here? Google are not manually or automatically inspecting the contents of your spreadsheets in order to profile you and show you better-personalised ads. Not enough people have such a spreadsheet for it to be worth it for them, I’m sure - and they also probably already know approximately how wealthy you are. Unless you’re under investigation for fraud or something, I doubt the government could get much use out of being able to access your financial spreadsheets via Google compared to the information they already get directly from banks etc. So that only really leaves criminals (for whom I still can’t see a great incentive to read your spreadsheets), and I also don’t really think your Google account is much less secure than your computer’s local storage (if that’s the other place you would keep it)

We’ve learned over and over that tech companies do things which seemingly make no sense to us, but do to them. Not being able to imagine it is not sufficient. Nothing is deleted anymore as well, in hopes it will be useful later.

That said I don’t see a huge risk here, unless combined with lots of other data. Would probably avoid though.

I simply want minimal exposure of my personal data since I don't want to go through life thinking about risk models. Not only is it time consuming, but my creative juices simply don't flow when it comes down to exploiting people (nor do I want them to flow in that direction).

I only care about humans seeing my data.

Most big tech companies very rarely/never let a human review private customer data. Therefore I'm fine handing all the data over to big tech companies.

I don't really understand any other point of view - if you're worried about a machine seeing your private stuff, why did you type it into a keyboard in the first place?

> if you're worried about a machine seeing your private stuff, why did you type it into a keyboard in the first place?

Who owns that machine is important though. I don't mind putting my card details in via my phone to buy something because there's a level of trust in the whole system (it's my phone, I have a level of trust that google is not going to steal my card details via android, and a level of trust that the shop is legit and will process my order.)

If some random person off the street asked me to type my card details into their phone that's a very different ball game as I don't inherently trust them.

I don’t care that much about card details. If I see a fraudulent transaction, I dispute it and it’s done. But my personal financial details/etc — that’s much different than a payment mechanism.

> Most big tech companies very rarely/never let a human review private customer data. Therefore I'm fine handing all the data over to big tech companies.

This isn't true. Google and Apple and others turn over user data to human analysts at NSA and FBI and others without search warrants all of the time, on hundreds of thousands of user accounts per year.

To be fine handing all the data over to big tech companies, you have to be fine handing all of the data over to US federal cops and intelligence services, too, because that's what giving the data (in non-e2ee form) to big tech means.

Actually I have heard the exact opposite of what you are stating is true. Both Google and Apple fight very hard to avoid handing data to authorities. They don't want to be seen as some sort of easy conduit to government surveillance or shill. How does that benefit their reputation? I know of one case where Google spent millions on lawyers fighting government wanting access to an activist's email. Their FAQ here makes their policy pretty clear. https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/9713961...

Apple’s own transparency report indicates they turn over data to the USG for over 100,000 different apple IDs each year in the no-warrant-or-probable-cause (FISA orders and NSLs) category.

(Mind you; this includes device location histories due to geoip logs, unique identifiers, iMessage histories, photos, documents, everything.)

The cases they are allowed to tell you about aren’t in this category. They aren’t even allowed to say exactly how many of the secret warrantless orders they received, or exactly how many users were affectee, only 500-count ranges.

For just Apple, for just January 2023 to June 2023 (six months):

National Security - FISA Non-Content Requests

Table for National Security - FISA Non-Content Requests Data

Requests Received 0 - 499

Users/Accounts 40,500 - 40,999

National Security - FISA Content Requests

Table displaying National Security - FISA Content Requests

Requests Received 500 - 999

Users/Accounts 50,500 - 50,999

National Security Letter Requests

Table for National Security Letter Requests data

Requests Received 0 - 499

Users/Accounts 1,000 - 1,499

National Security Letters where Non-disclosure Order Lifted

I encourage you to read it for yourself:

https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html

> ...no-warrant-or-probable-cause (FISA orders and NSLs)...

These are not equivalents, nor are they similar. FISA = Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court / NSL = National Security Letter.

If a person is the target of the FISA system, there most certainly is probable cause.

National Security Letter is a gag order, given by the intelligence community, in order to protect national security.

Again, if you or your organization receives one of these, there most certainly is probable cause.

These systems may be detestable, but there's no need to make things up.

There is no probable cause required for FISA orders. They are routinely used illegally against americans.

This has been well documented in the press following the Snowden disclosures. It’s called FAA702 or PRISM.

> Apple’s own transparency report indicates they turn over data to the USG for over 100,000 different apple IDs each year in the no-warrant-or-probable-cause (FISA orders and NSLs) category.

FISA “orders” are warrants and have the same requirement for probable cause as any search or seizure warrant (they aren't criminal warrants so the probable cause is not of there being evidence of a crime, but of the target being an agent of a foreign power.)

NSLs are administrative subpoenas accompanied with gag orders, not warrants, and correspondingly do not have a probable cause requirement; unlike warrants (and like other subpoenas), they are subject to precompliance challenge (and the associated gag order is challengable separately.)

> FISA “orders” are warrants and have the same requirement for probable cause as any search or seizure warrant (they aren't criminal warrants so the probable cause is not of there being evidence of a crime, but of the target being an agent of a foreign power.)

You put orders in quotes, but that’s what they are called, because it is illegal and inaccurate to call them warrants, because warrants per 4A are issued only upon probable cause. FISA orders are warrantless and do not require probable cause.

Snowden was very clear when he released the data on FAA702. No probable cause is required. They are not warrants. There is nobody in the room except a government petitioner and a government judge who rubber stamps them.

They are the #1 most used source in the US IC, and they make it possible for the FBI and DHS et al to read all of your gmail, all of your google docs, and all of your iMessages and phone photos without so much as a shred of criminal wrongdoing.

The idea that they are used only for foreign surveillance is patently false. There is ample hard documentation (again, thanks to Snowden) that they routinely use these to spy on americans. Their twisted logic is that if the data is replicated outside of the US (to say, a datacenter in Europe) then they are legally permitted to access it under the way the unconstitutional FISA Amendments Act (Section 702) is written.

> You put orders in quotes, but that’s what they are called, because it is illegal and inaccurate to call them warrants, because warrants per 4A are issued only upon probable cause.

Orders authorizing foreign intelligence surveillance purposes under FISA are warrants, and are often called warrants, and they, like all warrants, are issued only on probable cause. (It is not improper to call them “orders”, and they are often referred to that way, as well, it is just less specific; all warrants are [court] orders, but not all court orders, much less all orders more generally, are warrants.)

https://bja.ojp.gov/program/it/privacy-civil-liberties/autho...:

—quote—

Subchapter I of FISA established procedures for the conduct of foreign intelligence surveillance and created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The Department of Justice must apply to the FISC to obtain a warrant authorizing electronic surveillance of foreign agents. For targets that are U.S. persons (U.S. citizens, permanent resident aliens, and U.S. corporations), FISA requires heightened requirements in some instances.

* Unlike domestic criminal surveillance warrants issued under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (the “Wiretap Act”) , agents need to demonstrate probable cause to believe that the “target of the surveillance is a foreign power or agent of a foreign power,” that “a significant purpose” of the surveillance is to obtain “foreign intelligence information,” and that appropriate “minimization procedures” are in place. 50 U.S.C. § 1804.

* Agents do not need to demonstrate that commission of a crime is imminent.

* For purposes of FISA, agents of foreign powers include agents of foreign political organizations and groups engaged in international terrorism, as well as agents of foreign nations. 50 U.S.C. § 1801

—end-of-quote—

FISA warrants do not have the check and balance safeguards that other warrants have, and the system for getting FISA warrants has been extensively and egregiously abused

>they are subject to precompliance challenge

and it's weird you go to the trouble to mention this but slough over the problems with FISA warrants. You are not arguing honestly here.

That seems like the least "compromising" data, compared to other things we let them get.

Imagine there are whole countries out there where income is public and accessible to anyone ;)

I put recipes in google sheets. I hope that Google gets the ratios right on some killer ragù.

I hope you don't use Gmail if that's your attitude lol.

+1 for googlesheets. It is stable, and provided you don't exceed the API limits, you can run a lot of data through it. Appscript is also incredibly powerful if you work with tools that have decent APIs. With a few lines of js and the built in trigger functions, you can have an automatically updating dashboard with email notifications when certain conditions are met (e.g. balance too low, user engagement metric does X etc).

I've built a scrabble tournament management app on google sheets, because it was the easiest way I could think of to let multiple people edit it with all the others seeing live updates. From a developer's point of view it kind of sucks, having to maintain everything in one large javascript file and having to use spreadsheet tabs as input and output, not to mention manually attaching the script to a new sheet for every tournament. But the user experience has been excellent, modulo a few permissions glitches.

I'm still trying to rewrite it as a self hosted web app this year because the aforementioned permissions glitches and the difficulty of doing versioned deployments has made me reluctant to continue relying on google, but overall sheets has been a huge boon and we have gotten years of use out of it.

The article mentions appsheets, which I absolutely loved in my last role.

Brilliant for knocking up very simple internal tooling off the back of a Google Sheet. Most importantly, there was zero fucking around with IT on it, as it was already included in our workspace package.

> for building a proof of concept, nothing beats Google Sheets

Supabase is free and checks all the boxes in addition to having auth, vector search, logs, security, and not being ... Google

Love it. I think my prototyping capabilities just extended by this comment

Back in 2010, I was in a work meeting making small talk and we were discussing how cringe some advertising is nowadays. One of us, a program manager who was ~15 years my senior told me it's because we're not the target demographic and that millennials are targeted differently, mainly through word-of-mouth and generally Guerrilla marketing tactics.

Whenever I see articles like these and comments like yours, I can't stop thinking about that meeting.

Edit: to clarify, I am not accusing you of anything. But I do suspect the article to be part of a Google marketing campaign.

If I want a database set up in minutes just to focus on the business side and nothing else, I simply fire up a new Django project (I suspect any other framework with an ORM and auto-generated CRUD UIs would be equally competent for that).

I have nothing against Google Sheets, I really haven't put much thought into it in this context, but I would need some convincing that it's a better and easier way to kick things off.

That Django project needs a host to run on, even if it's just your local machine.

If you want others to interact with it, you need to expose it to the internet through some means and think through the security implications of doing so.

The Google Sheets approach doesn't need you to manage a process or web server. It is instantly shareable while letting Google worry about security, performance, availability, etc.

The specifics of the "what's better?" ratio can shift depending on comfort level / experience with either product, or what infrastructure you may already have available to deploy to. But building on top of GApps does mean you get a lot of useful aspects "free".

Thanks, that's a valid point. I have never thought of publishing a PoC web app as more than pushing some files on a server and editing a config file, but now I see how not everyone can be familiar with that.

I like to just start with a SQLite UI editor.

You can just query a database and work with the results directly . In a dynamic language like python there is little advantage to loading rows into classes. That Django query language is so painful and opaque.

Practically, Django's admin *becomes* the SQLite UI editor you are referring to, I suspect. Starting with it, the amount of UI code, backend code or SQL code to be written becomes a matter of how far you want to stretch the PoC in either direction (more effort on the views for a prettier/more unique front-end, more controller code for more business logic/cases covered, more database work to assess how the data model will scale).

I’m saying I prefer to design a database with sql, views, and native applications rather than python classes and web interfaces.

hey we do the same thing lol, google sheets is great and sometimes if I have or want more I can just simply use pocketbase for easy solution

these 2 tools is great for easy/fast prototype various project and honestly its kinda hard to replace

Slightly off-topic.

In small business accounting, I have a persistent need for a FileMaker Pro like solution for invoices. FMP was conscious of on-screen layout and print.

ReTool has been recommended as similar replacement for FMP but they don’t have the idea of creating print-ready documented receipts and invoices. You don’t even need to print it, you just need to keep it for the IRS.

I love the idea of using Google Sheets and turnkey app building apps. But I still need documentation.

There's gotta be a ton of solutions for sale for small business accounting, no? Among them FileMaker pro?

> "There's gotta be a ton...Among them FileMaker pro?"

You'd think. I don't know what Claris did last week, but when I last dived into this small pool about 12 months ago their license + hosting was something like 2k/year (looking now it might have gone down, or their pricing page is hiding the fees?). Add on top you need to develop, maintain, support your project. These costs are not insignificant for a "small business"--and by the SBA definition my clients are in the bottom 2-18% by employee (size) & revenue.

Currently I manage my startup’s accounting in Google sheet, and your comment gave me an idea to enhance it with Google Forms!

That... Sounds scary.

Clunky, but should be ok assuming a) a pretty simple structure and cashflow b) properly implemented double-entry, and c) backups.

Accounting in a spreadsheet is scary?

Accounting of your holiday's expenses or hobby project? Sure. For a whole business and all the legal and practical obligation that entails? Nope. Not a chance. Just give me a proper accounting software so I don't have to second-guess myself at every turn as to whether my code or my interpretation of the law is correct.

I wonder if anyone has ever made an ORM adapter that works with Google Sheets as its "Database"?

Firebase auth? Would it be possible for a savvy end user to replicate your API calls to Google Sheets directly to bypass the auth?

I tried going all on on Google Sheets earlier this year. I used the Python API and like almost nothing worked consistently.

I got 1 sheet to work well with like 1k rows and thought woohoo this is great! So I went all-in, put 25k rows in and Google pooped the bed. It gave errors all the time, rows and columns were funky. API issues galore.

SQLite however handled 25k rows without any errors, always rock solid.

I gave up. Overall a terrible experience once I got past 1k rows. I'm glad it's worked well for you.

I only had like 10 columns, so it wasn't like massive amounts of data. I was linking to a file out in Google Drive and that was where most of my issues were. Google drive's API was 99.99% completely useless.

My takeaway from the experience was, Google proclaims they have an API, but it seems more like nobody tests it or cares about it. Perhaps it's malicious compliance, they have it because they have to have an API, but not because they expect anyone to actually use it.

Perhaps I'm just not cool enough for Google.

Hello! Founder of Glide FTA.

Yes, many of our customers hit the issues you mentioned as they scale spreadsheet-based applications. We built Big Tables for this case: https://www.glideapps.com/big-tables

You keep most of the convenience and programmability of a spreadsheet, but you get Postgres scale and a first-class API (which includes atomic table swapping for updating large datasets). It also supports live updating of any views displaying that data.

Thank you for also having Airtable support, which I vastly prefer over Google Sheets for any kind of API work

Thank you for discussing this openly, it can be a real bummer to write something, test it, have something work up to a point then fail due to situations outside your control.

You probably just saved me about 20 hours of coding.

to be fair, 25k rows seems like a few more rows than I'd use a spreadsheet for

Unreasonably large spreadsheets are surprisingly common. Excel 2007's row limit was 65536, and nowadays it's over a million. Spreadsheets actually get that big, too.

An app I worked on once wanted a Google Sheets Integration - just a quick button to import rows from the database and into the spreadsheet so that the client can do some quick visualization and pie charts (I offered them a readonly DB account but they didn't know any SQL).

Few years have passed, and there are currently 470 THOUSAND rows with 20+ columns in that spreadsheet which is used almost daily.

Rewriting this into a proper web app would take maybe a week (the API is already there and used by GS), but was never deemed a priority, so it will keep existing in the backlog until we hit row or cell limits - after which it will suddenly become urgent...

Did the commenter say that it was being edited concurrently? Because that's the only circumstance in which it would really be acceptable for it to break like that.

Is 25k a lot? I regularly make google sheets with 400k rows, but those are manual csv dumps from a real database that I just import

Wait till you hear about the spreadsheets researchers use... My chemist friend uses Excel files that regularly exceed 2GB of just text...

which is an awful idea because some versions of Excel will, if you open a file with more than 1million rows (or ~16k columns), automatically truncate and delete the excess data! And don't even get me started on automatic date conversion.

Computer illiteracy and shitty platforms (MSOffice is not apt for science at all) costs Scientists biliions on broken research:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02211-4?error=coo...

If you have more than a few thousand records, this is the wrong tool for the job. I've used Google Sheets as a "database" for a few applications in the past. In each case, it was an internal tool that did not generate more than a few thousand records, if that.

Even text files (like CSV) are fine for the amount of data the OP has trouble with, and Excel certainly is, so it’s unclear why Google Sheets should already balk on that. Google Sheets has a limit of 10 million cells per sheet (so for 25000 rows that would be 400 columns), and really shouldn’t be running into errors for sheets below that limit.

I guess? 25k rows with 10 columns shouldn't be a big deal. LibreOffice, Excel, Numbers, they all handled this data without trouble.

It is 99% static data, it would be updated maybe once a year if that. The point was to give users something they were familiar with to look at the data, search it, etc. While being in the "cloud" so I only had to update one place whenever I do get tasked with an update and to handle authn/z easily with no hassles.

Anyways, I used SQLite and a very simple web frontend(it had 3 screens: search, table view and record view). Solved the problem and moved on. Search just filtered the table view.

> If you have more than a few thousand records, this is the wrong tool for the job.

Just to be precise, Google Sheets might be the wrong tool for the job. Other spreadsheet applications can handle "more than a few thousand records" easily, seems this is a Google Sheets specific issue.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's not fixed on purpose, they do have cloud DB offering and all that overpriced jazz to sell you.

Can also be a feature to cap the potential scale for a PoC you want to keep from getting productized as-is.

A few thousand like the product of rows*cols? Just curious.

records = rows

The projects I worked on always had a mechanism to dump data into a proper database. For example, I built a daily scraper to collect some of the inventory. I didn’t keep all the data in a single sheet. Instead, all the data was stored in a cloud-based managed SQLite or PostgreSQL database, or sometimes a local SQLite database. Only the day's data was stored in Google Sheets because the client wanted to see the spreadsheet themselves and have the UI be accessible for their users.

It feels a little misleading to say you're using Google Sheets as the backend database, when you need an actual database in conjunction with it.

Extremely misleading, in this case Google Sheets it's working more like a frontend

I have had a similar experience with their API. Very verbose json structure, lack of stable row IDs, inconsistent data types. And being a spreadsheet, it also has to have styling/formatting details, complicating it even more.

There are extensions that let you query Excel worksheet files directly from SQLite (no importing, no transformation, just direct query). It's quite fun to do; you can use Excel (or Libre office, etc.) to maintain the spreadsheet, and build reports with SQLite.

Could you mention a few of such, to save time going through search results?

The one I use is xlite

https://github.com/x2bool/xlite

It's read-only and mounts spreadsheets as virtual tables. Very fast.

Perhaps more relevant to this thread, libgsqlite loads Google Sheets as virtual tables:

https://github.com/0x6b/libgsqlite

(I haven't tested it though.)

Starting with a Google Sheet is perfectly fine, but for building a non tabular user interface, or having a few thousand records, I would directly switch to something like SQLPage with a SQLite database.

Founder of Glide (YC W19) mentioned in the article — thanks for the recognition. This was not an ad from us, we were surprised by the coverage.

Glide’s customers are businesses building software for internal use. During YC we called these “dark apps” but since then we call them “apps for work.” We wanted something usable by IT and operations staff (not developers) that emphasized design and UX.

Glide started as a simple spreadsheet-to-PWA trick but is now a complete programming model and runtime platform for data-driven business apps, including APIs, databases, responsive layouts, a managed AI system, and workflow automations.

One of our Crown Jewels is our data editor, where you program your app with our reactive computed columns. Our data grid has become a popular open source component: https://grid.glideapps.com/

You can also try our new AI-native builder experience, where we’re trying to simplify building even further. It’s very early but just shows our continued effort to make building software simpler: https://glideapps.com/create

Thanks again!

I know a few people who started to use glide for personal apps and were put off by the price. ($200/mo for over 3 personal apps is a bit tough).

They showed me what they were doing and that was absolutely incredible for people without programming experience. They integrated with spreadsheets and llms and their PDF collections of manuals for devices etc.

But as lower-income people they were stopped in their tracks and I found that really sad that there isn't an option for non money-making or business supporting applications. In their case they were all doing that for their hobbies or for supporting their aging parents and giving them tools to handle their tasks, chores and care.

I second this. I'm guessing you're limiting access at a lower price point because you're worried too many business customers will opt for the lower cost plan when they should be on the higher priced one? I would pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $10/mo or so for a personal plan that had more than your free tier and less than the business one.

Yes, I’m also sad we couldn’t find a way to be affordable for everyone while also growing our business. We’ve learned that the personal/community app ‘market’ is impossible to grow upon, and that pricing for this group undercuts your pricing power with businesses.

The pricing is completely prohibitive. It’s a shame, looks cool but I’m not gonna bother with a pricing model that’s clearly telling me to go look elsewhere as a solo dev

I’ve had the same experience. I really want something of this quality that is accessible to hobbyists or folks managing non revenue generating things — any kind of social organization could really benefit!

I haven’t used Glide yet, but I’ve worked extensively with other ‘front-end interfaces for Airtable and Spreadsheets’, like Softr, Noloco and Bubble.

The first time I tried Glide, I struggled with the interface, and unfortunately, support didn’t respond to my messages, so I had to take a different direction.

That said, I’d love to give Glide a try. It’s incredible that we have direct access to founders like you here on HN.

Congrats on your success! From your perspective, where do you see no-code and low-code heading, especially with AI dramatically lowering the barriers to coding?

Thank you! Please let me know how your second attempt goes.

AI and no code platforms will merge into new high-level software creation tools. We already view Glide as a hybrid—try our AI component for the bottoms-up view. Our top-down AI approach will soon be live in our onboarding.

I remember when you launched your product on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163081

I favorited it back then. Glad to see it's doing well, it looks like a cool product. I haven't found a reason to use it yet but that's also because I have slowed down on coding personal projects after work in general.

Glide was cool when it launched but they never made that product work. Right now they have moved to an agency model and that is their product.

This is not true. We don’t build apps for customers, although there are Glide agencies that we match customers with. We’ve learned that some businesses prefer to pay for someone else to build for them no matter the platform, so we’re happy to facilitate that given our agency ecosystem.

During COVID, I built a quick no-code solution to help ‘all-inclusive resorts’ in Cancun and Punta Cana. It started with guests scanning a QR code, filling out a short form, and scheduling their Antigen/PCR tests. Over time, it evolved to help nurses manage operations, streamline test results, and send certificates via email.

What began as a DIY project during lockdown scaled quickly to Mexico City, the Dominican Republic, and Barcelona, processing over 30,000 tests the day after New Year’s Eve. Using Airtable, an Airtable extension called miniextensions.com, and tools like Docusign, Make, Sendgrid, and Twilio, the solution ended up supporting over 1 million tests. I handled all technical aspects, support, and training myself.

Since the solution was meant to be temporary, I prioritized speed and reliability. Airtable’s relational database capabilities were crucial, especially compared to spreadsheets, for managing multiple linked tables and automations. Airtable also offers a REST API and a pretty amazing self- actualizing database schema that can be copied into tools like GPT or Claude for added context. You can build powerful tools with its scripts, interfaces, and automations.

That said, Airtable is best for use cases with fewer than 250,000 records per month. Above 100,000 records, the web platform’s performance can suffer, though there are workarounds. It’s perfect for small to medium-sized businesses needing custom API integrations for CRMs or internal tools.

If you’re interested, I wrote a brief case study about the project here: https://rashidazarang.com/covid-testing.

On a related note, today I built a cool Airtable automation using ChatGPT and custom scripts. By filling out a corporate email in a form, the system scrapes the web for details like company name, address, phone, fax, and more, which then populates the CRM automatically. I’m still experimenting and plan to make a YouTube video about it soon. Here’s the loom video I sent to a friend about it: https://www.loom.com/share/b9ddbefbdce5434da378667fc2079d00?...

This is very impressive considering the real-world complexities surrounding it, but you've taken that complexity and turned it into a fairly simple work-flow with minimal coding. I've been developing software professionally for nearly 20 years and I find these kinds of projects to be fascinating. I started out my career with a mixture of coding and non-coding "integrations" (hacks) with other software. Over the years I've fallen in the typical "how can I build this from scratch" trap, but in many cases - as you've proven - that's not always the best decision. Kudos and thanks for sharing!

This is great and I look forward to your YouTube video. It is intriguing to me since you went you choose existing tool and piped the entire workflow vs to build the entire thing from scratch in Python, for example.

In the demo Loom video, the part where you are scheduling an appointment, it looks very calendly like but it is not. Did you build the entire UI and UX yourself?

> … the day after New Year’s Eve.

OT nitpick, but isn’t this “New Year’s Day?” Or did you mean January 2nd?

+1 for Airtable API. Way ahead of Google Sheets IMO.

woah!

didn't even know you can embed videos on HN!

I think your browser is doing some embedding cause I don't see an embedded video...

Glide is cool ... I wish there were FOSS versions of Glide to spin up nice, neat and simple mobile apps.

There are now quite a few reliable FOSS version of no-code tools (but the mobile space seems to be missing alternatives). Few nice no-code FOSS that I love using are listed at https://blog.n0c0de.com/articles/1635ef6f-f616-8023-b336-ff3...

This is great, thanks for sharing!

Thank you!

I've recently been toying with the idea of turning my overly complicated weightlifting Excel into an overly complicated me-only webapp / testflight app. It can't be worse than Excel for iOS!

Self-plug: I wrote a not-too-overly complicated app for tracking my strength training (a 5/3/1 derivative)

https://github.com/bcspragu/stronk

Nice. If you havent seen it, I use 531 calculator religiously and it has a ton of programs on it, and very customizable https://blackironbeast.com/5/3/1/calculator?

Might inspire you as you continue to develop your app

I use stronk (531 BBB) ! Its a damn small world!

I exported most of my data from "Strong" into Stronk, was easy. Thanks !

The interface showed lbs, but my values were all kg, still works.

I use https://www.liftosaur.com/ which allows for overly complicated stuff with its liftoscript DSL

This seems like a common predicament. I made this one mostly for myself and to try out VLCN sqlite sync. https://www.dumblift.com

This is exactly what I've wanted to do for a long time. All the apps in the app store are money sucking or ad ridden and unnecessarily cluttered.

I want a simple front end that lets me log lifts to a sheet/database

I use Google Forms to send data to a Google Sheet. You just put whatever lifts you have in the Form with spaces to add weights. I use this Google Form --> Google Sheets thing for a dozen different things.

I do this same Google Form technique, and save the bookmark to my phone's home screen. So it's like having a dedicated app!

I’ve been jotting them down in a standardized format in apple notes and using a regex to parse them into structured json for later analysis.

For all the apps that are supposed to make this easier none of them do it right.

I'm doing something similar, incidentally in a wildly complicated google sheets + appscripts

lot in google keep and copy paste, then sheet does rest

https://imgur.com/a/xoHaxFY (3 images)

notation is ColB, it'll generate relevant metrics, running total for some metrics like sets / INOL

I also have onedit in sheet where if I put $$ anywhere it will calculate for the row

if I have:

++5,10 it will generate warmups 5 reps jumps at 10%, back to 50%

+++5,10 will do ramping warmups i.e. x5, x4, x3, x2, x1

whatever last onedit row will also split up Rep PRs at top

Most useful for me is auto cycle naming and visualization, i.e. the house keeping stuff that makes all the other apps finicky vs just logging on paper or note

#### date = program name

### macrocycle (i.e. month)

## mesocycle (i.e. week)

# microcycle (i.e. day)

so it will auto generate something like

#24/12/27

#24/12/27「188/58」「3/2/4/4」「2D AGO」 (0,4,4,3)

188th session / 58th session of this program (program 3, macro 3 / meso 4/ micro 4), done XYZ days ago. (0,4,4,3) is push, pull, legs, fatigue/recovery out of 5

Visualization shows on/off days so you can get good timeline sense

box border for mesocycles (week) with how many days at corner (useful for intuitive training)

bars are volume (500lb increments) for varios tags (i.e. bp for all bench press variations)

underline shows inol status for session (none, single under line, double underline, thick underline for >0.4, 1, 2, 2+

it'll highlight extra good or bad sessions i.e. (5,4,0,3) was a very good push day

Now mostly i goto gym, log in google keep:

#YY/MM/DD (performance) comments

ex1 (reps x sets) comments

ex2 (reps x sets) comments

ex3 (reps x sets) comments

Copy and paste into sheet when I feel like it and review metrics graph when needed

My format is

MM/DD/YYYY (i.e. 1/1/2025)

$sets x $reps $weight $name (i.e. 3x10 135 Bench Press)

I uploaded the log file to ChatGPT and had it spit out a Python script to parse into JSON:

``` for line in file:

    date_match = re.match(r'^(\d{1,2}/\d{1,2}).\*?$', line.strip())
    if date_match:
        # construct a new workout entry 
        # continue

    exercise_match = re.match(r'^(\d+)x(\d+)\s+(\d+)\s+(.+)$', line.strip())
    if exercise_match:
        # insert new exercise into current workout
        # continue

```

I’m verrrry interested in your regex!! Can you share?

I’m interested in building a fitness ontology/terminology linked to a tokenizer and parser.

My format is

MM/DD/YYYY (i.e. 1/1/2025)

$sets x $reps $weight $name (i.e. 3x10 135 Bench Press)

I uploaded the log file to ChatGPT and had it spit out a Python script to parse into JSON:

``` for line in file:

    date_match = re.match(r'^(\d{1,2}/\d{1,2}).\*?$', line.strip())
    if date_match:
        # construct a new workout entry 
        # continue

    exercise_match = re.match(r'^(\d+)x(\d+)\s+(\d+)\s+(.+)$', line.strip())
    if exercise_match:
        # insert new exercise into current workout
        # continue

```

you could do an ios shortcut that fills a numbers sheet for you

hmm tell me more

get Claude to make an app and publish it as a PBA

PBA?

mispelling of PWA, presumably

I've been very impressed with hevy[0] so far

[0] https://www.hevyapp.com/

This is giving me flashbacks to the days when MS Access (and later on Visual Basic) ruled this segment of the market.

It's interesting to think there's still a market for this type of small scale enthusiast application.

One scenarios I've been thinking about recently is the death of the generic app.

If LLMs end up being able to create software easily, why wouldn't we choose to have software that's totally aligned our specific needs?

Not just totally aligned, but also "just-in-time" and ephemeral: an LLM goes and does/builds it on request, and then destroys all artifacts when the request has been fulfilled?

If the persistence of something incurs a cost in storage and security, and the traditional penalties of efficiency and learning-curves are removed, why not recreate it every time its needed?

I like this idea.

As an analogue to this; would each iteration adapt and evolve in the same way an organism might?

Maybe not "evolve" but certainly would be different every time, right? If it already knows every conivable way to generate something, it stands to reason it will be different every time, as every request will be a little different, even if it's just the temperature of the room.

As a thought exercise: if I could automatically generate, at no cost in money or time, a "disposable" vehicle for every single trip I took, wouldn't it make sense that it would be different every time, even though the basic requirement (transportation) is the same? Why bother generating a car with A/C if it's cold out? Why have a passenger seat if I'm just going to the corner store for milk?

Yes, but then familiarity is often a positive quality.

Knowing where the AC always is, could be seen as a benefit (even if you don't want to use it).

By aim for iterative improvements, the system could focus on personal contextual features; and the way we end up using a product over time.

Ah, yes, preference! How well will the AI know what we prefer without us having to articulate it every time. Very good, I like this.

Let's turn that on it's head: maybe we engage with AI/AI products that seem to just provide outcomes we prefer. Let's say all AI will probably be able to generate all manner of things, but we might like Z AI because when I ask for Y kind of widget it builds ones I seem to just...prefer more. It seems to "just get me".

I suppose, if your best friend, PA or butler knew you really well, they might have a really good idea of the kind of thing you might like.

If the AI has a very close link to you, and observes a lot of what you do, it might have a much clearer idea of what you want and need.

And if it was linked to your mind ...

Let go of your complex solutions. Spreadsheets were the right answer all along.

I organize my life with spreadsheets and it works great. Running Spreadsheet, Health Spreadsheet, Investing Spreadsheet, Gardening Spreadsheet, on and on. :) It's just the best way to examine the data that is your life and have any hope of remembering the past and improve the future.

I’ve kept my finances on a google sheet for well over a decade. And it was old excel before that.

My wife had surgery last summer and had about 10 medications she needed to take immediately afterwards - each of them had their own period so I needed to know what we took, and what was "overdue" at any point in time.

I whipped up a spreadsheet in google sheets and added a google form that allowed me to quickly pick a medication that was just taken - it'd enter it into the sheet and an "overview" page would show me what was pending, with color coding if something was "overdue".

I felt like I was abusing what a spreadsheet was meant for but it worked quite well.

If I knew about Glide I probably could have made it look even nicer.

I think the mobile form factor has something to say about that. I somewhat agree (reluctantly) for desktop usage, but spreadsheets are too complex to be ergonomic with small touch screens.

Yes, so was IBM/360 in text mode but someone wanted to draw nice buttons.

We built an entire app for our golf league- all using Glide and Google Sheets.

It was honestly a great experience- all the players had a great mobile experience with obvious forms and leaderboards, while the storage and compute was hidden inside the Google Sheet. The pricing was pretty reasonable- considering we could split the bill among us all, and we only needed it for about 4 months.

There’s still hope for good, quality SaaS! However, I hope Glide (or another) can figure out the pricing for the hobbyist tier.

This looks great, but I got a bit of sticker shock when I saw Glide's plan to do this is $69 per month cost (billed yearly). There's a free tier, but with a 1-app limit and only Big Tables (no Google Sheets). I'd be fine with paying for personal apps, but $69/month feels a bit... steep.

It's a tool targeted at businesses. The article writer just found a use case that works for them personally.

I know, but usually a lot of these have hobbyist plans. I wouldn't mind being throttled and QoS'd behind businesses for a lower price.

I use Notion databases for this. They're essentially spreadsheets with customizable table, list, kanban views, and each row gets its own wiki-style page in addition to the structured data. So it's nice for lists of books or movies or games, where you have some metadata but you also might want to take notes on it when you read/watch/play. It works pretty well for this purpose, but I also could probably make Obsidian or Logseq work and it would have a better privacy story, give me more control over the shape of the data, and not cost $48 a year (though I don't really mind paying).

https://www.notion.com/help/intro-to-databases

I have been looking for a way to switch from Notion since they rolled out AI features without an opt-out (besides emailing them). I don't even dislike LLMs, I just want to know what I'm sending them and when.

I badly, badly wish Obsidian had some kind of database/spreadsheet feature. I'm limping along with LibreOffice spreadsheets for privacy, but it's a pain having my notes in two different formats. And I miss grep.

Try SiYuan Note. It was posted here a couple of days ago.

What would you use this feature for?

Basically what parent said, little personal database tables. Example: I have a list of 100 movies I want to see, and I have columns like date watched, year released, should I rewatch again in 10 years, notes, etc. I want to be able to do two things:

1. Sort/filter by columns (ex: status = not watched)

2. Add markdown like "[[Steve]] told me to watch this" and have backlinks etc. work seamlessly with the rest of my notes.

I know you can do that with Obsidian "properties" but I don't want 100 separate files for my to-watch list.

And I've tried a few of the Obsidian database plugins too, but as far as keyboard usability none of them came close to VisiData or LibreOffice.

I think this all works out of the box with logseq.

You can create a movie template with a few props then put them anywhere and then tabularise all the entries with a query.

You should check out Fibery. It’s ultimately like Notion but a lot more performant and less “finicky” due to being too clever about UX, in my opinion.

Definitely interesting. I think if I was going to put in the effort of switching, it would probably be to more of a labor of love pain in the ass situation like Obsidian where I can be more in control.

My use case would easily fit into the Fibery free plan. Amusingly, their own comparison page argues that Notion is a better fit for me:

“Where Fibery works better?

Processes and work management for medium and large teams. Complex processes like product management, feedback management, user research, software development tracking.

Where Notion works better?

Personal life organizer. Small/medium company wiki. Work management for teams with simple processes.”

https://fibery.io/fibery-vs-x

I’m a heavy Obsidian user personally, started using Fibery for my startup, and now I’m starting to use Fibery for personal stuff over Obsidian as well.

Obsidian is a better note-taker, but Fibery is much more programmable and has the most important OOTB feature of Obsidian which is bidirectional linking (IMO).

I don’t think Fibery gives you less control except in the sense of like data ownership (which is what brought me to Obsidian back in the day).

More key bindings for Fibery would also be appreciated :)

Funny about backlinks — Notion has had them since 2020 and I've never once looked at the backlinks for a given page. I don't think any of my pages link to each other.

I was commissioned to make a video explaining what Fivery is and what makes it powerful. It was a couple of years ago, but I believe the core principles still stand. In case someone is interested to learn more and is ok with video format, check it out: https://youtu.be/ddgJGoQBdtQ

I think Fibery is a very interesting product and an incredibly powerful platform. Developed by a small team.

A little know Google product is called Tables[0]. Very similar to what you’re describing.

Another is AppSheet[1] for a more drag and drop application builder.

[0]: https://tables.area120.google.com/

[1]: https://about.appsheet.com/home/

From the Tables page:

Important update: The Beta program is now closed Tables is no longer accepting new users for its Beta program

Also,

> Table’s features and capabilities are now integrated into AppSheet, our no-code platform that blah blah blah

Seems like a usual Google product in that if you use it, you'll be forced to migrate all your data/workflows to some shiny new thing every few years.

Tables was never a supported Google product. It was an Area 120 experimental prototype. By design, Area 120 prototypes either get shut down or get merged into real products.

AppMaker was Google's AppSheet competitor that was shut down after a few years.

We're building Thymer [1] for this, which is end-to-end encrypted, offline-first and optionally self-hostable. It's like an editor but you can organize anything into custom database views, we hope to get it ready soon.

[1] https://thymer.com/

Very cool! Will be keeping an eye out for it.

My experience with no-code or low-code products (like Glide, but I have not tried Glide yet), is that they are fine and dandy when you have a single table or sheet.

But as soon as you have to source data from multiple tables 9or sheets), they all fall down, or become exponentially more difficult to use. I do not know what it is about splitting your data (even if everything is indexed against a common id), that makes the complexity go up so much. If someone can make an easy-to-use app to deal with this situation, I would potentially throw a lot of money at it.

Opening Glide on my phone, I'm greeted with:

> Open Glide on a large screen to build apps.

I get it - but a little ironic that one can't get started with an existing sheet...

Yes, we agree.

We have a mobile experience in the works! https://glideapps.com/create

Why lock down to a nocode tool instead of just hacking together a simple html5 page?

Ai assistants have speed up the prototype workflow for doing less code/design.

True that Claude can generate a simple working prototype in a single prompt. But there's still the friction of deploying the app, making it accessible across devices, and easily managing updates. Which something like Glide streamlines for non-technical users.

For those curious, you can also do some pretty fast prototyping (including deploy) with https://bolt.new and https://v0.dev (vercel). Sometimes even a single prompt.

publish it as a website and download it as a PWA

Even just "make it a PWA" can take an experienced frontend developer a day or more. The manifest needs to be just right, the server might need to be reconfigured to serve the right MIME type, you need to generate a few mandatory icon sizes, you need a service worker even if you're not using it...

If you're using a big framework like Vite, this is somewhat easier, but then it's not a "simple html file" anymore and you spend just as much time fiddling with framework stuff.

He kind of answered you in TFA:

> I can feel some people reading this article demanding that I just learn Swift or some mobile-friendly JavaScript package and make some real apps, but I steadfastly refuse. I enjoy the messy middle of programming, where I have just enough app, API, and logic knowledge to make something small for my friends and family that's always accessible on this little computer I carry everywhere, but I have no ambitions to make it "real."

An AI generated page will be full of security holes that a non programmer will be unable to assess.

I'm not normally a fan of nocode but dude, get real, the target user for this will have zero chance of understanding and maintaining the output if it's in code. Compared to pick your column and choose the type of widget you want it represented as. Below the tip of that iceberg there are also lots of non trivial features like search and sync.

Why buy a bike when you can assemble one from parts?

Cause guy does not code perhaps? Otherwise siding with this comment thread. Claude indeed does super rapid html5 dev a child’s play.

Presumably so they can hook into an external datasource

so can a simple HTML5 page with a jquery script tag

I've always heard of completely devoid out of touch developers but this is the first I've seen it so pronounced.

The classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Did you skip web design 101? If it’s simple enough, you can absolutely slap it together with jQuery and html.

Time is a valuable resource. This doesn’t simply boil down to one’s abilities—for most of us, opportunity cost is an important factor. If I’m just trying to get some value out of some data, why waste time playing web developer, fighting CSS, dealing with CORS issues, etc., when I could simply use an existing tool that already has my use case covered?

Why waste your time? Some of us are just in it for the love of the game

One day left for 2024 and snark is dead; hopefully it's revived in 2025!

Yeah, I can’t tell if some of these responses are serious or tongue in cheek.

Ha. You said exactly what was on my mind.

I keep changing the last part of Google spreadsheets URL from /edit to /preview

Much better loading time.

For my workplace, I built an internal orgchart and the backend is entirely Google Sheets. It's been completely hassle free and I've spent almost no time on the code since building it three years ago. As employees join and leave, HR adds/deletes a row in the sheet and only they have access to the "database" besides myself. In case of accidental deletion, there's the handy restore ability built into sheets so a database "rollback" is also trivial and can be done by HR without my input.

Sheets as a database for light web apps is absolutely joyful to build with.

Glide appears pretty cool, except that the next level up plan over the free one is $69 per month, more than a little steep for most personal users. I myself am wondering if there are any good projects out there that do similar things but that use either local databases or even browser storage?

I think the key value of Google sheets link is that you can do rest of your aggregation/data fixes on Google sheets. And data is in your control

I made an app for a meetup/reunion, but 10 user limit meant everyone had to given a shared password

Like you, I would happily pay for many many services about 10/month - right where streaming subscriptions are. But none of these companies seem to understand that part…

Is Glide better than AppSheets?

Our customers who’ve switched from AppSheet tell us emphatically “yes” because of Glide’s ease of use, power, and the design of the apps it produces.

Easier, but more expensive in the long run.

The idea is neat but holy SaaS, the price for what it offers is ridiculous. It’s not even about having the money, it’s just that $828 p.a. price of entry to build a spreadsheet front-end is objectively a bad buy/business decision.

Most people would just learn to code at a boot camp for $828 so they don’t need codeless.

This comment reminds me of the infamous Dropbox comment :)

Touché, but let’s see…

You and I have a very different idea of “most people”

Its been real easy to build small and large web apps for news organization on Google Sheets. Most recently we built an "AI Election Tracker" for 2024 elections across the globe

https://restofworld.org/2024/elections-ai-tracker/

GS is not the best editorial interface but its not bad either, especially when it allows you to get things done quickly.

Likewise, this was another fun project (since retired) that sits on Google Sheets:

https://restofworld.org/stat-of-the-day/

We skip Google's API which I really dislike. The sheets are set to publish to the web and you can use that to pull down the data and parse it into JSON files.

It take less than a minute to set the basics up now.

Why does the site hijack the back button!? It wouldn't let me get back to hn.

I used to work on some really complicated old code for a long term incentive management company where each client had a ton of their own rules, but once those were set up they would be running fine for 3 or 5 year cycles without any issues. The difficult part was to fit their requirements and rules into our code.

At some point I started working on a new version that would just run with a spreadsheet as the frontend where the business analyst could add whatever rules and calculation fields they wanted, which would then link to some input of users, share values, periods etc.

It was going quite well and seemed extremely viable but unfortunately the business died due to some other issues along with Covid before the software saw the light of day.

Is that an ad? It definitely sounds like one.

Either that, or the author has a really odd fixation that warrants spending $69/month, just to share a list of nearby restaurants with his wife?

That's definitely it !

Definitely an ad.

Founder of Glide (YC W19) here. This article surprised us and is not paid.

OT but I convinced several of my clients to use Excel and SharePoint they already had in their bundle over writing a full blown app multiple times, added some automation and it was both cheaper and made them happier.

I'm looking for a no code platform that I can use for my customers and charge a subscription for access.

Most of these no-code solutions target internal company Intranets.

But, I want to use them for apps I can sell to customers.

Does anyone have recommendations?

As mentioned by another poster, check out "Partner portals" section on https://retool.com/

I am also interested in this.

The hack quotient on this is high, so that's good, though ironically it's hacking around all the BS we put up with (languages, frameworks) to get a programming project up and running!

Tried to use Glide a few years ago and couldn't understand why it is needed anyway in real life? It seems like toy for startup-guys, not for real MVP's or something valuable.

I like Google Sheets and Google Docs but this app is so strange. Maybe it's ok for small "homemade" projects for neighbourhoods or local businesses like flower salon or fitness club. But why it is needed for these type of business if we have social media, messengers, WPA and adaptive layouts on websites.

We’ve made a lot of progress in a few years! Check again?

You can easily add some user input with Forms and with some setup you can get SSO and require Google auth to the Forms and Sheets. You can also throw up some async jobs in Google Cloud Run functions.

I automated some IT processes this way. These were tasks that were already a bit manual (like on/off boarding hires) and needed flexible workflows but would be helped with automation.

When the scale is small it can be a nice little toolbox.

Basically: Guy reinvents MS Access on Google sheets 40 years later.

Disclaim: this is not to say Access is to be despised of or anything. People found its utility for many years and the fact it is not what Boyce/Codd suggested they do with their tables, does not make it irrelevant. There was an article about how it just refuses to die and why. Worth reading for everyone interested in computer and computing history.

The article conveys much the same sentiment as “An app can be a home-cooked meal”

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

> the shopping list is plagued by blank items/rows

Hmm, interesting that he goes as far as to add a map based on an address provided (which is actually quite nice) but can't (or rather, didn't) get rid of blank items/rows.

I used google sheets but wouldn’t go past big query or firebase these days. You can have connected sheets that read straight from big query and probably firebase too, and they’re so much better and faster and have fewer quirks than sheets

From a similar need I built the HomeHero app (https://homehero.pro) which helps maintain house inventory and now turning general (projects) inventory.

I once used AppSheets to make a Sales enablement app for salespeople in my team. It worked well and gave great results, but.. damn does it get painful once the data starts going beyond a nontrivial threshold.

Love this, big fan of Glide. We've used Google Sheets for a long time to power Levels.fyi and allowed us to move fast without too much of a formal backend. Check out our post here: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...

Tbh sheets has gotten a lot better over the years. It's not hard to autofill and other things that used to be impossible or too obscure to figure out. I'll stick with the free platform for things just for me

I wanted to use Google Sheets for an internal corporate app, but authentication/authorization is a pain, I got it to work but it would have probably been faster to just have some CRUD SQLITE somewhere.

Glide (from the article) adds simple pin-based auth and access control on top of the spreadsheet data. There’s also user and role-based data protection.

I haven't used online spreadsheets as databases and I guess they are good for prototyping, rapid application development and in-house testing.

I wish Google Sheets supported a REST API for their new tables feature so you could interact with them more like a database and less like a 2D array

You could more or less achieve this, by using a Google Apps Script that exposes the sheet. I found spreadapi to be good enough for basic use.

https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi

This is great, thanks!

A great example where customers don’t care as much what you code in especially for B2C.

Is it a solution that works or is helpful is more of a bar.

Looks like a wonderful New Years Eve project

Google sheet on mobile is pain. Good idea on how this becomes usable. Will try it.

I really like the part where the article was phone friendly.

Seriously how does anyone make money with a website where the actual content is so obscured by ads that users don’t bother coming back?

Since now google mail is blocking email addresses with ipv4 and ipv6 literals, I moved to a self hosted messaging site to interact with google mail prisoners.