carliny

Hey there, that would certainly simplify the aspect of payment, but to be clear, there are also data governance rules that vary by country, irrespective of whether we're collecting payment or not. We definitely considered that option as well, but ended up going down this path for now. We hope we'll be able to expand access before too long though!

Hey Terretta, great question. Tables is already built on standard Google infrastructure so we have many of the default security and privacy protections built in.

From a user-facing standpoint: Tables is really geared towards being more user-friendly than the traditional DBA type tools, so the sharing model aligns more closely with Google Drive, and offer similar permissioning roles like "Editor", "Commenter", and an additional "Writer" role for collaborators who should be able to edit the rows, but not the table schema itself. We also have table and row-level change history baked in, and while we don't specifically offer an audit trail within the app, users can implement a version of that themselves using our bots. We're also working to support the ability to use bots to essentially automate GDPR compliance, by having bots that will automatically delete table rows that are >X days old.

From a customer-to-Google standpoint: we are very serious about your data privacy and security. We're not currently rubberstamped for HIPAA/SOC2, but we're already in the process of going through the internal reviews for FEDRAMP and HIPAA compliance. We do not at this time have advanced enterprise admin controls for customers, but it's absolutely coming in the future (we are only 1-day old to the public :).

We're not going to have all the angles covered, but we're working towards it!

Thanks, crazygringo! Appreciate the kind words.

Absolutely, we're really hoping that Tables can be great for all those smaller groups and use cases as well. The feedback on your impressions of the landing page is really helpful; I'll take that to the team and see if we can improve on that.

For some context on the tiers, I agree that storage is becoming a commodity and may not be something to gate on too heavily. For some quick insight, we did an analysis and the vast majority of lightweight work trackers (not for a serious business use case) had far below 1000 rows/records in them, so we left it with that limit to mitigate abuse, and then give 10x in the next tier (plus, we only charge for a single license, not by # of collaborators). That said, your point about making it easier for people to just jump in and get started is very valid. Thanks for giving me and the team some food for thought, we'll noodle on this and see how we can improve the messaging! :)

Hey there! Tables PM here -- thanks for writing an honest opinion about what factors you're considering before wanting to use it for a business; I really appreciate that feedback and it's very helpful for us to hear.

I know our team would love to have people try Tables for lightweight work tracking use cases, even if it's not for a mission-critical business need. At the end of the day, we want Tables to help people and businesses make work a little easier, especially with covid forcing many to digitize and work remotely. If we're able to create a lot of value, that'll make for a strong case to graduate Tables into a larger Google product area, and we're only going to be able to do that with feedback from folks like yourself who can apply a healthy dose of objectivity. :)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, and we hope you'll give Tables a little time (even Keep took several years before finally joining G Suite)! I'll also take that feedback on the "beta" label back to the team.

That's really helpful to hear, thanks for the examples. I definitely agree that there's potential for supporting use cases beyond just simple work tracking, and into more advanced workflows, and I'm hoping that we'll be able to make Tables useful for some of those use cases in the future too.

Thanks for the kind words, and I hope Tables will help people and businesses in positive ways as well! From my perspective, we just want to offer a decent option for users who want to track team work within the Google ecosystem, especially during this time with covid forcing many businesses to digitize and work remotely.

Thanks for sharing those use cases and we'll take that feedback on the limits back to the team.

Hey there! I'll point you to a similar comment and response I gave for a fellow non-American who asked the same question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24556244.

tl;dr is we'd love to and we're working on it! I'm glad to hear you're interested in Tables, we'll try to get it to you as soon as we can.

Thanks! Very much appreciate the kind words. :)

Yeah, to give you my perspective on this for a second: the reality is that the rules for how we work with and protect user data continues to evolve and become more nuanced with the different regulations from different countries. Not to mention, taking payments in different countries and currencies has a lot of implications! For every country we release to, there's a bunch of potentially new rules to follow, so it's a lot simpler and safer to do it with just one country first, get it right, and then expand after that. In my experience, there's no particular opinion that users from a particular country are "unsafe," but it's more about whether we have enough time and people to make sure we're doing things right by our users.

Hope that gives you a little insight into this and how we think about it!

Hey jbm, Tables PM here, your comment definitely resonated with me.

Fun fact: I'm Canadian! :P On your point though: as my own opinion, there's some very smart people here trying to make sure we're doing things in a safe way that protects both our users and our team, and so sometimes we're asked to start small. As a result, we're doing what we can to offer something useful for people and businesses during these covid times, while still respecting the boundaries that we've been given. I, like most PMs, hate red tape, but I also appreciate it for the dangers it protects us from. :)

All that said, we're definitely hoping we can offer Tables to more people in the world, so stay tuned!

Hey there!

Tables PM here; your comment caught my eye as it had an interesting point about the Sheets API access changes that are coming. We do offer an API and while Tables isn't intended as a replacement for Sheets in any way, we're hoping it might be useful for folks who do need a lightweight database for their work. :)

I wanted to be fair and call out that Airtable also has a free tier (and API), and they offer a lot of great features and functionality as well that can be great for startups!

At the end of the day, you should use what fits your needs best. I wanted to create Tables because our team didn't have a great work tracking tool that quite fit our needs, and it felt like we could help other Google apps users and businesses too (especially during this time of remote working with covid). I hope you'll get to make your work life simpler, no matter whichever tool you choose.

Hey there! I'm the Tables PM and your comment caught my eye.

I really appreciate that feedback for us, and we're really hoping to make it as useful as possible for you and others! :) As prlambert@ mentioned in another comment, we're kinda like a startup and if things go well, the goal is graduate into larger parts of Google.

A point of clarification on the free tier: we're offering 1000 rows per table--an individual tab within a workspace--which we hope offers a lot of flexibility in mixing and matching data in a workspace to track your work together. If there's particular use cases you have that involve over a 1000 rows, we'd love to hear more about it. Thanks for taking a look at the product!