Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app

Is the Google Sheets API rate limit open enough for actual production use?

I thought it was pretty restrictive, no more than 60 writes per minute, but I'm not sure about the reads restrictions.

Just beware of the modern version of the "Excel noob trap" which lots of investment banks fell into in the 80s and 90s. Spreadsheets are amazing generic calculating frameworks and you can do a ton in them, so a lot of banks ended up building a huge ediface of excel spreadsheets that ran a wide variety of risk, pricing and operational functions.

With a few plugins and extensions you can really do amazing things with this type of setup. The problem is that your spreadsheets basically become an unmaintainable and impenetrable nightmare and all your business logic is held hostage in various people's personal sheets. Making wide changes becomes hard/impossible and doing something that in a traditional software framework would be easy ("Let's change the frobnicator to twizzle first and then twozzle afterwards, instead of the other way round as it does it now") become very difficult requiring many many changes in many many sheets with a lot of risk, and a lot of dilligence to be sure you have actually made a particular critical fix everywhere.

Funny story. Before pivoting my startup to Loom, we were a user testing company named Opentest. Instead of spinning up a DB and creating a dashboard for my co-founders to look at who requested certain user tests, I just dumped everything into a Google Sheet. It was so good. No downtime. Open access. Only 3 people looking/editing, so no conflict. Didn't have to deal with database upgrades or maintenance. I often think about this decision and feel like I've learned a bunch of "good engineering practices" that pale in comparison to how being truly scrappy can be a genius unlock at any level.

You don't actaully need any fancy wrapping.. just open https://script.google.com/ you can already access all google's APIs + you will be able to integrate your sheets with your gmail (send email), calendar (you can modify the calendar when the sheet get changes), create pages, allow inputs from form and etc..) The problem with that is the sheet will not have any .. transaction based ops like a real database so for example you want to lock certain resources.. you may fail..

Great concept. Congrats on launching.

Do you have a sense for how much usage Google will allow on a given sheet or user? I.e. will Google shut down the API after a certain usage level?

(Side-note, your SSL cert seems to be having trouble, i.e. www.zerosheets.com is correctly encrypted, zerosheets.com is not.)

I'd like to plug PocketBase [0] for a similar use case.

Last week I was looking for a place to store random data with API access, and was looking at making a Google Sheets backend, but PocketBase was easy and didn't have a 60 rpm quota [1].

Deploying to a cheap VPS was very easy with CapRover.

[0] https://pocketbase.io/

[1] https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/limits

I rather use Google Sheets as the front end of my app. Have it call endpoints in my backend and populate the sheet with the data, and auto-generate charts based on that data. Easy, no-nonsense dashboard. Add in some dropdown menus and inputs and you got yourself a good enuff frontend

I'm surprised no one's posted Spread API yet: https://spreadapi.roombelt.com/

It's a free Google Sheets / Apps Script you just paste to your sheet, and it turns the sheet into a full CRUD. It's kind of rate limited though but completely free!

Edit: I've thought about creating a company around Sheets before, and the problem is that once you get to the "willing to pay" stage, you also kind of outgrow Sheets. I'd rather migrate to Turso, Cloudflare D1, or Pocketbase instead of staying with Sheets or SpreadAPI, because of the limitations.

Are Fortune, The Weather Channel, Fast Company, and National Geographic really your customers?

2 Google Sheets backend stories:

- Needed to manage vocab learning content for 60 world languages, mostly being updated by a handful of university students and a bunch of remote volunteers. Google Sheets was our source of truth, with a nightly sync into MariaDB. We even wrote some callable scripts that could detect ambiguities and other common issues. Saved us a ton of tooling effort, and stakeholders found it cool that we could update content so quickly.

- Working on a new product, my boss found a Figma plugin that lets you wire up prototypes to a Google sheet. It’s report-heavy and we’re still building the real app, so to dogfood it internally I’m running a wizard-of-oz collecting data with a different tool we already built and dumping results into sheets and then sorting/filtering/calculating for all the needed views. Internal stakeholders get a real, clickable prototype with real values that closely approximates what the real product will look like. It’s been amazing!

My next user script project idea would require something like this. It's for my own use, but I have to fill out grade sheets using an incredibly painful web UI. The data would be far more easily entered into a spreadsheet. (That's exactly what they used to use, but in order to make things "easier" the school implemented a horrific parody of an ultra basic CRUD web app...) So I want to make a user script that reads from a spreadsheet to populate the painful-to-use web form.

I haven't started yet because (1) I still haven't finished writing up my last user script experience blog post, and (2) I'm terrified of the auth nightmare. It might be easier or harder in the user script context—I am in the context of a web page, so maybe that means I can do a normal oauth flow from there or something?

Google apps script already lets you write http handlers...

They seem pretty powerful.

Didn't https://www.glideapps.com famously start with Google Sheets backend?

I used to use a Google Sheet to drive a restaurant website's menu page. It was perfect. The restaurant could update the spreadsheet whenever something changed, and it'd instantly be reflected on the web. If they ever messed something up, they could just revert.

Pricing is unclear to me

There's a help page that gives you all the code you need to do this. https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/quickstart/js

tried it, sign in and ssl doesn't work.

I love this. I recently had an idea for an app that would allow people to share their favorite things with other people, and i left that exploration thinking how amazing it'd be to build lots of apps on Google Sheets as the backend - you own the data, it has sharing built in..etc.

so not just google sheets as the backend, google sheets as your personal backend for you instance of the app.

Great job having fun and practicing making a company. Love it. Keep going! I remember using this one https://www.sheetgo.com/ back when they were starting. Fun to watch them grow!

Good luck!

Reading the documentation, I was expecting more tbh. As I found out there is no way to customize the API. The response is always a JSON dump of that google Sheet.

I use Opensheet as the backend for storing reviews of my book. It's not CRUD, but easy enough to fetch data as JSON and display it on a website (and for free!).

Highly recommended.

https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet

to use zerosheets, you need to allow it: See, edit, create, and delete *all* your Google Sheets spreadsheets.

Based on my experience, you'll get problem when the data is somehow large, and at that point it'll be too hard of a problem to fix / optimize CMIIW. Use it for prototyping and migrate to your own backend, or make a driver compatible with google sheet api, to connect to sql.

I recently made a full web app using only AppsScript and Google Sheets as the database, and wrote about it here [0], and open sourced it here [1]. It was a novel experience, but I felt particularly compelled by the idea of having a data store than non-devs can easily interact with while having a web app in front of it that didn't require a server to be set up. But, AppsScript is too slow for this kinda thing to be a nice experience. Zerosheets looks nice, and I'll investigate it further if I look into this idea again!

- [0] https://thetechenabler.substack.com/i/142898781/making-a-sim...

- [1] https://github.com/eeue56/simple-link-aggregator

Do you have any bad data entry prevention?

Maybe we can replace Bitcoin with Google Sheets?

Related: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...

Reminds me of the days when we'd write plugins for Microsoft Office that would populate data from an API and even send edits.

This looks great. I tried doing it myself a while back using existing client libraries for Python and was surprised how annoying the setup is, like the spreadsheet auth in particular.

I'm also surprised Google hasn't tried to kill this use-case. That's my main hesitation for using it on anything semi-serious.

Great stuff. I need to tell some of my friends about it. Thanks for making it!

My startup currently does this. Not as an API. I have different sheets set to populate different firebase relatime databases on a build script. I think it's the right way to go for early startups because then everyone can help build the product. I will be setting it up for our translation dictionaries.

This is a great way to prototype. I got a moderate distance along a road of a startup idea and we were going to start with a simple Google Sheets backend.

Also recommend checking out Azure Logic Apps' Google Sheets integration. It's been a few years since I've used it but I built some pretty nifty quick and dirty tools on top of Sheets, Logic Apps, and Azure Functions for back office app work at my last company.

I use BaseQL which is a GraphQL layer for Airtable. It's worked for 3 years. For performance reasons after we translated our catalog we had to put in postgres + hasura as middleware but we still use BaseQL all over. It's rad. https://www.baseql.com/

Being able to get data joined across sheets is priceless.

you can use Google Sheets as front-end too. lol

I was exploring some alternatives for templating and CMSs a few days ago, and stumbled over NPR’s internal toolkit[1] for publishing articles with data, charts, visualizations, etc., and thought it was interesting that they included Google-Sheets-as-a-CMS.

1. https://github.com/nprapps/dailygraphics-next

Wrote something similar a decade ago: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1359

Hope things have improved over that time.

What is the selling point of your solutions versus something like Baserow ?

To anyone using Google Sheets as its data layer: be sure never to create a primaryKey column, always use the title column. Also be sure to use one single spreadsheet with many tabs, and coreference cells by their sheet/line/column. That’s such a superb mental model of what your data represents. Of course denormalize your data without caring. Tabular model is not good at managing cardinalities, but [truth to be told] neither is our brain. Also use AppScript for formulas and business logic. Your future dev will love reverse engineer it. Then when things become hairy, hire an IT consultant and pay him well. Be sure to complain that his added value is limited wrt this Gsheet chef d’œuvre.

Might've been overlooked, but "fastly" should probably be "quickly" on the main page.

I did something very similar with https://github.com/kellpossible/avalanche-report/ we started with Google Sheets because it allowed us to quickly iterate with data entry workflow. When paired with a server this also allowed us to generate custom charts/diagrams via the IMAGE function with a crafted URL query. Reads are cached in a local sqlite database.

We're in the process of migrating away from Google Sheets now as it's a little painful to set up and it's impossible to completely prevent users from editing the wrong fields in our use case. But it has served very well so far and would highly recommend this approach to start with for anyone!

Neat! This seems very similar to Sheety[0], which I've used a bunch of times before (and found a few bugs...).

Do you have any plans to open source?

[0]https://sheety.co

There are open source tools out there already including budibase, nocodb, joget

How does this differ from AppSheet?

https://about.appsheet.com/how-to-create-an-app/

Very opportune! I'm just building an app that needs to interface with some sort of spreadsheet. I was going to use Airtable because their API is just better than Google Sheet's, even though I kinda prefer Sheets. I'll give this a try this weekend and see how it goes!

The link is broken. Says "no https for this domain"

How does it compare to teable[1], which is a postgres + airtable fusion?

I can see that Google Sheet has higher availability but fewer builtin dashboards.

[1] https://teable.io/

no https for this domain

Nice product.

Couple of suggestions/questions from using Google sheets to put enter some data that changed manually via back office admin which we then showed in a website that was accessed by thousands.

1. Will I hit rate limits if I access this API often via say GET requests from a public facing site? (What we did was used Redis as an intermediate cache)

2. Let's say the data on the sheet is changed, is there a webhook to notify the change? (What we did incorrectly initially was to rely on polling for change detection. Which was a bad idea especially as we grew increasingly reliant on this. Instead, the better way to do this is to put an 'Update' button in the sheet which then triggers an API call to an intermediate server to bust the cache I mentioned in the previous point. This also initiated a new fetch of the sheet data. A more user-friendly/better UX way to do this would be to use the Appscript Sheet APIs sheet change event handlers which can be leveraged for this if you don't want to enforce an update button on users though I haven't used this myself. [1])

In your case, I guess the way to do 2 would be to ask users to clone a sheet that has this Appscript code embedded in it when they create a new sheet that must be served with your API. No sure if the UX of that is acceptable though.

Wish your product success.

[1] https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/script/s...

There are loads of good use cases for this. At one point in my career I had to somehow re-tag thousands of resources in multiple clouds, some were terraformed, many were manually created over the years.

The solution? Export them all to a Google Sheet with one tag per column. Edit and apply-on-save. Filter, sort, summarize, pivot all the much you want. It's incredible.

https://afoo.me/tools.html

I built this page with several google sheets as data source，；）

For some of my apps I just load the full spreadsheet as Json into the app. Cache it. Check for updates after every new start.

Fast efficient easy.

Website design is very nice fair play. Is there a cost to using the product? I dont see that mentioned on the site and theres no pricing page listed. That would naturally cause me to freeze a little, rather than authenticating with my google account

levels.fyi started out using Google Sheets as a back end. Submissions were done via Google Form, inserting into the sheet.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...

wow this is now the 9th time someone has built this lol

This looks like an awesome product!

I'm currently in a bit of the same problem. Make an MVP of a webapp. What makes my predicament extra annoying is that my toolbox is primarily Microsoft. I have Power Automate, SharePoint, Office365, etc available to me. I do not have Azure unfortunately.

The answer is spin up a flask app with SQL and do things right. Does something like Zerosheets exist for the MS environment?

Really cool product! I'm bookmarking it for future products that don't need to live in MS land.

Wow ! So smart and useful! Thank you for sharing.

reminds me of fuckitdb https://pypi.org/project/fuckitdb/

I also used Google Sheets as a datastore backend: https://github.com/adam-p/danforth-east

It's a community association membership management thing, and I wanted the (non-technical) association board members to be able to easily inspect the data and do something useful with it if I moved away. It has mostly been successful, except that sometimes someone will manually edit the sheet and break something.

https://github.com/benborgers/opensheet#readme Is the best and simplest tool for turning Google Sheets accessible quickly.