Don’t really get the purpose for this apart from throw away projects.
For vibe coders is it really “hours” setting up a database these days? GCP cloud sql + drizzle ORM is minutes and actually scales unlike a spreadsheet, heck Claude can even write you a deployment script and run it over GCP CLI.
I think it can be useful if you want to use an existing Google Sheet, or if your users want to modify the database directly in Google Sheets, even though it seems pretty risky.
Cloud SQL costs gazillions, sheet is free (other than selling your data)
>sheet is free (other than selling your data)
Except the sheets-to-api SaaS charges $9/month if you want more than 250 requests.
Cloud sql lowest tier is pennies a day, this ninja platform is also not free.
A spreadsheet is a misclick away from corruption, why not spend another prompt on getting Claude to configure a db?
Which works out at $100 USD / year. You might think that's trivial, but when you start provisioning multiple environments over multiple projects it starts to add up.
It's a shame that Google haven't managed to come up with a scale to zero option or serverless alternative that's compatible.
Sheet Ninja is 108 USD / year and has tiny capacities for every metric. SQLite is free and would stomp this in every aspect on low budget hosting. Even a tiny API that stores CSV would be magnitudes more efficient.
But what would scare me the most, is that google can easily shut this thing down.
setup a DB project , use same cloud sql instance for all DBs. Did that for years on non prod or experimental projects. $100 is a bargain for what you get in terms of resiliency
It is trivial to set up a database on GCP given that you know what you are doing and I would pay Google for that stability and support for setting up multi-tenancy and region.
Using Google spreadsheets as a backend will just cause them to charge everyone later.
Sheet Ninja isn't free. Even on their side, "free" does not mean what you think it means.
> Cloud sql lowest tier is pennies a day
Unless things have improved it's also hideously slow, like trivial queries on a small table taking tens of milliseconds. Though I guess that if the alternative is google sheets that's not really a concern.
Most are lucky to get a few sign ups.
You can fire up a burstable postgres for about $20/mo
> Cloud SQL costs gazillions,
WTF is "Cloud SQL"?
I have a postgresql server running on a $5/m VPS that I add DBs to as and when I explore some new idea.
Google have you covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl8ig2BtLAY
Don't do this guy, cloudsql costs a lot.
SQLite is enough for 98% of all of these use cases, and 100% of the ones this would appeal to