Show HN: Sheet Ninja – Google Sheets as a CRUD Back End for Vibe Coders

abdusco

The animations in the page keeps interrupting me and scrolling me up after I scroll past them.

sxa001

Hi all - a friend and I have been dabbling in the entrepreneur space for years, but we never really pulled the trigger because of our corporate jobs. We suffer from the same thing that plagues a lot of engineers: we know how to build products, but we are weak at distribution and marketing. We feel that being able to build is becoming table stakes and the ability to actually get a product into people's hands is more important than ever. We built SheetNinja ( https://sheetninja.io ) to force ourselves to learn that side of the business from the ground up. We chose a validated market (sheets-to-api) so we could focus on the "how to find users" problem rather than wondering if the category was useful. It also fits our current "vibe coding" workflow i.e. when we use LLMs or Replit to spin up an idea, a Google Sheet is often the fastest way to handle CRUD without the friction of setting up a traditional database. We are looking for feedback on the tool itself and the landing page. We have a lot of visitors but a lower sign-up rate atm. Thanks, in advance! https://sheetninja.io

Imustaskforhelp

Good project but I wish something like this can exist for proton mail, I have made some puppeteer scripts which can hook up to proton docs. But Proton is really doing some great disservice to not having a public api for their docs. I can imagine it being used for anonymous comments page for webpages etc. I am not sure if there is something that you can do about it though given that the fundamental issue of this is caused by proton not having an api whereas I think google docs does have API. It's more a message to proton if anything.

PullJosh

Looks great! I’ve definitely wanted this exact thing before. I will consider reaching for this next time I need to throw together a quick app.

mememememememo

Oh man fix the site. If I scroll down it auto scrolls up after 2 seconds. And other bugs.

tyleo

This site is pretty broken. The project seems cool but I’d recommend a more static landing page. I bounced very quickly. Didn’t even make it to the bottom with all the distracting animations.

snoopen

I'm not sure I see why this needs to be a paid service. Unless I understand incorrectly, you can get the same result for free, self contained, with freely available code like this: https://gist.github.com/richardblondet/ce87a397ef669d4d25dd2...

robotswantdata

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.

rsafaya

Really good project for a quick data back end. One feature suggestion: webhook support for row changes: If my Sheet updates (say, a new waitlist signup), I'd want to trigger for e.g. a Slack notification. Supabase has something similar with their database webhooks. I use that extensively for kicking off signup workflows.

smrtinsert

Do vibe coders need an api for an api? Sounds like something solvable with a skill

igor_mart

Just impossible to read the landing page on mobile due to endless carousel sliding which constantly returns you to the top of the page

odest

I really like the idea of using Google Sheets for quick prototyping and maybe "vibe coding" without the friction of setting up a traditional DB. I haven’t noticed a scrolling issues, btw

lpcvoid

The world needs less vibe coded slop, not more

evanbabaallos

Is this meant to replace databases?

_joel

"Ship now, pay later" you're not wrong.

curbits

I have done this for my own projects for years it’s great for projects that are only for me and gives me a very good db editor also. Cool project though the only risk I see is that if the target audience are vibe coders they will you known just vibe code an integration

pduggishetti

SQLite, SQLite + drizzle with WAL mode, push it to a VPS, do not waste your time on anything else :) Thank me when things become super easy! When things scale, SQLite will still be fine, will fit 99% of the vibe coders needs! When they don't then migrate to what ever!

Raed667

I put Google Sheets as a backend (in production) when i wanted a select non technical people to be able to see and modify the data without the cost of building a backend. I really wish auth was easier to setup for services though, i see no reason google can't provide this out of the box

_pdp_

If this site does not run on top of a google sheet then don't believe it.