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.
replies(4):
At a company I worked for, we needed to develop an MVP (basically a web page) and apply certain business logic to a Google Drive spreadsheet that was frequently updated by the Sales team.
In this case, we had two options:
Develop a backend to replace the current spreadsheet and have the sales team use it as a new "backoffice" - This would take a very long time, and if the hypothesis we were testing was wrong, it would be time wasted.
Create the web page and use Google's SDK to extract data from the spreadsheet.
We chose to go with the second option because it was quicker. Indeed, it was much faster than creating a new backoffice. But not as quick as we imagined. Integrating with Google's SDK requires some effort, especially to handle the OAuth logic, configure it in the console, and understand the documentation (which is quite shallow, by the way).
Anyway! We did the project and I realized that maybe other devs might have encountered similar issues. Therefore, I developed a tool that transforms Google spreadsheets into "realtime APIs" with PATCH, GET, POST, and DELETE methods.
Since it's a product for devs, I think it would be cool to hear your opinions. It's still quite primitive, but the basic features already work.
I thought it was pretty restrictive, no more than 60 writes per minute, but I'm not sure about the reads restrictions.
My Google API rate limit is way bigger then 60/minute.
Not that hard. Like 10 lines of code to get a decentish cache going.
This manifested as an issue when doing a deploy but being unable to get critical data. We added retries and stuff like that but it seemed not great to run a business of something that isn’t designed for this purpose.
They're internal tools, but big ones. And I'm surprised too. You won't hit too much resistance doing things the well-supported ways, but for some reason there's no well-supported way to run a cache.
Another problem I had is an API change one year in.
I would not use Google Sheets again. Maybe I’d try Airtable, Notion, or some other similar platform where the API access is more of a priority to the company.
I'm convinced most of the people in this thread haven't tried working much with Google Sheets API at scale. Most of the time it's fine, then it will have days where 30-40% of the calls (as measured by Google Cloud console API monitoring) will throw an internal error which Google advises the option for is to "try again later". Also API calls that take up to 4 minutes (?!) to return (again as measured by their own API monitoring tools in Cloud console).
It's too bad because I otherwise really like this approach.