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.
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.
My infrastructure is 100% focused in scale so I think we can work together, we just need to share the costs.
Please send me a message here https://www.zerosheets.com/contact so I can get your contact.
super easy for prototyping and getting the job done, while google sheet as a backend is nice too but I need authentication etc etc