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Poor Man's Back End-as-a-Service (BaaS), Similar to Firebase/Supabase/Pocketbase

(github.com)
200 points dcu | 1 comments | 03 Jul 25 15:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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CharlesW ◴[03 Jul 25 17:03 UTC] No.44457094[source]▶
Pocketbase is already the poor man's BaaS, and is minimalist compared to the two others mentioned.

> Data stored in human-readable CSVs

The choice to not use a database when two near-perfect tiny candidates exist, and furthermore to choose the notorious CSV format for storing data, is absolutely mystifying. One can use their Wasm builds if platform-specific binaries offend.

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loeber ◴[03 Jul 25 17:58 UTC] No.44457602[source]▶
In 2025, pretending that a CSV can be a reasonable alternative to a database because it is "smaller" is just wild. Totally unconscionable.
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r0fl ◴[03 Jul 25 18:56 UTC] No.44458129[source]▶
I use CSV files to run multiple sites with 40,000+ pages each. Close to 1mil pages total

Super fast

Can’t hack me because those CSV files are stored elsewhere and only pulled on build

Free, ultra fast, no latency. Every alternative I’ve tried is slower and eventually costs money.

CSV files stored on GitHub/vercel/netlify/cloudflare pages can scale to millions of rows for free if divided properly

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1. tansan ◴[04 Jul 25 13:06 UTC] No.44464188[source]▶
The way you write this makes it sound like your websites are pulling from the CSV per request. However, you're building static websites and uploading it to a CDN. I don't think SQL is needed here and CSV makes life way easier, but you can swap your CSV with any other storage device in this strategy and it would work the same.