
Show HN: Polybit – Build, Deploy, Host Node.js APIs - keithwhor
https://polybit.com/
======
joshdickson
Node JS developer here.

The idea of the project is great. It can be difficult to get folks up to speed
on various Node JS topics, and one of the big ones (like with any code
deployed on a web framework, really) is getting people up to speed on
deployment. Anything that is working on making that easier, especially for
new/young developers, is great.

That being said, I _really_ do not like the pricing strategy because I think
it completely incentivizes bad behavior and optimizing your API/apps for weird
things at anything past micro-project scale. Things like when database queries
happen are also not entirely opaque to developers, especially new developers,
which is going to lead to them not understanding charges (for instance, would
a new developer understand that on a fairly basic installation of Passport and
Express, _every_ page request, logged in or not, would result in DB activity
as Passport tries to figure out if the session is logged in or not? That's
likely to far overshadow the single API credit needed for the API hit.) I
think that Heroku's free tier would be much more attractive for small
projects, and for anyone more advanced than that, a $5 Digital Ocean droplet
is simple enough to learn very basic server administration and quickly deploy
your application. There are a number of other Node platforms (Modulus) who
will give you good service for < $15/month.

I think it would make a lot more sense to structure this more like EC2's
burstable instances, which accrue CPU credits for times when they do not run
at their allotted CPU, and then can expend those credits to burst above that
CPU for smaller amounts of time. That achieves a lot of the good things you're
working on, but doesn't push people toward minimizing trips to and from the DB
or instance.

~~~
keithwhor
Thanks for the insight. :) I don't disagree. Database queries don't use
credits right now. We're going to be playing around with what makes the most
sense for our customers. Expect things to change as we grow!

------
ThatMightBePaul
Congrats Keith :D

I've met Keith a few weeks ago at the NodeJS NYC meetup. Great dude, who
genuinely wants to make development better. Polybit seems particularly cool
for front-end / designers, mobile devs, and anyone else who'd rather build an
app than fret over the high availability, scalability, or etc.

What I'm saying is: cool idea + Keith's very approachable if ya wanna pick his
brain about the design :)

Hope this goes well for ya dude!

~~~
petercooper
I want to second this. There is no doubting Keith's enthusiasm and attitude
for both development and helping end users. If you have any questions or
issues to raise, I'm pretty sure Keith will do his best :-)

~~~
keithwhor
I'm flattered! Thank you so much.

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mmanfrin
Looks very similar to Zeit:

[https://zeit.co/](https://zeit.co/)

~~~
crisopolis
Zeit (now) doesn't have database related stuff... then again why have your
database mismanaged by a non-DBA PaaS?

------
mxuribe
The premise of this is a great idea. The sign up is pretty neat - def. suited
to expected audience/users. However, no pricing info? I'll come back once
pricing is displayed.

~~~
saganus
I didn't found the pricing info either until I played around in the terminal,
which gives us this:

$ pricing

Polybit offers pay-as-you-go services.

Action | Cost

\---------------------|---------------------------

API Request | 1 Credit

Database Query | 1 Credit - FREE in Beta

Project Deployment | 10 Credits - FREE in Beta

Create New Project | 50 Credits

Create New Database | 50 Credits

Package | Credits | Price

\---------|-----------------|---------------------------------

    
    
             | 1,000 (x2)      | FREE - Received on Registration 
    
     1       | 10,000 (x2)     | $9              
                    
     2       | 100,000 (x2)    | $49          
                       
     3       | 1,000,000 (x2)  | $249       
                         
     4       | 10,000,000 (x2) | $999
    

Limited time - purchase now with `purchase <package>` while we're in beta,
receive 2x the credit

Edit: Well...formatting sucks since I just copy-pasted. But it's somewhat
readable I hope

~~~
ebbv
I realize this style of pricing is the new hotness and I get why it's
appealing for the company providing the service, but as a developer this is
really unappealing to me. The last thing I want to do is have to worry about
how many API requests my application is making because it costs money.

For example; if I want to render a complicated page out and the API design
will be better if that's done with 10 API requests then I want to make it with
10 API requests. I don't want to have to feel like I need to make some kludgy
nasty single request in order to reduce my costs by an order of magnitude.

Similar with queries; I'd rather use multiple simple queries than craft some
nasty monstrosity query that gets all the data I need at once.

Am I just crazy?

Full disclaimer: I work for a more traditional web host. But these views are
totally unrelated to that (I think), it's just based on my personal
thoughts/take on this pricing structure.

PS - I really dig the design of the site and think this is really cool and
everything. Just the pricing structure seems like a friction point for me
personally.

~~~
puddintane
No your not crazy at all!

Sometimes it is better to do many smaller requests versus one bigger request,
and it would be nice to see a pricing structure based on bandwidth at least.

~~~
keithwhor
Pricing is going to be something we continue to iterate on. Always appreciate
feedback!

------
jamesjyu
Keith is awesome. I've met him a few times to chat about Polybit and he is
seriously dedicated to making a great developer product and solving the pain
of standing up a backend API.

~~~
keithwhor
Thanks :). The truth to anybody reading is that James is the awesome one.
Since I first met him early this year to talk about his experience at Parse,
he's been one of the most supportive people I've met in Silicon Valley to
date.

If I can give a piece of advice to other early founders: it's tough, it never
seems to magically get easy, but there are truly awesome people out there
willing to help. Still a long road ahead, but I'm very, very grateful to
everybody who has helped make Polybit a reality so far (mentors, advisors, and
especially the developer community).

------
webXL
Pretty cool stuff. I got stuck a bit in the registration though. I always use
a password manager and paste in my passwords. It's telling me it doesn't like
my 16 character password because it needs to be 5 or more, and when I paste
it, it's in cleartext.

~~~
keithwhor
Ah! Yeah, copy and paste issue. Don't have a handler for that for the console.
Will fix it as soon as I can. Thank you for catching that!

------
joshstrange
This looks really interesting but I personally really dislike the pricing,
maybe others will love it but to me it's nearly impossible to guess how much
this will cost me. When I start a new project I have no clue how many requests
or queries will be made. I get the advantage of not working about
infrastructure but I'd rather pay a flat fee and then be able to scale up to
handle more requests.

~~~
keithwhor
Great to have this feedback! Nothing's set in stone yet. This is what we're
launching with but I'm sure there's a good chance we'll have something more
palatable for you down the line, if you're interested! :)

------
unchaotic
Intrigued by the whois information :)

Creation Date: 20-dec-1999

Expiration Date: 20-dec-2025

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asimuvPR
Bug report:

REPL on [https://polybit.com/](https://polybit.com/) fails to display fonts.
See [1] for a screenshot.

Firefox 47.0 on OSX.

[1][http://i.imgur.com/ty8PZT9.png](http://i.imgur.com/ty8PZT9.png)

The console logs the keydown events per pconsole.js line number 308. I see the
keys I pressed but nothing shows up.

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "h", charCode: 0, keyCode: 72 }
pconsole.js:308:5

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "e", charCode: 0, keyCode: 69 }
pconsole.js:308:5

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "l", charCode: 0, keyCode: 76 }
pconsole.js:308:5

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "l", charCode: 0, keyCode: 76 }
pconsole.js:308:5

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "o", charCode: 0, keyCode: 79 }
pconsole.js:308:5

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: " ", charCode: 0, keyCode: 32 }
pconsole.js:308:5

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "w", charCode: 0, keyCode: 87 }
pconsole.js:308:5

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "o", charCode: 0, keyCode: 79 }
pconsole.js:308:5

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "r", charCode: 0, keyCode: 82 }
pconsole.js:308:5

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "l", charCode: 0, keyCode: 76 }
pconsole.js:308:5

keydown { target: <textarea>, key: "d", charCode: 0, keyCode: 68 }
pconsole.js:308:5

:)

~~~
keithwhor
Should work now. Just pushed a hotfix. Thanks for the catch! (You and
everybody else.)

~~~
asimuvPR
Happy to help. :)

------
Roodgorf
I'm confused on my credit balance after signing up. The pricing printout shows
a 1,000(x2) for the registration tier, and below the table seems to indicate
that these (x2) markers represent the double credit offer for beta users.

However, the account I just registered shows a balance of only 1,000 credits.
Is the credit bonus only applied to credits which were paid for? If so the
(x2) in the first row is a bit misleading.

That being said, I'm excited to check out this service and don't mean to
complain about getting something for free.

~~~
keithwhor
My bad. Misprint. Happy to honor it though, and give you an extra 1,000
credits. This goes to anybody on HN - E-mail me (keith at polybit) with the
e-mail you used to sign up and I'll add the credits by the end of the day!

~~~
Roodgorf
Oh, no need, I figured it was a misprint and just wanted to make sure you
didn't get any unexpected complaints about it. Thank you for being so cool
about it though!

------
franciscop
Totally broken for me (after writing "Register"):
[http://imgur.com/a/cYtZz](http://imgur.com/a/cYtZz)

Browser: Firefox 47 (default browser)

Extensions: AdBlockPlus, LastPass

OS: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

~~~
keithwhor
Yeah, some other users are reporting issues with Firefox. Putting out some
other fires at the moment. Hang tight! Thanks so much for your patience and
for trying it out (and reporting the errors)!

------
vittore
What would be alternative deployment approach for nodal apps? It is still just
node.js app so I should be able to deploy it to phusion passanger or dokku,
right?

------
mgrennan
Very COOL! As a DBA, as fare as I'm concerned this is how databases should be
used. NO! application should contain SQL. SQL should ONLY be in an API.

~~~
crisopolis
What does being a DBA, Databases and SQL have to do with this Platform as a
Service?

~~~
michaelbuckbee
I think parent was trying to express approval for Polybit's "API First"
philosophy - which would result in a situation where Apps call APIs which call
Databases.

Their experience as a DBA being what led them to this conclusion.

------
udkl
I'm reminded in some sense of RoR/CakePHP with scaffolding.

What are some other tools that provide similar functionality ?

------
johns
Love the idea. I think you really need an about page though. People need to
know why they can't trust you.

~~~
frank_jaeger
>People need to know why they can't trust you.

Why can't people trust him? Seems like a good guy to me.

------
CLei
Awesome website design, the fact I register using command linea is extremelly
cool. Nice touch

------
dazhbog
I am surprised Nodal still uses 90% of Nordic Semiconductor's logo :/

Love the website design!

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throwawayReply
I'm on Windows/Firefox the console only echoes back missing characters.

~~~
keithwhor
Apologies! I'll look into this ASAP. Don't spend enough time bug testing on
Windows these days. :)

~~~
diggan
I'm on OSX/Firefox and I see the same. Maybe Firefox is the missing platform
you need to test ;)

~~~
keithwhor
... probably that. ;) I was up 'til 5AM preparing for a launch, knew I'd miss
something.

------
stockkid
feedback: the console in the home page doesn't seem to do anything. (Chrome
Android)

------
kimmshibal
Do you have bug bounty? :)

~~~
keithwhor
Polybit Credits perhaps. Mind emailing me with your find?

