
Show HN: 8base – Ready-to-Rock GraphQL API and Serverless Back End - asantalo
https://www.8base.com
======
asantalo
Albert from 8base here: Between my last two companies, we raised over
100-million in VC capital that all got spent on hiring massive engineering and
sales teams. I always had this dream about starting up a company that could
grow exponentially with an agile team, relying on a self-service product that
was so awesome it sold itself. And, that it would simplify software
development for developers and businesses who relied on it. Now, after 2-years
of hard work and many lessons learned, I'm excited to share 8base with
everyone.

It's a ready-to-use serverless back-end that generates a GraphQL API based on
the developer's database schema. We've had developers building on 8base since
October 2018. We've made refinements galore since. We'd love nothing more than
honest feedback from the HN community!

~~~
gremlinsinc
I'm curious why pay for your product, when I could just use Hasura for free +
the instance it's running on?

Edit: I might use it if it had a freemium model not just trial. I often play
w/ new technologies, forget about em, come back try em again and stick w/ the
ones that stick in my mindshare, but a trial doesn't allow me that freedom --
at least for hobby projects.

~~~
andric
Second this.

A timed trial just feels weird. I like that Heroku, Netlify, Contentful, and
Firebase have a free tier, so I can use it for small demos and to learn the
platform. If I have to pay for _every single tutorial or playground project_ I
won‘t want to use the platform or even want to learn it.

It also kind of disincentivizes teachers on online platforms (like Udemy) to
teach it. Because you often need to go through a few examples in order to
learn something. i.e. if I do a node.js course, the course author isn’t just
going to make me build 1 practice app, I’m probably gonna build a few and then
host them on Heroku free dyno, the same way if I take a React course, I’m
gonna build a few practice apps and host them on Netlify.

~~~
asantalo
Andric, this is great feedback and we appreciate it. As you probably know,
pricing is a bit of an experiment as a company evolves so we are listening
100%.

~~~
gremlinsinc
Yeah that's basically my point when there's a new shiny framework or even a
headless cms or something, we (devs) like to test it out a bit, and we might
come back to it 5-10 times before actually pulling the trigger and using the
service.

Even all the major cloud platforms have free tiers for this reason - to get
devs hooked on their platform so there is no other option they'd rather use.

Not saying the free tier should be outrageous... maybe 100MB and 10k requests
per month or something small like that.

~~~
asantalo
Gremlinsinc, please email me at albert@8base.com as I'd like to chat with you
about this some more if you are up for it. Thank you.

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codebeast
Super stoked to see 8base out here. I love JAMstack and I love how 8base fills
up the data layer for my JAMstack projects nicely. You will know what I am
talking about if you have spent days trying to setup a GraphQL backend for
JAMstack project. I wrote about how I use 8base for JAMstack on CSS Tricks few
months ago [https://css-tricks.com/hey-lets-create-a-functional-
calendar...](https://css-tricks.com/hey-lets-create-a-functional-calendar-app-
with-the-jamstack).

I use 8base extensively and happy to see where it goes next and how developers
adopt it

~~~
dosh1965
Easily helps with API integration challenges thru the GraphQL layer. For
example, using a simple endpoint I can translate an image with a text overlay
(constructed using a Cloudinary API) from English to any language (I'm in
Spain at a conference now, so it's gotta be Spanish) like: Input:
[https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_500/l_text:Ar...](https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_500/l_text:Arial_80:Hello%20Sitges/flowers.jpg)
Output:
[https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_500/l_text:Ar...](https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/image/upload/w_500/l_text:Arial_80:Hola%20Sitges/flowers.jpg)

~~~
sgrove
Oh, sounds interesting! How're you hitting Cloudinary from 8base - do you have
an example?

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ffab00
Love the look of the website and the tools, it is worth a try!

I'm using AWS and AppSync (The service for GraphQL) directly and managing
infrastructure (other services) with AWS CDK.

I'm encouraging everyone to try AWS directly. The learning curve is a bit
steeper but there will be no lock-in to a single service.

Now more and more services are offering a way to run serverless apps: Netlify,
Zeit, 8base. It's nice and convenient, but knowing the source will let you
design apps with proper security considerations.

~~~
sebscholl
Makes sense.

The way I think of these things is always that the more tools you have in the
tool-chest, the more things you can build. It's NEVER wrong to learn more or
dive deeper. But just because you might know-how and be capable of building a
house by sawing down your own lumber and smithing your own nails, doesn't mean
you wouldn't want to order some parts pre-fab - or at least go to the hardware
store!

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patrickaljord
Anyone knows the difference between this and AWS Amplify/AppSync? Seems to be
doing the same thing. Amplify also offers offline development. Good job
otherwise.

[https://aws-amplify.github.io/](https://aws-amplify.github.io/)

~~~
samwight
Think the major difference is that there's much less vendor lockin with 8base.
8base is just a GraphQL endpoint, letting you use any library you want to
interact with it, while Amplify requires you to use their specific APIs with
their infrastructure. 8base also has a built-in roles and access management
system, and lets you do authentication with any OpenID connect service.

~~~
weego
Amplify is 'just' graphql too. That's a disingenuous argument. Ironic even
because 8base is all aws services bolted together.

~~~
sebscholl
having worked with both I think each lends itself better to different
projects. Amplify gives you the option to work both with REST or GraphQL,
however you then have to go through all the steps of setting up a CRUD api.
That part comes out of the box on 8base, with things like relational
filtering, pagination, etc.

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samwight
Really impressed with their product! They've been doing everything right for
an early stage startup. I love that they don't encourage vendor lockin while
making it just as productive to build stuff with them (they're just a GraphQL
API). Their pricing is also much clearer (and honestly much cheaper) than most
of the competition, especially something like AWS Amplify, which doesn't even
have a pricing page. Their documentation was a bit lacking when I last tried
to use it, but the docs are open source and they're working on heavily
improving them. Really like what they're doing, and can't wait to see where
they go next!

~~~
asantalo
Thanks samwight! What project(s) are you building on 8base right now?

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pighive
Your website looks really pretty on mobile and Desktop. How can I build
something like this? If you don’t mind me asking. Thanks.

~~~
sebscholl
I'd try logging in and creating a data-model for your project. All the GraphQL
operations will be generated from that so you can start using the workspace
API. Whatever application you're building than then connect through there.

[https://docs.8base.com](https://docs.8base.com)
[https://youtube.com/c/8base](https://youtube.com/c/8base)

~~~
ericmcer
How does a graphql API help with building a responsive web page?

To parent, you are gonna want to look at responsive web page information, most
css templates and frameworks will be responsive but it is fairly simple to do
from scratch now using stuff like flex box.

~~~
sebscholl
Lol. I totally misinterpreted your question. Answer: Webflow.

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johnnyballgame
I signed up because of this post. I'm rather surprised I hadn't heard of 8base
prior, it appears to be a killer product.

Best of luck to you guys!

As a side note... I'm working on some Gatsby projects and want to use 8base
for the backend. The few tutorials I've seen so far seem to be loading data
dynamically post-build versus creating static pages with data at build time.
Do you have any examples of this yet?

Also, do you have an official Gatsby source plugin or are people generally
using the generic "gatsby-source-graphql" plugin?

~~~
asantalo
johnnyballgame, thanks so much for chiming in. I'm thrilled to hear you are
using 8base with Gatsby. The team had a call with Jason Lengstorf recently to
figure out exactly how to support this! As of now, you'll need to stick with
the "gatsby-source-graphql" plugin. We'll work on some example content for
creating statis pages at build time asap!

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gavinray
I happened to met Oscar Perez, their COO at StartupGrind Miami a few night
ago.

Great guy and super cool product from a company that is passionate about
supporting the local developer and startup scene.

~~~
asantalo
Thanks gavinray!

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dakna
Congrats for shipping, looks great.

It's been a while since I looked into GraphQL backends, so I'd love to know
how it is different compared to Postgraphile, Hasura or Prisma.

~~~
asantalo
Thanks Dakna! I'd say that Prisma and Postgraphile both fall more into the
data access layer category where you'd use them instead of other ORMs (like
Sequelize). 8base and Hasura are more similar, though Hasura is focused on
layering over a person's Postgres database without providing any resolvers
while 8base is a fully-fledged backend-as-a-service. Like Parse for GraphQL in
2019.

~~~
BenjieGillam
PostGraphile is not an ORM, it’s a client-facing GraphQL API designed to be
consumed directly from your frontend applications (web apps, mobile apps,
etc). This is why it has such powerful customisation and extension features so
you can use it to build the GraphQL API you want.

~~~
asantalo
Benjie, I appreciate you chiming in here personally. Apologies if I
oversimplified as I am not all that familiar with your product. Aside from
looking at the nuances of the GraphQL engines of either product, the primary
difference is that 8base is hosted and ready-to-use and PostGraphile is for
someone who wants to build, deploy and manage a server application and is
using Postgres. Aside from that, there are likely lots of other differences.

~~~
BenjieGillam
No problem; I saw 8base at one of the GraphQL conferences, looks cool. I
agree: PostGraphile is intended for people who want to control their own
servers (be that via serverless, containers, Heroku, or traditional servers).

~~~
asantalo
Thanks Benjie, would love to connect with you at GraphQL Summit in San
Francisco if you are attending in October. Let me know!

~~~
BenjieGillam
I’m going to be speaking at ReactiveConf in Prague, so sadly cannot make it to
SF; hopefully see you at another conference though!

~~~
asantalo
Best of luck, Benjie. Yes, let's connect at the next one for sure!

------
darrenf
Note to OP: the right arrow link next to "Explore the docs", about 90% towards
the bottom of the homepage (just above "Ready to try 8base?" and the footer)
leads to [https://docs.8base.com/docs](https://docs.8base.com/docs) – which
404s

~~~
candresarev
Nice catch, should be fixed now. Thanks!

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iq22hi
It’s refreshing to see a team deliver a high-quality user experience on an
early version of their product. Day zero pixels and thread count separate the
winners from the losers, in my humble opinion. You guys have clearly sweated
the details from your website to the product. Well done 8base!

~~~
asantalo
WOW thank you. "Sweat" is a good word to describe how we got here, for sure.
We really appreciate when people notice.

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heymartinadams
I recently switched our startup to 8base due to its ease of use, user-friendly
UI, and minimal set-up. Their backend dashboard is amazing — our customer
support staff will have no issue looking up and modifying any data or creating
new data. Highly recommend 8base.

~~~
asantalo
Thanks, heymartinadams, really appreciate the comments. May I ask what you
were using or planning to use before you made the switch?

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lisasheeran
I was impressed with the 8Base GraphQL strategy since I met you at the GraphQL
conference, and am psyched to see how far it has come. I especially like how
accessible and affordable 8Base is for any developer. Clearly, 8Base listens
to developers.

~~~
asantalo
Thank you Lisa! Yes, you have a great vantage point, having met us about a
year ago. We have been heads-down!

~~~
lisasheeran
yes, and with years of experience watching so many startups go out too early
to tell their story fully and with all their ducks lined up.Good job

~~~
asantalo
Thanks Lisa. Patience is a virtue! I have never had a lot of it but with a
self-service product, We are competing against the entire Internet and none of
us have the time to fiddle with half baked products.

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ilyalazarev
Great job guys!!! UI is amazing, love it. Going to spend a few more days
learning 8base. Do you have some kind of public roadmap with features coming?

~~~
asantalo
Thanks for the kind words, Ilyalazarev. We don't publish a public roadmap but
here are a few teasers of what is coming in the next few months: 1) For our
advanced users we will be releasing the ability to create and manage views and
indexes on the data. The views are totally GraphQL enabled. 2) Brand new user
administration and user invitation capability. 3) Native Salesforce.com
integration - Ability to expose a company's Salesforce.com instance via
GraphQL and cross-connected with 8base data.

Lots more...

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yodon
The docs link is returning error 404 - any chance this has a user management
system built in? The tight integration of cognito, GraphQL, and database is
something AWS really got right. I'd much rather use 8base than Amplify but I
can't tell if you're going to make me first roll my own user management system
(hint: making me roll my own user management system is a major incentive for
me to look elsewhere)

~~~
samwight
It does actually, honestly one of the better ones out there. It's super easy
to set up roles and set what fields that they can and can't access.

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iq22hi
This is amazing what you guys have done. 8base should be YC winners. My group
would like more information regarding investment opportunity. Who can we
reach?

~~~
asantalo
Thank you! Please email me at ceo@8base.com and we can chat offline.

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sebscholl
This is awesome! I'm stoked to see the GraphQL community getting this polished
of a tool. Chris Coyier wrote on css-tricks the other day about the best
GraphQL API being one you write yourself, which is super true as the ones
offered by headless CMSs and the like aren't ever customizable enough. I can't
imagine a spec though that can be met between what 8base is generating +
custom resolvers.

Congrats 8base!

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alacret
I think that serverless tech will continue to take over bigger and bigger
companies, not only is feasible for startups, but companies and products like
8base are pushing this forward!

~~~
asantalo
Thanks, alacret. To us it only makes sense that serverless, which provides a
better capacity/utilization model, will be the future. The technology is still
evolving and a big part of 8base is how we simplify the provisioning of
Serverless.

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evanweaver
Go go 8base team! I met them at GraphQL Berlin and was really impressed by
their product. Fills an important hole in the JAMstack ecosystem.

~~~
asantalo
Thanks Evan. Great to hear from you and appreciate the kind words! We need to
talk at some point about integrating Fauna into 8base.

~~~
evanweaver
Yes we do! :-)

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mister_hn
Will you publish also a self-hosted variant?

~~~
asantalo
mister_hn, We are really focused on being a production-ready hosted solution
but who knows what the future holds. Keeping options open and eager to hear
what you and other users think about that.

~~~
mister_hn
I would say that distributing the product also as self-hosted, on-premise
option for privacy-focused and strictly certified environments (CC EAL) could
be really great.

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21stio
Cool stuff. How does it compare to Prisma?

~~~
evgeny_s
Prisma is just Data Access Layer (you would use it instead of other ORMs like
Sequelize or Mongoose to work with database directly) while 8base gives you
production ready API right away with roles/permissions/authentication, with
possibility to extend you API with custom functions with much more

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fverzino
It looks amazing what you have done is a short period of time.
Congratulations!!

~~~
asantalo
Thanks for your kind words. Much appreciated!

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abcxtal4
Great tool indeed! Greetings from Portugal. Congratulations 8Base

~~~
asantalo
Thanks so much!

