
Show HN: Deta – A cloud platform for building and deploying apps - abdelhai
https://www.deta.sh/
======
abdelhai
Hello HN, co-creator here!

With Deta we are exploring ways to make the cloud less of a monster.

As a dev who worked in sales and marketing, I always had ideas for small web
tools to improve my own and my team's workflow — but I always faced hurdles,
like setting up a server, configuring an http proxy and implementing auth.

With Deta, we are trying to take away these repetitive tasks and allow you to
simply build your web app, not the environment it runs on.

We would love any feedback / questions / comments you may have!

~~~
savrajsingh
AppEngine and Firebase tackle the same frustrations. They both worked out
pretty well. Have you used firebase? You should at least try it out and
explain where it falls short.

~~~
corentin88
Firebase is great, but there’s plenty of space for yet another simple cloud
solution.

Providing a decent SQL database would be a good feature compared to Firebase.
And tons of little things that avoid reinventing the wheel everytime I have a
new idea

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memexy
This sounds cool but one bit of feedback in terms of prioritization

> DetAI (pretty soon) – No-code neural nets to auto-fix bugs before they
> happen.

I (and I suspect others as well) don't really need no-code auto-fixes for
code. What I want is simple workflows for training WYSIWYG AI models. I'm not
interested in writing python to express the model's computation graph. All I
want are some blocks that I can glue together into a tensor graph and then
deploy it for training and inference.

~~~
axlee
> All I want are some blocks that I can glue together into a tensor graph and
> then deploy it for training and inference.

Something like that?
[https://peltarion.com/platform](https://peltarion.com/platform)

(no relation)

~~~
inetsee
I looked at the website and I couldn't find a pricing page anywhere. I tried
looking for a site map to see if that would lead to a pricing page, but
there's no site map page either.

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umut
I think you might be underestimating the fact that your marketing copy is a
good proxy for your product commitment in the long run. I am having
difficulties adding you to the short list of "platforms to be considered when
starting out a new project" mainly for this reason alone..

Best of luck though, i just wanted to give honest feedback

~~~
abdelhai
Thanks :)

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king_magic
This sounds like one of those platforms that's neat in concept, but will fall
apart fast for complex requirements.

~~~
lowmemcpu
Ya, after reading the page I would think the developers agree. They even wrote
"Deta is building a cloud for the developers with less build bells and
whistles". Sounds like a simpler version of Heroku? But why not use Heroku?

They also make it sound like the problem they're solving is that YAML is
hard... but it's really not

~~~
abdelhai
We do more than Heroku in some cases. Our plans is to offer more convenient
abstractions for _developers_, where they can just ship code and we do the
rest (imagine netlify but for the backend).

YAML/K8S/AWS make sense for complex backends, not for our target use cases
(small tools and utils).

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mxschumacher
Calling something both production grade and beta at the same time seems like a
contradiction to me

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jedberg
The pricing page is hilarious:

Explorer: $0

Adventurer: $5

Enterprise: MONEY

~~~
Flavyo
It was funny when I read it but not sure if it is completely appropriate for
attracting Enterprise customers.

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yewenjie
Hi, thanks for posting this. I have two simple lightweight use cases and I
would like to know if those fit to this platform or not.

1\. A simple Python script with two-three dependencies that needs to be run
everyday once. Basically I am looking for a crontab in the cloud.

2\. A very lightweight script that needs to be run 24/7 and would not consume
more than few MBs of RAM ever.

None of these two needs an HTTP endpoint.

~~~
abdelhai
> 1\. A simple Python script with two-three dependencies that needs to be run
> everyday once. Basically I am looking for a crontab in the cloud.

This is possible and a target use-case. We offer cron and you could get rid of
the API endpoint.

> 2\. A very lightweight script that needs to be run 24/7 and would not
> consume more than few MBs of RAM ever.

We do not offer long running jobs atm.

Ping me mustafa@deta.sh and happy to onboard you.

~~~
yewenjie
I can't find how to setup cron at your site. Can you please point that out to
me?

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moralestapia
You are currently sending the shadiest verification email I ever encountered.

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searchableguy
Now I am curious how _shady_ it is.

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abdelhai
The sender is no-reply@verificationemail.com (managed by AWS). We are working
with them to have an @deta.sh.

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elcomet
Are you planning to add a SQL database? I don't want nosql

~~~
abdelhai
SQL is not planned yet but we would like to offer it at some point.

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yellowapple
I take it SQLite ain't already bundled with Python, then? Seems like that'd be
an easy win (and SQLite's almost certainly "good enough" for Deta's target
audience).

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tosh
can you tell a bit more how deta compares to similar (?) services like
firebase, netlify, vercel?

(don’t worry if there isn’t a great “usp” answer, just interested in learning
more)

I’m personally quite excited about getting the journey from idea to something
to tinker (and shareable) back down to how I remember it from a few years ago
where I just live-edited files on a server. I tend to over-analyze all the
various tech stack and deployment aspects too early :(

For hackathons I’m currently also using repl.it and glitch to get immediate
results.

edit: kudos to getting this shipped/launching, can relate to how difficult it
is to get an initial version out!

~~~
mxek
Hi — another co-creator here, thanks for the feedback.

With respect to your first question, I believe abdelhai answered it in another
thread above.

We totally empathize with the experience of getting something to tinker and
share rapidly up and running.

We actually started out our journey with our own cloud editor. It was
essentially a worse repl.it or glitch but with a built in database and files.
What we learned from our own talks with devs is that many of them really love
their local development workflow and their own text editors. We decided or
original approach was the wrong one for us but still want to provide the
instant experience and rapid feedback that Glitch and repl.it do so well.

A couple USPs that might not be apparent in our marketing materials:

If you type 'deta watch' from the CLI, your locally saved changes will deploy
in real time to your Micro(server). All you need to do is hit 'refresh' in the
browser or make a new HTTP request.

We provide a real time 'Visor' which caches and logs incoming requests and
responses. These can be replayed from within Deta against your latest code.
Users have found this very useful for developing things like webhooks.

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dgellow
$0, $5 for the first two tiers? That sounds way too cheap.

~~~
dubcanada
For $5 you can get an entire VPS from DO. You can also get similar services
from Firebase for less. How is $5 for a service that offers a very very basic
NoSQL API and simple Auth API cheap?

~~~
dgellow
You have to provision and maintain your VPS. As far as I can tell, Deta isn't
in the same line of business, they provide a managed infrastructure.

For sure you can already find cheap ways to host your systems. I still think
that if you're a small team that want to compete in this domain you shouldn't
try to compete on price, they are doom to fail if they go in that direction
against already established businesses.

As someone who seem to match their target audience, I can say that $5/month is
too cheap for me, that doesn't really inspire confidence. Of course that's
just my opinion.

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bilater
So you're a little bit of firebase a little bit of Herou? I guess
consolidating managed services can have value.

~~~
abdelhai
Yes + dev-friendly SDKs. That's what we believe.

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dang
We changed the URL from [https://www.deta.sh/billion-
ideas](https://www.deta.sh/billion-ideas) to the project home page, which is
more appropriate for Show HN.

We also changed the title from "Show HN: A Cloud for the Next Billion Ideas",
which is too baity for HN. I always advise startups (especially YC-funded
startups when they prepare their launches) to rigorously take out any sales
and marketing language from their text and titles. HN readers are averse to
it.

The basic rule is: Don't try to sell them, try to interest them. If you sell
them, they will close the tab. If you interest them, they will sell
themselves.

~~~
abdelhai
Apologies.

Honestly, we felt that our description (cloud platform) doesn’t match our USP,
and we thought that our phrasing conveys our message/ambition more succinctly.

~~~
dang
No worries. I'd be happy to change the title to something accurate and neutral
if you want to suggest better wording.

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photonios
Isn't this pretty much what Heroku does? Why would I choose Deta over Heroku?

~~~
abdelhai
We offer a higher abstracted cloud. With Deta, you do not VMs/container, you
just push code and it just works.

No need to load balance, etc. We also have a built-in fast NoSQL DB that works
without configuration.

And many other dev-oriented conveniences.

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vangelis
Very cool platform, but I can't actually sign up!

~~~
mxek
This was down for a bit but should be fixed now, sorry!

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moritonal
Why did you link to the ideas page?! There are 839 words on it and I have no
idea what your product is or does.

After looking at the docs[1] and front-page, you're a serverless
lambda/functions/zeit with all the normal limitations, but a pretty decent
tech-specs for the free and paid tier.

What makes you different? I really like the lack of vendor lock-in, but you
need some more killer features to stand out.

1\.
[https://docs.deta.sh/docs/micros/about](https://docs.deta.sh/docs/micros/about)

~~~
013a
Did you not make it to the bottom, which includes a very specific and useful
definition of the services they offer?

~~~
tonyhb
No, because it started explaining why computers are good and I didn't need a
recap.

