

Show HN: My first tiny web service, a simple key/value store - donutdan4114
https://tinycache.io

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paulasmuth
I am not sure I understand the pricing and/or the service. What are your
guarantees about dropping or not dropping keys? Obviously you can't sell
unlimited memcache space for 20$/mo and you must protect against customers
exhausting all your available resources.

So since it's quite obvious that there must be some limit and/or expiration
policy I think you should really just spell it out on the page.

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donutdan4114
We never drop keys unless the expire time is set. As long as someone isn't
abusing the service by flooding it with random data, it will scale for them.

~~~
paulasmuth
How do you determine if I am flooding your service with random data?

My understanding is that one of your main ideas is to encrypt the data so I am
honestly wondering where you would even start to check if a user was randomly
flooding you or legitimately storing lots of keys.

Not trying to pick nits here... My original point was that -- in my opinion --
it comes across slightly dishonest if you insist that there is no limit even
when it's obvious there must be one. (I mean seriously, how many machines is
this running on right now? Even if it's running on amazon/google you can only
scale my backend up so much with 20$/mo)

~~~
donutdan4114
Thanks for the feedback, I updated the pricing message to be clearly max-keys
of 100,000 for gold plan. All feedback appreciated.

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mzjs
It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure there are very many potential use
cases. Mostly, I can see using this client-side so that I don't need to set up
a back end myself, but if I understand correctly, that's not really possible
since you have to keep the API key private.

~~~
mrspeaker
Yeah, I remember there was a service like this around 2009 (that, like this, I
thought was pretty nifty... I wish I could remember the name) - but it was
anonymous and you didn't need auth: you could write to a url and have the hash
of it as the "read" endpoint... I used that for a lot of quick mock-ups and
things.

~~~
ffk
You're probably thinking about openkeyval.org which is now defunct.

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bikamonki
I've used parse.com free account, created a class named 'cache' with columns
'key' & 'value'. The free plan's capacity is like 100k bigger than your
highest paid plan. Sorry, I do not see the advantage of your service.

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orf
>> curl
[https://tinycache.io/api/v1/YOUR_API_KEY/mysecretkey?decrypt...](https://tinycache.io/api/v1/YOUR_API_KEY/mysecretkey?decrypt=supersecretkey)

Passing the key as a GET parameter is not super-secret, I would avoid doing
that if possible.

~~~
donutdan4114
Technically it is secure over HTTPS. Is there a specific concern you have?

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johnrob
URLs have a tendency to end up in logs. Unless you are careful in your
implementation (including what you inherit with your 'stack'), you may end up
inadvertently persisting keys.

EDIT (btw, I love the concept of your product)

~~~
donutdan4114
Thanks for the feedback!

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jkestner
I like the idea of the pixel font, but find one that doesn't make the N look
ugly. Silkscreen's usually a safe choice.

And I'd make the dev account more than 100 hits/day. I could easily go through
that while actually coding, fixing bugs, repeat.

Since the use case is about quick, lightweight projects, I'd make creating an
account optional until you need it. I'd want this to be as frictionless as
possible, so that if I'm in the throes of coding and want the simplest
possible key value store, I can just type in a URL like
[https://tinycache.io/api/myemail@address.com/CACHE_KEY](https://tinycache.io/api/myemail@address.com/CACHE_KEY)
and know it'll work without having to break out of my editor.

~~~
donutdan4114
Thanks for the feedback. In regards to the "font", that was actually done in
photoshop. It's meant to look a bit pixelated and "off". But I'll probably
tweak it to clean it up.

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rubyn00bie
I'd really caution against your pricing structure. Unlimited access to a
million keys is no joke, I've run some rather large memcached servers and none
of them were $20/month.

You should pricing should always reflect the true cost + your desired profit
margin. I'd probably be charging hardware usage + 15% before even factoring in
the value of the service itself.

Right now I'd say you're vastly too cheap; don't think about the costs solely
as your servers but what's the value you've added to memcached/caching? Surely
that's more than what you're charging?

Tldr; Keep the small plans cheap but make the big plans waaay more expensive.
Those using the biggest plans are finding the most value.

~~~
beachstartup
well, if you consider that they're probably just deploying on $5 and $10
digitalocean droplets, the 'unlimited' nature of the requests just means 'as
much as your instance can handle', and there's a built-in profit margin.

~~~
donutdan4114
Currently the service is in rackspace, and it's not cheap hosting. But yes,
"unlimited" means as fast as the service can handle among all the other
requests that are incoming too.

~~~
donutdan4114
This service isn't designed to compete with something that has dedicated VMs
and that kind of thing. It's vastly cheaper than most other data stores for
this reason. Granted, it will scale for very heavy use. Right now, it's
essentially launch day, so how much people use it will determine how I
optimize it.

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NicoJuicy
Who would pay for this ? I truelly wouldn't know

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vbezhenar
parse.com is essentially the same thing and it seems that it's popular enough.
Of course it has a lot of polish and additional services on top of KV store
but it's core value is key-value store with REST API.

~~~
donutdan4114
Yes, similar idea. Mostly focused on personal applications, and small apps.
Will probably add additional features in the future for doing more advanced
queries, message queues, etc.

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donutdan4114
Hey everyone, all feedback is appreciated. The main point of the service is
speed, and ease-of-implementation. It's very easy to setup an account, and the
API is very simple.

Always curious what fellow HNer's opinions are.

~~~
idank
Congratulations on releasing something out there. I think above all, you will
walk away with some gained wisdom in various areas of web services that'll
make your next project even better.

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FriedPickles
Awesome I (a human) love it. Trying to sign up but I'm having this problem:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/yd91j84bmrg4w0w/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/yd91j84bmrg4w0w/Screenshot%202015-05-24%2014.49.33.jpg?dl=0)

~~~
donutdan4114
Hmm, not sure what's going on with that. Try again, I changed the captcha
type.

~~~
FriedPickles
Worked now, thanks! By the way, with this many haters you know you must be
onto something good...

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donutdan4114
For personal use, this page explains how to setup a local script to work with
the API. Makes it super easy to access whatever data you want across different
computers.

[https://tinycache.io/documentation/examples](https://tinycache.io/documentation/examples)

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rtz12
I'm having a hard time figuring out what this service could be used for.

~~~
donutdan4114
Mostly for small scripts and apps that could store data without having to
setup your own back-end.

~~~
buckbova
I'd probably go with firebase for a simple app or proof of concept. It even
includes authentication.

[https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html](https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html)

~~~
donutdan4114
My problem with a service like that is that once you jump out of the free
plan, their prices jump way up. tinycache is a small service for small
applications with small pricing.

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Mahn
Key/value databases are simple enough to setup and run, even for small
projects. I can't see myself paying for a service like this.

~~~
donutdan4114
Indeed. Although setting up a central data server with an API takes a bit more
work. However, if you're willing to do the work and set all of that up
yourself, than yes, the service isn't for you. I see it more as a simple way
for someone to integrate their script or app without having to do a lot of the
cloud-setup.

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navd
I actually like this, and am happy that you were able to release something...
Most people don't!

