
Show HN: Toga – Create apps from Google Sheets - davyson
https://toga.tech
======
davyson
Sam, one of the creators here. Spreadsheets are still the most flexible
software creation tool in existence. Excel and now Google Sheets allow
millions of non developers to produce software within their workbooks. However
while spreadsheets are great experiences for authoring tools, they aren't so
easy for your users.

Toga allows you to create apps from your Google Sheets so you can provide an
easy interface for your team (or even your customers and partners) to access,
edit and create data. Permissions are integrated to you can limit by the
sheet, column and row.

I'd love to hear what you think!

~~~
cpursley
I'm really hoping one of these types of app builders backed by spreadsheets
takes off. Not only will it empower non-devs, it will give devs the ability to
prototype and iterate faster. Toga looks especially well thought out.

Are there plans/a path in the future where users can move off of spreadsheets
to a relational database when the need arises?

~~~
davyson
Yes absolutely, we're working on a way to let people graduate to a flexible
database.

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serjester
Am I missing something? I used to run a fairly large landscaping company with
a partner out of gSheets so I was excited when I saw this. But at the moment
this just seems like a wrapper that takes away most of the useful
functionality of a spreadsheet. I could see something like this being great if
it had integrations with payroll, accounting, etc software but it currently
seems far too basic to be usable.

~~~
denster
I'm biased [1], but agree with serjester -- the spreadsheet needs to be a part
of the application authoring process.

For data access, a tool like this needs to support:

\- lightweight: the spreadsheet itself

\- medium-weight: a built-in set of functions for storing/fetching data (from
a built-in, behind-the-scenes DB)

\- heavyweight: functions for accessing data in an existing corporate DB,
queue (Kafka, JMS, etc), and other sources in _real-time_

[1] Founder of [https://mintdata.com](https://mintdata.com), where we think
spreadsheets have a bright future in this space :)

~~~
fragmede
What definition of "real-time" are you using here? I presume you're not using
the RTOS[] definition, so I'm just curious what workload you would consider
"heavyweight" and what kind of real time guarantees that means the ideal
system would have.

[] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-
time_operating_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-
time_operating_system)

------
razin
Congrats on launching! Have you heard of Glide:
[https://www.glideapps.com/](https://www.glideapps.com/)? How are you thinking
of differentiating yourself from them and others?

~~~
davyson
Glide is really great at making utility mobile apps on Google Sheets. We see
Toga as being used more for your business system, so Toga works in desktop and
mobile and has the really fine grained permissions needed to make business
systems work.

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andor
How often does it actually happen that people wonder who deleted a column?
Google Sheets has a history and can undo changes.

~~~
paulgb
Deleting a column is an illustrative example, but from what I hear from a
heavy Sheets user is that it's pretty common on a shared document for people
to break _formulas_. This is harder to notice because formulas are hidden
behind selecting a cell, and harder to fix because you don't always know when
it was broken to fix from history.

~~~
fulafel
I'd imagine there's a wide practive of having sanity check indicators in
spreadsheets. I wonder if there is tooling support for this in current
products like gsheets?

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igammarays
This is great. This is basically Airtable, but a more dummy-proof interface. I
wish the landing page showed more screenshots of the admin interface, the
config steps I need to go through to generate a Toga app.

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ReD_CoDE
I've seen before AppSheet [1] acquired by Google, however, it seems that it
supports just mobile apps

Your solution looks interesting, especially if it has an easy to use interface
like bubble [2] to create the website and also mobile app

[1] [https://www.appsheet.com](https://www.appsheet.com) [2]
[https://bubble.io/](https://bubble.io/)

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unixhero
Hi

What is the pricing?

Without it I cannot suggest it to my deep pocketed enterprise clients, and I
cannot ever consider for my own bootstrapped, very very shallow pocketed,
projects.

~~~
denster
I had the same question, but noticed they have pricing at:

[https://stacker.app/pricing](https://stacker.app/pricing)

for a related project, from the same company. Perhaps pricing will be in a
similar ballpark?

At MintData [1], we get this asked a lot too, and honestly

\- how long the company has been in business \- the existing customer base
w/references \- the ability of the vendor to support enterprise customers &
their needs

tends to play a bigger role for making a go/no-go decision, in our experience.

[1] [https://mintdata.com](https://mintdata.com)

------
jayesh1981
If you are looking for more advanced apps for complex use cases as opposed to
simple single table/sheet data then Axonator.com is a great choice. It allows
you to collect more rich data like pictures with annotations, conditional
logic, custom backend business logic, drag and drop form builder. Data can go
directly into spreadsheets or any databases/APIs. Axonator is different
because it allows your to model complex relationships between data tables.
With its UI first approach, no knowledge of data modeling is required. It
spits out native high performance IOS and Android apps without the hassle of
coding. Enterprise are using this tool for quality inspections, surveys and
automatically generate PDF reports and display the collected data in the form
of insightful dashboards.

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germanjoey
Seems extremely similar to Appsheet... what's your differentiator here?

~~~
davyson
AppSheet apps almost exclusively target mobile users + often for external
parties. Toga has desktop and mobile experiences and is primarily designed for
internal teams.

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chadlavi
If this were very customizable, it would be a powerful way to hack together
MVPs or even richly-interactable prototypes for user testing

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stewbrew
So it's basically an alternative forms UI for Google Sheets? Something like
Google Forms but better?

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necovek
Considering the date and the love I have for all things spreadsheets, I was
hoping for a blank page :)

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optemization
cool! this can be really good for creating internal company or customer
portals similar to the glide. it's always a pain to onboard new teammates or
users to built out google sheets the logic/thinking is obscured and hard to
learn.

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dplgk
I'd be wary of basing an entire product on another company's product,
specially Google.

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dominotw
i see api token in the url when i click on the link to demo site.

~~~
davyson
Yep... that was our hack to make the demo apps work without passwords. Quick
and dirty... but quick.

~~~
thestepafter
I would recommend not “hacking” something like this and publically admitting
it on HN. Pretty much made me distrust all of your work if you are going to
take shortcuts like this that expose your API key. Adding a “taking the time
to fix this now” probably would have been sufficient for me to think
differently.

~~~
davyson
Thank you, we will fix.

