Title: We&#x27;re Michael and Sam, co-founders of Stacker (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stacker.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stacker.app&#x2F;</a>). We let anyone create custom software powered by data from Airtable or Google Sheets, with a nice UI, auth and rich permissions. Think Internal Tools, Custom CRMs, and Customer Portals.<p>We&#x27;ve been working for ages on building something that lets non-technical people create software without code. We spent about 2 years building a really powerful and complicated drag-and-drop no-code app builder. It was really awesome, it could create social networks, SaaS, marketplaces – the works. The only problem was: nobody could use it unless they were already a developer! It turned out that even though you weren&#x27;t technically writing any code… you were still actually programming, still thinking like a developer. Just with a really inefficient set of no-code tools.<p>We (eventually!) realised that non-devs were already building systems anyway; but instead of code they were using spreadsheets.<p>Spreadsheets are basically the world&#x27;s most used database&#x2F;IDE. They&#x27;re great for modelling and managing data. But, if you&#x27;ve ever used someone else&#x27;s sheet you&#x27;ll know that they&#x27;re not the best way to interact with the data. Giving someone access to your spreadsheet is pretty much like giving someone access to your SQL database – they won&#x27;t understand it, they might see more than they should, and they might break the whole thing.<p>Stacker is basically an app layer on top of spreadsheet. We let you set up a nice UI, add user login, and limit who can see&#x2F;do what using permissions. We also handle abstracting away the limitations of the APIs of Airtable&#x2F;Google Sheets so that the whole thing stays performant.<p>The main two cases where people find Stacker useful are:<p>1. they want to create internal tools that are easier to use&#x2F;understand<p>2. they want to allow customers&#x2F;partners access to some of the data in their sheet without giving the whole thing<p>We&#x27;ve been really excited that most of our early users have been non-technical people who hadn&#x27;t ever thought they could create software for their business. People have been creating marketplaces, CRMs, resources centres, order-tracking portals, ERPs… lots of stuff. We&#x27;re a monthly SaaS model starting at $39pcm – we handle all the hosting, infrastructure, and even SSL certs etc.<p>Right now we support Airtable and Google Sheets, but we&#x27;d like to expand out to include other data sources like SQL databases, APIs and even MS Excel(!).<p>Underneath the hood we&#x27;ve got a bunch of technology from our original web app builder – a python backend that creates on-the-fly endpoints depending on the user&#x27;s data model, and react frontend that can flexibly layout the app. Then on top of that, we&#x27;ve got a service that analyses the schema from your sheet and automatically creates your initial Stacker app.<p>I&#x27;d love to hear what use cases you can think of for this, either internal or external, and what you&#x27;d like to see it do in the future! Check it out here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stacker.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stacker.app</a><p>p.s.  History update – you might remember us from when we did a very early alpha launch as &quot;Toga&quot; a few months back (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22746663" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22746663</a>). Thanks to everyone who helped us iron out all the bugs from that!
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