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8base — Bring powerful apps to market fast - 8base GraphQL Backend
8base brings together the systems your application needs and makes them available through a single GraphQL API endpoint. This means your backend is production-ready instantly, and able to scale automatically with your business. Awesome for building startups!
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So I'm curious about what you actually get. It sounds like you're just spinning up a graphql database on aws, right? But any startup will still need to understand how to interact with the graphql database, process data, trigger events, etc. And graphql isn't a magic backend that takes care of all that. So I'm just not sure if this is a database as a service, or something more White glove where you'll walk people through how to manage a graphql database? Seems like it would just be easier to spin up your own do droplet or AWS and not have the overhead.
Hey @alteredorange! Thanks for asking this. The database (Aurora MySQL on AWS) is just one part of the package. Essentially, 8base is a ready to use serverless architecture on AWS that abstracts away the need to interact directly with any of the AWS services. To that point, you'll never need to interact directly with your database, and instead can build data models visually while the GraphQL gets auto generated.
Have you checked out https://docs.8base.com yet?
@alteredorange Thanks for your comments. 65% of founders today are non-technical and finding a competent technical co-founder isn't easy so we also provide a service to help startups design and build their software on 8base.
@imaznation Hey Alex, great question. 8base is well capitalized by myself and was founded by experienced entrepreneurs. Our platform revenue is growing but we run the company profitably through our services offering where we help companies design and build their products on 8base. If we ever were to exit the business (God forbid), we can install 8base on a customer's AWS instance so there would be no interruption. Off-boarding is somewhat facilitated by the fact we use standards everywhere (My-SQL, JavaScript, TypeScript and GraphQL).
Upvoted the project but I'm a bit concerned about the pricing. $25/month for 100,000 database rows seems really steep. 1 million rows would cost $250/month if scaled linearly. Even in my own personal projects, I store 10s of millions of rows in multiple database tables. The pricing seems prohibitive especially if the goal is to scale.
A DynamoDB with support for 100 million rows costs ~ $40/month
@rayliverified Hey! Totally understand your concern and would like to say that we don't take a "linear" approach to pricing. The developer tier is really a way to let people get cranking on an super solid architecture fast, for which the database set up alone (Aurora MySQL, memory optimized instance, slave DB, and replica) would cost $1000+ per month were you to set them up for yourself. That said, our custom tier is there so we can work directly with people to make the perfect plan.
What do you think would be a fairer DB row limit?
@rayliverified Ray, I really appreciate your comments. With our new pricing, we are evaluating moving away from DB rows to DB usage. Your feedback is very welcomed and in the event you have use for 8base now we would love to have a conversation with you on what your needs might look like and how we can price accordingly.
@sebscholl @albertsantalo Thanks for taking the time to reply and consider my suggestions! Please definitely focus on the business model first as I'm sure that customers who understand your value proposition wouldn't mind the cost. Just be cautious that pricing might turn off some potential customers which I don't think is your intent. You wouldn't want pricing to be a barrier in communicating your value prop right?
Pricing is an interesting discussion where the most I can offer is my perspective. There are a lot of companies that only offer 1,000 rows for free that are very successful (i.e. Bubble and no code tools). Your competitors offer between 1,000 - 100,000 rows for free.
I personally prefer billing based on storage and usage. Plus, this model seems to mirror costs better as cloud providers use that model.
1GB storage or 10 million rows would be a fair free tier or trial that would give me ample room to explore the service IMHO.
@albertsantalo @rayliverified thanka again for sharing your thoughts here. And yes, I totally agree that we don't want to turn people off with pricing. It's tough to balance getting pricing right for the customer AND the company. That said, 100% taking your thoughts into consideration as we refine this.
🚀 This day has been a long time coming! I'm so excited to announce 8base on Product Hunt.
8base is the platform that I wish I had at my past ventures. After raising lots of capital, I always saw that we were spending 80% of our time and money building and maintaining non-unique systems that all applications need - things like log-in and role-based permission-ing, and even workflow, messaging and notifications. These components were always critical, but when looked at in isolation, completely undifferentiated.
Had I had 8base back then, we would have been able to launch faster, require less venture capital and operate using smaller teams. Our dream is that 8base will take care of the foundation for startup founders and makers in larger companies so that they can instead focus on innovation. It's a big goal, but I really believe that we can accomplish it!
So far we've had dozens of startups, 1,000's of developers world-wide and some very large organizations using the platform. We've also got some epic projects in the hopper where we're providing design and development services to support non-technical founders that want to get to market fast with a scalable product.
Either way, building amazing digital products is our passions and 8base is the manifestation of our dream to make doing so more accessible and economical for everyone.
💬 Feedback
I'd love to know if you have any feedback, ideas or things to fix. We're constantly improving 8base and any feedback can have a HUGE impact.
Thanks,
Albert
The product is extremely clever -- it's easy to jump into, but when we got a demo from Albert and Sebastian, our minds were blown by how much complexity 8base is capable of handling, which is great for ML-driven companies like ours
Who did your motion graphics/animation, website, and marketing materials? In house or an agency? Everything is truly top notch! Congrats to the product marketing team!
@trapper_markelz little bit of both :) have an awesome team internally for static assets and then have contracted a killer animation studio for the explainer.
@sebscholl Well nice job. It was quite striking to navigate the site and consume the content and the experience.
Building all of your software on a proprietary, closed-source, magical backend ran by a startup?
Sounds cool for small projects, but the risk of failure, pivot, or unaddressed issues is way too big for a serious engineering team!
Hope you're thinking of open-sourcing core parts of this product to build trust, and allow people to improve/fork it for their needs :)
@florian_bienefelt It's great to hear that 8base looks like some proprietary magic to you, but I guarantee that it 100% isn't! Instead, it's a development platform built 100% using development standards on top of AWS that we've poured 1000's of hours into building. For serious development teams that love spending time reinventing the wheel, 8base is probably a bad choice. However, for serious engineering teams that value their time and money, like the teams at IBM using 8base and dozens of others, we hit home runs.
Not really interested in making our platform open source, but thanks for the suggestion!
Yes, I would recommend 8base. Building a new technology no longer feels like you've been sucked into a black hole. Working with the team at 8base has been extremely transparent and productive, giving us time to focus on other important tasks. The build moves at a very quick pace, allowing me to enter the market nearly 6 months sooner than what is usually expected. The 8base team NEVER misses a deadline, and exceeds my own high expectations with regard to the look and feel of the product. The 8base team took the time to learn my product and service well enough to be able to add changes and recommendations that will be significant. We have a few other products on deck and we plan to use 8base to do the build. why? Because we love the competitive edge we get by using 8base. Bill, CEO Livo.
@likewow thanks for the question! With done limited training, a non-technical would be able to use 8base to pretty much set up their entire backend (minus custom functions, which would require JavaScript knowledge). That said, we think of 8base as a platform to be used by developers to the benefit of non-technical and technical founders alike.
Would love to hear more about what you're working on!
@likewow Matt, thanks for your questions? For non-tech founders we also help them with professional services for design and development of their applications on 8base. Firebase is widely used but it's NO-SQL underpinning isn't well suited to the needs of data-driven startups. Firebase is better suited for building mobile apps that mostly require CRUD operations. Firebase also does not have GraphQL, which is a game-changer for developers and a massive strategic advantage for companies.
So this is a little bit like Hasura for RDS? That sounds pretty coo!. Does the GraphQL go through AppSync?
hey @simon_gibson1 ! There are for sure some similarities between 8base and Hasura. That said, we take the approach of being a fully managed service as opposed to linking up a Heroku account or manage a docker container, ect. Plus, our roadmap for application services (notifications, workflow, messaging, etc.) is really to make sure that 8base becomes a complete foundation for application development, as opposed to one specialized piece of the puzzle.
Also, we're not on AppSync! We built our own GraphQL Engine from scratch that's super powerful. If you haven't already, check out the docs for our grouping and aggregation capabilities (https://docs.8base.com/docs/8bas...). I've not seen anything like it from others offering GraphQL APIs. It's crazy powerful.
@chanlitohem Check out the latest pricing at https://www.8base.com/producthunt.
Amazing new product-Any Devs here want to try this on my ecommerce website that I am looking to complete? It is backend dev and coding that needs to be worked on and this platform looks perfect...Interested shoot me an email-Corey@winwintradelines.com Happy Developing
@winwintradelines @splitz_mbm Corey, let me know if you want to connect about this. Thanks!
As a frontend dev, this is exactly the tools that I needed. I've tried it and successfully built a website on it. Expecting for more features and better docs in the future :)
@albertsantalo for now, I'm expecting better docs, for many cases of authentications, file uploads, custom functions, etc
Love the product. And the team is top notch!
I've been using 8base daily for 6+ months or so and it's truly an incredible product. All of the core features like the GraphQL API and Data Builder are powerful.
You can move and build incredibly fast using 8base. After pretty thoroughly exploring the market for alternatives I was not able to find anything close to 8base, in terms of both ease-of-use and the power of the features.
It does everything I need and more and the community is growing. I'd strongly recommend you use it for your next project. And I'm happy to answer any questions if you are getting started and want an inside look.
@jacob_colling In 6 months there are lots of ways for any company/product to disappoint so I am thrilled your experience has been great. Thanks for sharing your insights with the community.
I received amazing support from this company as I was tinkering with a side project, multiple email conversations back and forth even though I was asking some basic GraphQL questions and some specific code written for me. Couldn't believe the level of support, highly recommend checking this out!
Love to chat further about a project. Looks great guys - I’m sure you are proud of it!
@tomfrazier Absolutely Tom. Please feel free to send me an email at albert@8base.com or Sebastian at sebastian.scholl@8base.com. Looking forward to it!
@tomfrazier Tom, on another note, after looking at your background, we have a marketing tech project in the pipeline (Multi-tenant SaaS product to be built on 8base) that I'd like to chat with you about.
8base is LEGIT. Great, accessible software that allows non-technical folks like myself to engage meaningfully with back-end structure and strategy (for what it's worth, our lead developer is also a huge fan).
The 8base team itself is also super solid. Smart guys who are genuinely invested in helping startups create quality experiences that are built to scale. They are also extremely fair with pricing!
Have already recommended them to a couple other friends who are looking to build products.
@mbiyimoh_ghogomu Thanks, Mbiyimoh. Working with you and your team is fantastic!
Albert and the team have built something amazing. 8Base is a gift to the developer community.
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