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Ask HN: Would you pay $5 for a CRUD app?

11 points by sharemywin ↗ HN
If so, what stack? If not, why not?

I was thinking about building a Code Generator that built the initial crud pages for a given data model.

And I was thinking I would pay about $5, to save a couple of days worth of work. To get a head start on an MVP.

19 comments

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sarcasmatwork
I've already seen github repos with a free MEAN stack template. I've seen various others over time that have been posted here.

Maybe create it, and make it free.. but also give people the ability to donate to you because your time is valuable.

PaulHoule
It puzzles economists and certainly me that people often behave as if the value of their time is zero. This turns up in mysteries such as why people commute so far, why grandmothers make scarfs out of acrylic instead of wool yarn, etc.

A "couple days of work" could be 3 to 5, U.S. minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and if you work 8 hours a day that is $174 to $290.

A real wage for a developer in the U.S. is probably 10x that. A company I worked for charged $2000-$3000 for a simple interactive web site, probably more like $20,000 for a serious application with a fair number of screens.

I rarely do "free trials" of products, particularly when I am working for somebody else. Giving a product a fair evaluation could be week or more of work, which won't pay off unless I buy the product. If I am working for someone else I have to not only convince myself but may also need to convince my boss, convince my boss's boss, ...

Similiarly I see all kinds of hand-wringing from people who are afraid that they are going to exceed the free tier on AWS and get a bill for $2.

I am a big fan of low code, I think the world still needs a web-based version of the old Microsoft Access. Why that doesn't exist is beyond me, but I will say (1) Firebase isn't it, and (2) whenever somebody does make one they seem to quickly get bought and shut down.

kleer001
> behave as if the value of their time is zero

I see this in my home kitchen and it has come to drive me batty. I think it's related to general innumeracy. Maybe the fear of numbering thing.

In the kitchen I've seen people saving butter wrappers to use the little scraps of butter on them to grease up pots and pans for cooking. That couldn't be a tenth of a cents worth of butter. Same with sauces and leaving only the last little table spoon in them. Why not use it all up and get a new one? I think it's also an inherited behavior back from Depression era days. Shrug.

was_boring
Probably because it's more complex then that. Time is worth zero unless someone is willing to pay you for it. So by saving something when someone is unwilling to pay you more then it is worth for the cost then you have "made" that money.

The only depression-era thing that I can think of passed on through my family and those I know is inherently selfish mechanism of survival because of scarcity. Things like always pay yourself first, and take what you can get when you can get it.

pacificenigma
It's also about reflecting your own values, such as remembering when you lived in less abundant times, not consuming more environmental or financial resources than you really need to, and demonstrating those values to other family members in the hope they are remembered.

Personally I stopped working 10 years ago and have plenty of financial resources, but I still take the train or bus as much as possible, or if I must drive, walk a block to avoid paying for parking. It has nothing to do with money and everything to do with living the values that I care about and trying to communicate those to our kids.

justaguyhere
web-based version of the old Microsoft Access

Isn't Airtable similar to what you're describing (though it isn't as powerful)?

Or do you have something else in mind?

gshdg
Airtable is a barely-glorified spreadsheet with the barest hint of relational capabilities.

Access was a full relational database and drag-and-drop UI builder (with generated forms and views as well) that could drop down to SQL in a pinch.

I too would absolutely love a web-based Access equivalent.

gt2
I would think that for the code to be useful, the developer will know how to use the framework it was generated in and thus is easily able to quickly generate the same thing as you are (be it with ROR scaffold or using a boilerplate in Django, Node.js, etc).
jakemal
I'll plug [Prefab](https://github.com/neighborhoods/Prefab), the project I've been working on for the last year and a half that was recently open sourced. We use it to generate most of our HTTP backend services and it's been really successful. It makes it extremely easy to generate actors and the related machinery to expose them over HTTP.
milankragujevic
I generally dislike when people jump in with their own projects or products, but your project is relevant, useful, in PHP which I use, well documented, and the OP hasn't actually posted a project (Show HN) but is asking for a market (Ask HN).

Thanks and good job!

jakemal
Thanks! If you try it out, let me know what you think and feel free to let me know if you run into any problems.
sharemywin
so does this create views in a mvc pattern?
jakemal
Users are responsible for creating the materialized views. This library just makes it extremely easy to expose APIs against those views. Does that answer the question you were asking?
whb07
Kind of like Ruby on Rails?
jklein11
I would pay $5 for a CRUD app. I would pay a great deal more than $5 for a CRUD app that meets all of my specifications. I would pay a considerable amount less for tooling to help me create a web app to my specifications. In order for me to pay it would have to be better than existing tools like Django and ROR which are free.
p0d
The badly named grocery crud for php is pretty decent. I would target something similar on another stack for devs who won’t touch php.
memn0nis
There are quite a few no-code / low-code companies that are trying to do this. I like the idea in general, but haven't found one that actually works for the products I try to build