[fiveSpeedManual]

I'm so excited to finally be able to share this with you!

Pantry is a free cloud storage service that I've been building for the past few weeks. You can use the API to store & retrieve data for you and your users online for free.

Looking forward to seeing what you all think of it, and please feel free to post suggestions or AMA.

Thanks!

[lidHanteyk]

What's your data integrity policy like? In particular, what's your privacy policy? What technical measures, if any, prevent misuse of uploaded data?

[fiveSpeedManual]

Great question! Let me get back to you?

You are right, and all of your points are valid. I will definitely be looking into drafting some documents revolving around data integrity and privacy.

As for the prevention of misuse, I've added a data limit per basket and a limit of baskets per Pantry.

If you have any ideas or suggestions - I'm all ears.

Thanks!

[1cvmask]

How will you pay for it if costs go up?

[fiveSpeedManual]

Great question!

I believe this is a good problem to have, and perhaps one day I'll be lucky enough to face this.

I've spent some time thinking of how to monetize Pantry - perhaps a private tier, something that is more feature-rich?

[jquast]

I shared a free JSON API with parse.com with a bunch of friends to develop a set of FOSS CLI apps we communicated over.

It was all open and fun and funny.

Then parse.com shutdown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parse_(platform) -- What started out as fun project for several developers turned into a dead project for us all, which by then had hundreds of users around the world, who were now getting errors instead of fun.

We all used different programming languages, nobody was able to re-engineer all of our clients into a new endpoint/api. My takeaway -- any one of us could have hosted the JSON api, but we made the mistake in thinking we would use a free 3rd party service. That decision killed the project.

[ocdtrekkie]

One thing I'd express, is many people launch cool things without a monetization plan, become popular largely because their free, and then lose everything they built when they realize to monetize effectively they have to "alter the deal".

Beware of Vadering your project: Figure out what you can charge for early, and never offer it for free.

[fiveSpeedManual]

Duly noted, this was an eye-opener. I suppose I should prioritize this while I still have time.

Time to step away from the keyboard and think about the business side of this project.

Oh, I did add a "BuyMeCoffee" button on the About page, but its more of a donation. - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/imRohan

[conductr]

I’d say don’t over think it and don’t quit your day job. But I also assume you’re not pouring money into this. Stay free as long as you can, it gives you data so build out some usage stats, talk to the highest volume users. Figure out what threshold they become willing to pay and how much. Then, ask them to pay because they might have just lied to you.

[fiveSpeedManual]

Haha, yeah I'm definitely not quitting my day job over this, and you're right about the costs as well - Pantry is fairly cheap to maintain.

I might keep it as a free service for the time being and do some research to see if there's value in a paid tier. Thanks!

[whalesalad]

- How would you sell me on Pantry vs. AWS S3? (You can use S3 in much the same way ... throwing up JSON at a path and fetching it. The cost some would argue is neglible)

- How do you deal with CORS?

- How do you deal with authentication?

Is this intended to be like the take a penny leave a penny jar? You put stuff here knowing anyone could come and destroy it at any time?

I did not sign up, I am only going off your API docs.

[strogonoff]

> How would you sell me on Pantry vs. AWS S3?

Is this question really appropriate? The developer is sharing a pro bono offering, where does selling anyone on it against a commercial service even come into play?

It looks like a project that must have been fun to make and could be useful for storing non-sensitive data with very little hassle. Long bucket IDs appear to leave little chance for name collision.

If you are building a piece of software that deals with anything remotely like PII or has specific availability requirements, I sincerely hope this is not something you are seriously considering (otherwise, pardon me, I hope I won’t be your user or customer), starting from the fact that you aren’t paying for it and there is no SLA.

[marktangotango]

Of course it’s appropriate! From the docs this service doesn’t even meet the “viable” part of MVP! Ok a user can post some json that’s public (no authentication) and doesn’t even work across domains (CORS).

Suppose adding those things and targeting “mobile backend as a service” or even more general “backend as service” there is still a lot to be desired. Like static html, ok you’re competition is Firebase.

How’s Firebase doing these days?

[fiveSpeedManual]

Thanks for the kind words and for understanding where I'm coming from, and my perspective :)

[pmiller2]

"Sell me on X vs. Y." is a colloquialism. It's just a different way of asking "what are the benefits of X over Y."

[strogonoff]

We’re talking welcoming a stranger sharing the result of their work with “but what are the benefits of your free solution over megacorp Z’s paid offering Y?”.

[whalesalad]

That is your interpretation but not my meaning.

[fiveSpeedManual]

Hey, thanks for the feedback.

This is definitely been a learning experience for me, and I'm really not sure what the future holds for the project.

CORS was/is an issue that I've yet to fully figure out, if you have any ideas please share - I'd love to learn.

Authentication is something that I've delebratly avoided as I feel Pantry should not be used to store sensitive data, nor should it be ever used in production. It's for POC's, hackathon projects, and should be used as a development tool for rapid prototyping.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions, and please feel free to submit PR's if you'd like!

[newhotelowner]

Let the user register a site when they create a UUID (Account). You are not storing private data. Let the user make cors request using the UUID as an authorization token. If the website and the UUID match, the server responds with the content.

[mariushn]

Hi, found an earlier comment of yours mentioning you changed to being a hotel owner. We make a free hotel PMS -- would you like to get in touch and see how we can make it better for you? https://hoteliera.com/