[ydant]

Agreed. Google Sheets is a great scrappy option for a startup / small company.

I've used it for a lot of system data that needs to be modified by a few people at most. With a little bit of careful code and caching (I like validating and syncing to S3) you can easily use it as a crud frontend for important system data.

It also can make great adhoc dashboards - plug into APIs (even private ones if you add in custom Google Scripts code) or push data updates to the sheets. I've had rather large reports auto updated on a schedule with multiple views of the data (pivot tables, queries, lookups, etc). Fully focused customized views into the data needed to solve specific internal problems with really quick delivery times.

Sure, a custom developed option should be substantially better than Google Sheets, but you won't develop it quicker. By the time you actually need something bigger/better, you should be at a place where your needs are better defined and you can afford the resources to develop something better.

[niutech]

Why anybody would like to store their sensitive business data on a public cloud such as Google Sheets?

[xcrunner529]

Yeah my client uses Google forms for some simple use cases and it goes straight to google sheets and I just pull from that for verifying submissions and such in code. Not bad at all.