If you're building an MVP and need somewhere to put data, you've probably landed on one of these three. They solve the same problem — give a small project a backend without standing up infrastructure — but they trade off setup time, flexibility, and cost differently. Here's how they actually compare, without the marketing gloss.
SheetSandbox
Turns a Google Sheet you already own into a REST API. Setup is authenticating with Google, connecting a sheet, and getting a bearer token — a couple of minutes.
- Cost: $6.99 one-time, no subscription, 5,000 requests/day included
- Schema: your sheet's header row — no migrations, no config
- Best for: waitlists, feedback forms, contact forms, small internal tools
- Trade-off: not built for high write concurrency or large datasets
Airtable API
Airtable is a spreadsheet with a database's feature set — linked records, views, automations — and a REST API on top. It's more capable than a plain sheet, but that capability comes with a steeper setup: you're learning Airtable's base/table/field model, not just filling in columns.
- Cost: free tier available, paid plans scale with record count and features used
- Schema: defined through Airtable's UI, with field types, linked records, and views
- Best for: teams that want a full no-code database, not just an API for one dataset
- Trade-off: per-base API rate limits, and more product to learn than a spreadsheet
Supabase
Supabase is a real Postgres database with an auto-generated REST/GraphQL API, auth, and storage bundled in. It's the only one of the three that's actually production-grade at scale — but you're managing a database, not filling in a spreadsheet.
- Cost: free tier for small projects, usage-based pricing beyond that
- Schema: SQL tables, defined by you, with real relational constraints
- Best for: products that will outgrow "MVP" and need real query power and scale
- Trade-off: real setup — table design, row-level security, migrations — before your first API call
Which one to pick
If your data model is genuinely relational and you expect to scale past a prototype, Supabase is the right long-term investment — the setup cost pays off. If you want a real no-code database with a nicer UI than a spreadsheet and don't mind the learning curve, Airtable fits. If you just need an API in front of a sheet you (or a teammate) can read and edit directly, and you want to be shipping in the next five minutes rather than the next hour, that's the gap SheetSandbox fills.