Hey! Thanks for the questions and feedback. We have a single project on Vercel to host the Next.js frontend but that's the extent of our usage there, and our usage is mostly static with some SSR to fetch user and public functions.

If you could send us the id/url path of the sandbox demo you were on with the error that'd be super helpful. Thanks in advance! support@napkin.io

can you email your napkin function id (or the full url path) with us so we can investigate? that would be very helpful, thanks in advance!

support@napkin.io

Hey! If you’re familiar with the term JAMstack, you can think of us as the “A” for API’s. A static site like a blog typically doesn’t need any backend-specific functions but anything that requires a server to run you could use Napkin for. Popular frontend hosting platforms like Netlify and Vercel also have serverless function add-ons that can be attached to your project.

Our goal is to be the “CodePen for backend” and our one-off functions can be used for more than just websites (think mobile apps, IOT devices, etc). We’re excited to build out examples and enable discovery very soon!

I didn’t know about Jamstack, but I find it a very interesting way of delivering an app. I will study the possibilities for sure!

Thank you very much.

That’s great feedback, thanks so much. We want to perfect the editor experience as much as possible. It can’t ever completely replace local, though, so we hope we can release our API in the future for this use case.

No problem! I think an option to disable "auto-save" will just fix this for me. Because I always have to "wait" to press Run. I would rather wait after pressing Run.

Ah got it, yes I’ll note this for next week’s update. Thanks and definitely let us know any other feedback! thomas@napkin.io :)

We’re big fans of both!

Thanks! Replit (and Glitch) are cool but ultimately they didn't pass our sniff test for production use cases. We believe our serverless architecture sets the foundation for the Napkin function to be a LEGO-like block to build complex systems at scale. We also like the idea of a simple isolated unit that can be shared. It's more lightweight, more understandable, and we'll be exploring ways to tackle discovery in the coming months :)

Hey! We're not yet open sourcing our tech during our beta period, but you can watch out for it here: https://github.com/napkinhq. We'll likely have a release for any open source tooling.

cloud9 ide is definitely a pioneer! We see Napkin as a part of the natural evolution in our productivity/dev tools, especially as we adapt to the advent of serverless architecture

It’s actually Firebase Auth’s Email Link (completely free compared to magic.link)

The price is the data, nothing is completely free

Not necessarily in this case. Firebase is a gateway to paid Firestore, Storage, and Google Cloud. They give away Auth for free and is ISO and SOC compliant. An argument can be made for their free analytics offering though.

To be clear, are you saying one shouldn't be concerned about running their webapp on Firebase/store because of the regulations surrounding what Google can do with that data? (customer usage changes for choosing when to start building competing products, for starters)