Hacker Remix

Show HN: I built a serverless data API builder – no storage, low latency

68 points by pinkfluffymochi 9 months ago | 32 comments

Hey HN,

I'm Bo, cofounder of Fleak.ai. Over the past several months, our team has been hard at work developing Fleak, a data API backend builder, and we would love your feedback on what we've built so far.

What Fleak Does: Fleak simplifies the process of building and deploying API backends. It features a no-code IDE UI that lets you create workflows by chaining together steps such as native SQL transformations, calling LLM models, AWS Lambda functions, and more. With a single click, you can deploy these workflows to a production endpoint (during test, we are able to handle 5000 QPS without LLM node).

Key Features:

Native SQL Transformation: Work with SQL directly, without the need for a storage layer. Simplified Setup: No more cluster configuration and script juggling. Efficient Deployment: Streamlines the deployment cycle and reduces the need for constant monitoring. The inspiration for Fleak came from my frustration with maintaining production data pipelines, especially with the added complexity brought by LLMs. Fleak aims to simplify life for data practitioners.

Known restrictions: 1. not all SQL syntax is supported, we are adding daily 2. free version has rate limit due to cost 3. LLM node latency is not optimized due to cost, but our base rate limit is higher than out of box models and can be elastic.

Our codebase is meticulously maintained, though it's not open source yet as we're still considering which parts to release. You can check out Fleak at www.fleak.ai. We are hosting a small product feedback lunch on Stanford campus this thursday 8/8 1:30pm-2:30pm. Come join us! https://lu.ma/0beq21pd

We'd love to hear your thoughts:

Does this sound useful to you? What features would you like to see? Any advice on open-sourcing? Thanks!

spencerchubb 9 months ago

What is an AI workflow? What does "embed API endpoint" mean? What is a concrete example of something I would use it for? Why would I use it as opposed to other solutions?

dsmurrell 9 months ago

I'm having similar issues understanding how I might use this.

bolei 9 months ago

you may think of it as a cloud function, we mostly focus on HTTP based data ingestions without a storage layers. e.g. Your app is sending some data, Fleak can be used to create an API to process that data then return back to the app synchronously or save the processed data directly into a storage layer.

samtp 9 months ago

For someone who is not deep into AI lingo, this pretty much sounds like an ORM + Cloudflare Worker/AWS Lambda. But I'm probably really off here.

What would really help would be a concrete business case for when someone would use this and how it helps vs other options

bolei 9 months ago

Indeed, and no you are not off. We heard lots of feedback for building out business cases so we are will be working on that. Thanks a lot for the feedback

Joel_Mckay 9 months ago

Maybe consider something like:

"Dynamic scaling ML based coordinator to minimize infrastructure resource costs"

Inferring the novelty of your firms value proposition would be more palatable to those that are risk averse to buzzwords. Note, simply dropping "AI" 128 times into a presentation like Intel/nvidia will unlikely work for a smaller firm.

Best of luck, =3

pinkfluffymochi 9 months ago

This is gold! practicing this pitch in front of a mirror right now. Agree on the AI part, time has changed....(we figured it was a great buzz word 6 months ago...now not so sure any more) T_T

curiousDog 9 months ago

To be honest, it's really hard to understand what Fleak does. For a minute, I thought it's a low-code way of deploying microservices/API endpoints. Maybe one end to end use case would help

simple10 9 months ago

This looks useful for no-code team members to create embeddings for LLM.

Since you're looking for feedback...

The "New Way" section would benefit from simplifying into a single flow chart with just two steps. Then move the existing 4 blocks to a features section.

Also would be great to have simple use cases on the landing page and link to the current Use Cases page for details. On the Use Cases page, I would get rid of the graphics. They don't convey much info and distract from the screenshots.

Maybe add a page for product comparisons. Without playing with the product first, it's a bit unclear to me how my no-code teams would prefer Fleak over their current tools (Make.com, n8n, Pabbly, Zapier, etc.).

The pricing page is somewhat of a deal breaker for my team to even spend time testing the product. The only option (free tier) seems to have really limits like 1 request / sec. And there's not enough info to understand how max events and other rate limits play together. I would keep the 1 user, 5 pipeline, token limits, and 500 requests (pipeline executions?) per month. Then remove the other limits. Alternatively, offer a Pro tier with a free month trial with higher limits.

Also on the pricing page, it would be great to list out a few use cases as examples of what's possible within the limits of each tier.

Hope this helps! And best of luck. It looks like a promising product.

bolei1007 9 months ago

Thank you for the feedback! They are truly insightful!

xing_666 9 months ago

I have gone through Fleak's documentation and demo videos, and also ran a few demos myself. I must say, Fleak seems like a fantastic product, especially suitable for enterprise users or professional engineers in the industry. However, from a personal developer's perspective, I feel that the documentation and demo videos are somewhat too professional and not as user-friendly for ordinary users like me. For instance, as a regular web scraping engineer, I need a simple and effective way to process the data I collect. While there are some basic open-source products available that could meet my needs, the learning curve, the necessity of running a server, and additional costs (like purchasing tokens for LLM) are daunting.

If a manufacturer could provide a one-stop service, including easy-to-understand documentation, tutorials or demo videos aimed at beginners, at a reasonable price, while ensuring the reliability of the service, I would be very willing to pay for their products. I hope Fleak could consider the needs of users like us, to further optimize the product and services, making it easier for more individual developers to get started with Fleak.

Looking forward to future improvements and updates from Fleak, and continuing my support for you guys!

bolei 9 months ago

Thank you so much! Please consider to join our channel https://discord.gg/6YyZWGYB if you run into any issues on the free beta version! We will definitely improve and price the product in a way to satisfy individual developer needs!