When I was playing an economics game I was building a lot of simple nocode Google spreadsheets with a little bit of JavaScript to import data. You could share your spreadsheets among friends and everyone made their own copy which they modified to suit their own needs.
I thought about some very trivial apps that are worth building but not worth the cost of the usual stacks. We are talking about the equivalent of a simple desktop app that doesn't need hosting except you don't want to use the local filesystem because you want to synchronize your data between devices. The actual app could be a simple SPA. It doesn't matter how it is implemented. What I am missing is the storage concept. There is remoteStorage.js but nobody adopted it.
We play Path Of Exile, an ARPG game with lots of trading and economy in our friend group. We have a Jupyter Notebook running on Google Colab, that extracts data from the game servers, and pushes the data into a Google Spreadsheet as a persistence layer.
We have Sheets for data ingestion, and other sheets that do the business logic.
This turned out to be a surprisingly well working pipeline and comes at zero hosting costs. We could just run Jupyter Lab somewhere, but this would cost too much and not nearly as quick to handle for our case.
