Why GKit SheetsAPI is Open Source (MIT)

SheetsAPI is a proxy between your application and Google Sheets. When you connect a sheet to GKit, you are granting our service access to your Google account. That is a meaningful amount of trust — and trust requires transparency.

This is why SheetsAPI is MIT licensed and the source is on GitHub. You do not have to take our word for what the code does. You can read it.

What the MIT license actually means

MIT is the most permissive common open-source license. In plain terms:

• Use it — run it in production, build commercial products on top of it, embed it in your own service.
• Modify it — fork it, change any behavior, strip features you do not need.
• Distribute it — ship modified copies, include it in larger systems, host it for others.
• No attribution required for personal or private use. If you redistribute modified source code publicly, keep the license file present. That is the only real obligation.

There are no "open core" restrictions, no feature gates that unlock with a paid license, and no server-side call-home behavior. The hosted version at sheetsapi.gkit.mreshank.com is the same code that is in the repository.

Why open source matters for a data proxy specifically

Most tools that touch your data are black boxes. You trust that the vendor is not logging your rows, not selling your schema, not storing OAuth tokens carelessly. With a closed-source proxy, that trust is blind.

With an MIT-licensed codebase, the question "what does this actually do with my Google OAuth token?" has a verifiable answer. The token exchange happens in a single Cloudflare Worker file. You can read every line that touches it. If something looks wrong, you can file an issue or submit a fix.

This matters more for SheetsAPI than for, say, an open-source chart library. A chart library renders data you already have. SheetsAPI sits between your OAuth credentials and your sheet data. Auditing that code is not paranoia — it is reasonable diligence.

Self-hosting on Cloudflare Workers

If you would rather not use the hosted service at all, you can deploy your own instance in about ten minutes. The repository includes a wrangler.toml and a deploy guide. The worker runs on Cloudflare's free tier for most personal and small-team usage — a request that reads 50 rows costs roughly the same as a static asset serve.

The self-hosted setup is documented in Self-hosting SheetsAPI on Cloudflare Workers. You bring your own Google Cloud project for OAuth, configure the worker's environment variables, and deploy. Your data never touches GKit's servers.

Contributing

SheetsAPI is actively maintained. The issue tracker is the right place for bug reports, feature requests, and questions about behavior that isn't documented. Pull requests are welcome — especially for filtering improvements, output format additions, and documentation fixes.

If you build something interesting on top of SheetsAPI, we would like to know about it. Open-source projects get better when people who use them in production bring back what they learned.

The repository is at github.com/gkit-dev/sheetsapi. The hosted version will always be free for individual use — open source is not a phase we grow out of.