# Google Apps Script

11 Hacker News commenters recommended Google Apps Script and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free scripting platform for automating Google Workspace, calling web APIs and publishing simple web apps.

## Why people recommend it

- Automating Google Sheets and Drive (2 comments): "use Google App Scripts to duplicate all the convos saved in your google drive to another folder" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184072)) "Use Google Sheets + Google App Scripts to make external API calls for each column!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45792805))
- Calling web APIs and scraping (2 comments): "I've had pretty good luck using Google Appscript to either access web APIs or screenscrape" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50110103)) "Use Google Sheets + Google App Scripts to make external API calls for each column!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45792805))
- Publishing simple web apps (2 comments): "The easiest one in my experience has been to write a simple Apps Script project and expose that as a published Web App" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114655)) "Google provides access to the URL to use the sheet as a database and also allows you to deploy Javascript" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565830))
- Automating complex tooling (2 comments): "if you have built up a lot of tooling for automating things it can be a pretty sweet platform" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098404)) "more complex stuff can be automated quite well with AppsScript" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836630))

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Google Apps Script", https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-apps-script/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).