Host Grist without installing anything
A spreadsheet that thinks in typed columns and Python formulas, with access rules able to hide a column or show each person only their own rows.
Starting at €8.99/month
Introduction
Grist installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. The spreadsheet that thinks like a database: Python formulas, typed columns, linked views. Developed with the support of the French state for public administrations. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Confort at €8.99/month incl. VAT — 4 GB of memory. Grist does not calculate in the browser: every open document has an isolated Python engine on the server that holds the full graph of your formulas and recomputes it as soon as a cell changes. Two or three documents open at once means as many live engines. Add the history snapshots Grist keeps so you can compare two states of a document and roll back, and the parsing of an entire Excel workbook at import time.
People arrive here from a spreadsheet that has become unmanageable, from an online spreadsheet hosted outside Europe, or from a no-code base whose formulas feel too thin. CSV files, XLSX workbooks and JSON import with column mapping; Excel formulas, on the other hand, are not converted — they are rewritten in Python, and that is usually a gain, because a three-line Python formula replaces a two-hundred-character Excel one. On the way out, a Grist document is a SQLite file you download in one click, alongside CSV and Excel exports, the REST API and webhooks.
What managed hosting changes
Formulas written in Python
A computed column contains real Python: readable conditions, loops over linked records, date functions. Where a classic spreadsheet forces formulas made unreadable by nesting, you write three commented lines the next colleague will understand.
Permissions down to the row and the column
Access rules can hide a column from a role — salaries from everyone but management — or show each person only the rows that concern them. It is the feature a shared workbook most painfully lacks, and here it is part of the software.
Views that answer each other on one page
You place several tables on a page and link them: selecting a customer on the left filters their orders on the right, and the summary table below updates. That replaces dozens of tabs and hand-copied filters.
A history you can compare
Grist keeps snapshots of the document: you see what changed between two states, row by row, and roll back if a manipulation did damage. The document itself is a SQLite file you can download at any moment.
Why hand it over rather than install it
A public body whose data cannot leave
Lists of service users, grant applications, nursery places: not the kind of data to drop into a spreadsheet hosted outside Europe. Grist is precisely the tool the French state supports for this purpose, and here the machine is in France.
An Excel workbook past its limit
Twenty tabs, formulas pointing at other formulas, and nobody dares touch it any more. Rebuilding the same tracking in typed columns and named formulas makes the file readable again — and two people can work in it at once.
A team where everyone sees only their own scope
The same document serves twelve advisers, and each opens only their own cases. An access rule based on the user name is enough: no more cutting the file into twelve copies that drift apart.
Grant tracking with summaries
Summary tables group by financial year, by scheme or by town and recompute as data is entered. The annual report is read inside the tool instead of being copied into another file.
Information to be collected from others
A form sent to partners feeds a table directly, and review happens on the same page as the tracking. No attachments going back and forth, no manual merging.
Hosted in France
In our own infrastructure in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves. Your documents, your access rules and your history stay in the country, and the person on the phone speaks your language.
Frequently asked questions
The data comes across without trouble: import the CSV or XLSX, check the type of each column — date, number, text, reference to another table — and the table is there. Formulas, however, are not converted: Grist speaks Python, not Excel syntax. So plan to rewrite the computed columns, which takes half a day on an ordinary workbook and leaves a far more readable file than before.
Coming in, CSV files, Excel workbooks and JSON, with column mapping and type detection. Going out, every table exports to CSV or Excel, and above all the whole document downloads as a SQLite file: that is your database, readable with any SQLite tool, including in ten years. A REST API and webhooks complete the picture for connecting Grist to other software.
You have to accept writing Python for non-trivial calculations: it is not hard, but it is not the syntax your colleagues know. The engine recomputes the formula graph on every change, so a document of several hundred thousand rows with many computed columns becomes slow — at that point a real database is the better tool. There is no offline mobile app. And some chart types go through a custom widget rather than a button.
App Confort, at €8.99/month incl. VAT. It provides 4 GB of memory where the application asks for 1 GB at minimum: the headroom serves the system, not the decor. You can change plan later without reinstalling.
Yes, and here it is particularly clear: a Grist document is a single SQLite file you can download whenever you like. The software is free, we host it, we do not own it.