Hi,

Forewarning: this idea is one I've only been thinking about for a while and it's not fully fleshed-out yet.

I love Datasette and what it stands for. I was thinking about how we could make it accessible to more people, especially those without access to credit cards required for a lot of hosting options. Or they might not feel comfortable signing up for said services.

So I was thinking I might create a service that hosts Datasette instances for folks. I'd probably stick it on AWS Lambda and limit requests to something like n/month to avoid bankrupting myself. If I did build such a hypothetical service, I was thinking I would rely on GitHub Actions to do the heavy lifting.

E.g. user johndoe creates a repo my-animals with a couple of files: dogs.csv, cats.csv and the following GitHub Actions workflow:

```yaml

.github/workflows/push.yml

on: push

this allows the publish action to use OIDC to authenticate johndoe/my-animals

permissions: id-token: write contents: read

jobs: publish: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - uses: actions/setup-python@v2

  - run: pip install sqlite-utils

  - uses: actions/checkout@v2

  - run: |
      set -eux

      sqlite-utils create-database animals.db          
      sqlite-utils insert animals.db dogs dogs.csv --csv          
      sqlite-utils insert animals.db cats cats.csv --csv

  - uses: datasette-hub/publish@v1
    with:
      db: animals.db
      metadata: meta.yml

    # this step is helpful for debugging why the
    # generated sqlite db was rejected
  - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
    if: failure()
    with:
      path: animals.db
      retention-days: 1

```

This would then cause a Datasette instance to be available at https://johndoe-my-animals.datasette-hub.test/. It feels like this could significantly reduce the friction to someone being able to go from data set to Datasette.

What do you think? Does this address a real need? Or am I perhaps misunderstanding the main friction points? As a bonus: it feels like this would pair well with git scraping.