Google Sheets is great when a product is still changing. It is fast. It is familiar. Non-technical people can edit it. You do not need to design a full database schema on day one. For many MVPs, internal tools, client portals, and small SaaS experiments, that flexibility is exactly what makes Google Sheets useful. But there is one mistake I see often: Connecting the frontend directly to Google Sheets. At first, it feels simple. Your React app fetches rows from a sheet. Your users see the data. Your team can edit content without touching code. Everything feels lightweight. Until the spreadsheet quietly becomes part of your production architecture. The problem Once your frontend depends directly on Google Sheets, your sheet is no longer just a spreadsheet. It becomes your backend contract. That is where things start to break. Columns get renamed. Tabs move. Permissions become unclear. Data types drift. Someone changes status to Status . Someone adds a new column in the middle.…