Data & Storage · Integration
Grist
Add Grist to your product for your customers, and give your AI agents governed access to it.
Grist sits between a spreadsheet and a relational database, and the difference from its peers is that formulas are real Python and columns can be computed. That matters for an integration because writing to a formula column is not possible and attempting it is an error rather than a no-op, so a connector has to know which columns are computed before it writes. Documents are the unit of access and each carries its own tables, so the document is the natural tenancy boundary. There is a hosted service alongside the self-hosted build, with per-user API keys. fastn keeps each customer's key scoped and handles the document-level addressing.
In your product
Embedded for your customers. Per-tenant auth, no per-customer code, maintained by fastn.
Let a customer connect their own Grist document so your product works with the tables they already maintain.
Read records from a table with the customer's own column structure preserved.
Add or update records from your product, skipping computed columns rather than failing on them.
Reference a document per customer, so one tenant's data is never reachable from another's connection.
For your AI agents
Governed, audited access for the agents you build, through the MCP server.
An agent reads a table and answers a question without the whole document being exported.
An agent appends a record within governed permissions, with the write audited per tenant.
An agent checks which columns are formulas before proposing an update.
Example prompt
What are the totals by category in this table, and which records changed this month?
Set up Grist in 4 steps
- 01Enable the Grist connector from your fastn dashboard.
- 02Have each customer authorise their own Grist account, so calls run under their credentials rather than a shared key.
- 03Decide which records, datasets and fields your product needs, map those fields, then enable the actions and triggers you want.
- 04Call it from your product and expose it to your agents through the same governed connection.
Why teams use the Grist integration
What you get by embedding it with fastn instead of building it yourself.
- Ship a Grist integration without building it. Your customers connect their own Grist account inside your product and work their records, datasets and fields there, with no per-customer code on your side.
- Handle the part that actually costs time: schemas differ per customer and change without notice, and volumes can be large. fastn owns the auth, token refresh, rate limits, pagination and breaking-change fixes, so a Grist update is not your on-call problem.
- One integration serves your product and your agents. The same governed Grist connection powers in-product features and gives AI agents scoped, audited access, so you read and write your customers' data where it already lives without wiring it twice.
Used by these teams
Compare with
Airtable
BaserowWorks well with
NotionOften used alongside
Tools the same teams tend to run next to Grist, across other categories.
Anthropic Claude
OpenAI
Azure OpenAI
Hugging FaceGrist integration FAQ
How do I add a Grist integration to my product?
Enable the Grist connector in your fastn dashboard, then let each customer authenticate their own Grist account. fastn handles the OAuth flow, token storage and refresh per tenant, so there is no Grist client code in your app and no per-customer branch in your codebase. Setup is 4 steps.
Do my customers each connect their own Grist account?
Yes. Every connection is scoped to the individual customer, so each authorises their own Grist account and only ever sees their own records, datasets and fields. That per-tenant isolation is the point of an embedded integration: you support the long tail of customer setups without maintaining an integration per customer.
Can AI agents use this Grist integration?
Yes. The same connection is exposed to your agents through the fastn MCP gateway, with permissions scoped per tenant and every call audited. An agent reads a table and answers a question without the whole document being exported.
Who maintains the Grist integration?
fastn does. When Grist changes an endpoint, deprecates a field or alters its auth, the fix lands in the connector rather than in your backlog, and your customers' connections keep working.
Does the Grist integration adapt when a customer's schema changes?
Schema and field mapping is configuration per customer, so a change on their side is a mapping update rather than a code change and a release on yours.
How are large Grist reads handled?
Pagination and throttling are handled for you, and initial backfills are rate-limited so a large import does not exhaust a customer's API allowance.
What can I build with the Grist integration?
A common starting point: let a customer connect their own Grist document so your product works with the tables they already maintain. Teams also use it for the other use cases listed above, and expose it to agents for governed reads and writes.
How much does the Grist integration cost?
It is included. Pricing is based on connected accounts, not on how many connectors you enable, so adding Grist does not change your per-connector cost. You can start free with 3 connected accounts.
Add Grist to your product
Start free with 3 connected accounts. No sales call required, and no per-customer integration code.