Build in Public: GoKiddo [Part 4]

It’s time for another update on my journey of building GoKiddo and it has been an eventful few weeks.

If you missed Part 3 , you can check it out here.

3, 2, 1, Launch… Right? Well, no.

I finished building all of the features I needed to launch GoKiddo and then BAM , Bubble.io burst my bubble by announcing that they will be making changes to their pricing structure which will have a significant impact on everyone who makes use of their platform to build web applications.

I am not going to go into too much detail about exactly what this entails, but in summary:

• They are moving from a capacity plan i.e. how many people can use your app at the same time (if you need more capacity go to a higher plan)
• To a pricing structure that charges you per action that a user takes on your site.

Why does this make a difference?

For GoKiddo to be succesful, the site needs to have a lot of traffic. All of these users will take a lot of actions (each time they view a page or click on a button), which will become 10-20 times more expensive with the new pricing structure.

Due to this, the new pricing structure makes it impossible to use Bubble.io for building GoKiddo. This leaves me with no choice - I need to find another way to build GoKiddo.

Lessons Learnt

This sucks. I was in a mini-depro for a few days after I realised that all the work I did in the last month has essentially been wiped out by a single pricing change.

Come to think of it, if this was possible - was it really such a good idea to build GoKiddo on Bubble in the first place?

Platform Risk & Vendor Lock-in

I learned a major lesson about vendor lock-in and platform risk during this process. Yes, Bubble makes it extremely easy to build a web app. But at what cost?

If you want to take your application/code and leave the platform/vendor, can you? No.

Vendor lock-in or platform risk refers to the situation where your company becomes dependent on a specific vendor’s product or platform to the extent that switching to an alternative product or platform becomes difficult, time-consuming, or costly.

I would ask anyone considering using any platform to build a business: to what extent are you locked into using the service/vendor and can you “leave” if you want to?

What now?

After I recovered from my pity party, I started scouring the interent for other solutions to my problem. My criteria is:

• No vendor lock-in
• A strong community
• Affordable pricing structure

After extensive googling, I found 2 open-source software frameworks which meets the above criteria.

• React Native (Developed by Meta aka Facebook)
• Flutter (Developed by Google)

Both these software frameworks allow you to code in a single code base and publish it to the web AND the Apple & Android App Stores (which was not possible to do with Bubble.io, which could mean this whole debacle may be a blessing in disguise )

The problem is, I am not that great at coding

React Native is built using the Javascript coding language and Flutter is built using Googles Dart language. I know enough about these coding languages to write simple code to solve small problems, but not nearly enough to build entire apps.

Luckily, I don’t have to be

Luckily there are platforms which allow you to build an application “visually”, while the platform writes the real code behind the scenes.

• For React Native there is DraftBit
• For Flutter there is FlutterFlow

This left me with one last choice. Which platform do I choose? It was a really difficult choice to make, but in the end it won’t make much of a difference.

Both platforms make use of open-source coding languages and if you are unhappy with them, you can take your code and leave and hire real developers to continue working on the project.

I decided to go with Flutterflow , seeing that they are backed by Google (I like Google more than Facebook), their pricing is better, their community is stronger and they have better capabilities with web applications.

Here I go again

So now I will start building GoKiddo from the ground up. Luckily I have a much clearer idea of what I want it to be after building it on Bubble.io and hopefully the second time is much easier.

In the end, this should be a much better solution, because when I am done, users will be able to access GoKiddo from the web and download a native app to their Apple or Android device (which will allow me to send them push-notifications and keep them coming back for more).

Thank you for reading

If you made it this far, thank you for reading these newsletters. I hope by writing them, I can encourage at least one person to pursue an idea they have and who knows, maybe make the world a little better.