Hi all,
UI builder newb here, I hope somebody can assist? I am a marketer working on a basic B2B SaaS MVP. I have had somebody help me setup the backend in backendless over the last few months which as worked out great, love BE. It is basically 90% functional, ready for MVP usage in any case.
My original plan was to use Bubble then for frontend as it seemed the easiest way to make a SaaS web app based MVP, Backendless UI builder didn’t really seem "enough’ at the time after a cursory glance (maybe a year back) and everybody always says use Bubble.
My app is basically a data as a service type app, it just generates useful market research data and provides that to users in a simple frontend with data tables. Users can create a new project with simple forms and view the data in different ways in multiple “advanced” data tables in a simple user admin area dashboard (marketing pages already covered separately, that’s what I do in Wordpress). Later I also need to provide the data as an API service with usage billing, which I am sure I can do with BE as well?
My feedback and quotes recently for time required to do the frontend in Bubble for what seems like a simple app, basically just a few forms and data tables, seems unreasonable so far, min 50 to over 200 hours, which doesn’t feel right since the most complex part was the backend and my developer got this done in less then 30 hours in BE. I think its the BE integration which is unfamiliar to the freelancers and shooting up my prices.
I have now looked at the UI builder again, the example apps and they look pretty awesome, especially the CMS one and I am sure I didn’t see these a little while back. It seems like it could do exactly what I need and is most likely be far more efficient to setup and use since the backend is already in BE
I was wondering if i could get a bread ballpark idea of how much time it would take somebody with BE UI builder experience to take a template like the CMS template as the foundation and create about 7 different screens, create 2 forms for me to post data to the Node code on my backend and then to retrieve data from the BE DB (only 2-3 tables) and display it in a few different data table screens, basically the same data from the same tables just duplicated tables and tweaked to display differently each time with some different calculation columns.
Is it possible to give an idea of difficulty and time for creating an “advanced” datatable in BE and I would also like to confirm how much flexibility there is with tables in UI builder. As my tables and the data they show are the whole product basically, i really need to be able to make them exactly how I need them and customize in any way that would be required. Are these tables done in code meaning they can be created to function and be visually designed in any way that I need?
Also with billing, does BE and the Stripe module allow any kind of billing later that Stripe allows, usage, memberships, membership tiers. How would SaaS membership billing usually be handled for a BE app, are there any external apps recommended like chargebee, Outseta etc or does/can BE handle all this membership and billing stuff itself? I know it already deals with user management and auth.
Lastly is there anybody that could assist me with this project that has good experience with UI builder? To be transparent this is a personal bootstrapped project and my budget is limited so I need a “lean and mean” cost efficient UI for this initial MVP to test viability. It has been difficult finding freelancers familiar with BE elsewhere.
Thanks for any feedback!
Regards,
Jarad