I never used no-code platforms until now mainly because I code myself. But I thought I share my experience building a weekend project using no-code and my thoughts on it.

RefKid is a platform to share referral codes and let new people discover new brands to get perks when they sign up.

I get a lot of referral codes and there isn’t a clear place I can share them, I thought this could be a good setup to try no-code. The idea is to share your referral codes and let new people discover them when they are signing up, usually as new customers. I built a dashboard to manually approve each referral to ensure it is safe (links etc) and consistent. Then the main page and brands show referrals at random to give everyone an equal chance of getting a reward and you have a profile page.

There are many no-code platforms out there, some are more focused on tool building and some are actually full stack. I decided to use a platform called Bubble.io to build it. The main factor was that it is indeed a full-stack service from UI building to database and deployment they cover it.

Positives of no-code

  • Handles authentication, security etc well. These are tricky topics to get right if coding yourself. In my experience, things like implementing OAuth (Google Login etc), password hashing can be difficult to get correctly.
  • The UI building is actually quite customisable (positioning, mobile view, components etc) but the process is very manual. They recently announced an AI page builder, I tried it and it is awful because it just gives the most generic looking pages. While they have re-usable components, they are not as flexible as coding yourself.
  • The database is linked and ready to go, so it was very easy to add, update and delete things such as referrals, brands in my case.
  • Easy to deploy! I developed it over the weekend and deployed it Monday. But to be honest, I could almost tell what the platform was doing behind the scenes and what it needed to iron out any issues.
  • There are many plugins such as Google Analytics and consent cookie banners to expand a little but some useful components / shortcuts are not free and offered by other companies in a marketplace.
  • Hopefully stays up to date, it seems when upgrading Bubble version you are required to check but otherwise it should run compared to custom coding which we regularly check for dependency updates and build with the latest version of packages.

Negatives of no-code

  • The performance of the website is way way below par from my engineering experience. Things take time to load and you can tell they push a lot of front-end code (they call engine) to run the website which makes it bulky.
  • It’s difficult to assess the pricing / cost because it is a mixture of page loads, database queries in their own internal workload units, they don’t properly explain it. If the website was to become really popular I’ll probably end up with a huge bill.
  • Structuring the project, pages, functions (login, add referral etc) was a bit of a mess. For example, you have to add authentication guards to each page manually (pages like user account such that only the logged in user can see it) whereas most projects I worked on you would add those sort of safety barriers at group level routing.
  • There are no automated tests (e.g. does the login page redirect already logged in users) as far as software engineering is concerned. You are encouraged to manually test (which we also do when coding) but as the project grows you might easily break something.
  • You’re locked in (!) The design, code and data is locked into their platform and that is what they want. I would normally recommend using open tools.

So what is the recommendation?

If your minimum viable product (MVP) / smoke-test is a CRUD (create, read, update, delete) application at its core like mine with referrals brands etc, then it could be very suited. But if you have any further custom requirements which might have unique selling points like performance, outside integration, innovation then probably not a good idea for you.

Each no-code platform will only list its advantages to gain customers, make sure to do your research and see if it fits your project.

You can reach out on my contact page if you have similar projects and need independent advice.