Hi, just thought I’d introduce myself, as a newbie to the WeWeb community. I come as a founder of a startup, and also the developer of an app in bubble.io, which I was forced to abandon due to bubble’s pricing changes (~$35/m fixed was due to become >$1000/m variable once I extrapolated my costs, due to them changing to consumption-based pricing). Naturally, as an unfunded startup going for a B2C model, which is NEVER a good fit for a consumption pricing model - I started looking elsewhere, and stumbled across WeWeb.
Push forward a few months, plus completion of all the academy modules, and I’m on my way to rebuilding my entire bubble app from ground-up in WeWeb, and in all honesty - it’s a breath of fresh air working with it. For all of the promises of a full-stack no-code platform, I found many gaps in core functionality in bubble which I was immediately grateful in WeWeb, seeing numerous native and basic core functions (e.g. loops and switch statements!!!) that are just not easy to achieve in bubble.
So now, I have WeWeb, with a Xano back end, Postmark for mail, Segment for CDM, and Webflow for my general site. And it all fits together, just nicely. For those interested - the selling points for me:
NOT consumption-based pricing
Ability to export a Vue.js package of the entire app
Pure client-side, native functionality (a must for a B2C app!)
Fantastically simple and functional responsive design, with pre-canned components making light work of what was typically months of work in bubble
Did I mention loops and switch statements?
It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing however:
I was incredibly puzzled at the lack of page permission controls in all but higher-paid plans. As someone who for my day job provides IT security risk advisory services, this is something that should never be seen. And this is quite simply that it’s incredibly important to ensure a “secure by default” design - and gating pages is the simplest and most effective way to achieve this. Page is only for admins? Make it so. Page is for public? Leave it open. But don’t leave the option there, for it not to work, then expect everyone to build up workflows on every page load to essentially replicate the functionality, but in a potentially more buggy and less consistent manner. Those with advanced needs can still build their own approach, but there really needs to be a mass-market baseline approach. I really hope WeWeb will change this in future.
The editor seems to have a lot of reliability issues, and eventually just stops working (oddly enough, it appears to go completely offline as I am presented a “no response from server”). Perhaps this is genuinely a server error, but so far I am encountering this kind of issue every few days and sometimes it doesn’t recover for several hours. I do also notice quite a number of typos in various places - so I think perhaps it may simply be bugs slipping through QA processes somewhere.
I’d love to see a general list of supported JS functions available for formulas. For example, having to add a plugin for “Date” just to get the current time seems a bit heavy-handed to me.
I’d like to see scoping for variables (e.g. by default have them global as current, but also allowing some to be page-level, or even lower), and perhaps an easier way to group them - as some interfaces list the full inventory of all variables, without folders, meaning I need to name them all in a specific way just to work out which ones are from where.
The editor follows page redirects, even in edit mode. This drives me absolutely insane on a daily basis…
To be fair, I do know WeWeb is still quite young - but I am very impressed with what I’m seeing so far. I have yet to actually publish my app (still in development), so I am however not entirely sure how many of my concerns will actually remain relevant in future. Either way, glad to be here and looking forward to seeing my full app built properly in WeWeb (and to finally cancel my bubble account for good)!
Hope WeWeb keeps up the good work, and whatever you do - PLEASE don’t go the consumption pricing route! Talk with the community first if there are concerns about viability at current pricing. I really don’t want to have to rebuild my app for a third time…
Hey, I’m glad you like WeWeb. Welcome I as well as many on this forum share your opinion on the permissions and roles, which should be a must, and docs (that are by the way being worked on). Overall though, I think WeWeb team is doing things right, and they do listen eventually, it just naturally takes some time At the end of the day WeWeb is just a startup still finding it’s own pricing according to our always evolving needs. For example they’ve updated their pricing quite recently where they dropped higly requested and frown upon limit of plugins. So they definitely listen.
It would definitely be a game changer in terms of security if roles were available in the base plan. Or at least provided a less buggy-bulletproof way of redirecting non authorized users out of the protected pages.
Regarding to Bubble… Back in my mind I feel, that every platform has to end up like Bubble, because people are very wasteful if you don’t incentivize them to save the resources, so it might end up costing a lot in the long run, but I hope this never comes in case of WeWeb, or comes as late as possible.
Especially with people using no-code, you can expect them to be unaware and inexperienced in terms of performance and optimization, which leads to ineffectivity and waste, which in turn leads to higher costs.
Hopefully the bright minds here come up with something that will avoid this issue. It’s a so called tragedy of the common, that’s why Bubble switched their pricing.
Anyway, I hope you’re gonna find yourself well here with us, and if there is anything, feel free to post a thread here WeWeb has an amazing community.
I am hoping that by WeWeb purely being a front-end player (without the middleware server-side API framework and data layer), WeWeb can avoid this trap with the nocode platforms. It’s ultimately much cheaper to host a web interface that can serve largely static (and therefore cached) js/Vue packages, with the client directly making the calls to another provider. The only real delivery costs come from the dev work in building the editor and supporting infrastructure, and ensuring operations. These are typically fairly fixed costs. With bubble, they abstract literally everything - so they are busy untangling the mess and trying to optimise a full stack right to an overhead-heavy data and API layer. I’m not surprised they discovered the platform was unviable and massively increased costs. I think there’s also a target market difference - bubble clearly doesn’t care for small scale clients and startups - I suspect they have realised their bread and butter is actually enterprises looking to build internal interfaces for legacy modernisation. They are also very heavy on vendor lock-in, since you have zero ability to export. My two cents
I couldn’t agree more. Nocode is really targeted at this audience, or those (like myself) who know how to code but would rather focus my efforts on building a business and getting clients, than writing native cross-platform compatible code. This is my biggest challenge really, as I do not have anybody helping me build any of this code - time is too valuable!
Ultimately, what Weweb is doing through the academy is the best way to help with educating the users, and I really appreciate the side-topics @Joyce goes through in the tutorials, where she may delve into different ways to achieve an outcome, and why one should do something in a particular way over another. This is especially important when she talks about data retrieval from an API and filtering at client-side vs server-side, which I think is probably one of the biggest mistakes made by new devs. Perhaps more hints in the UI, such as when a user applies a filter client-side that it should popup and say “are you sure about this? See this tutorial regarding securely filtering data”.
On the performance features, the only possible way would be perhaps including debug output (in non-live versions) that include metrics on CPU utilisation, memory and durations via the console. Any server-side metrics would need to be available in a reporting interface of some form. Bubble is in the process of implementing this, but the calculation is so opaque it’s very hard to work out ways to make things more efficient. Most of my WU utilisation was actually caused through workarounds for basic missing features (such as loops!), which would usually require using a workflow to call another workflow on a list, or transferring the data to the client to do the loop, then sending data back to the server to get the new data. As you can imagine, this is VERY wasteful and has no real alternative in their world.
Either way, very glad to hear your views on WeWeb - I’m looking forward to building up more with it, and let’s hope things all work out for the best!
Hi,
I am also producing my first app with Xano and WeWeb.
I was adviced to use MailGrid. Do you find Postmark better?
Also, what are you using Webflow for? Just as a landing page for your WeWeb app or are you using Webflow for a more comprehensive website?
thank you
Michael
I as well as many on this forum share your opinion on the permissions and roles, which should be a must, and docs (that are by the way being worked on). Overall though, I think WeWeb team is doing things right, and they do listen eventually, it just naturally takes some time