No Code/Low Code, is it Worth it at Scale?

‍

For a number of years now if you required a piece of software there were two options: either make a product from scratch with a full software development team or get something to work that’s already out there.

‍

The challenge with a full dev team is largely time. It takes a while to get a custom piece of software built exactly for you from the ground up. Testing, debugging, workflow re-ordering, and integration take months (at a minimum).

‍

The main challenge with an existing piece of software is more obvious; you get it right away but anything that doesn’t fit you need to put up with or structure workarounds for. It’s like living in an Airbnb; you have to make do with the furniture and decoration and kitchen utensils that are already there.

‍

Low/No Code development provides a third option.

The capacity to build a piece of software in 1/5 of the time a from-the-ground custom app development team would require. It’s a little bit like prefab housing. You get to start right away with a number of templates and narrow down to what you need very quickly. Then you can push people through to test quickly, debug quickly, and change quickly, because swapping out a template is much quicker than rebuilding one.

‍

‍

And the template library is growing: very very quickly. So the short answer is that Low Code and No Code development are now, in 2022, very viable options to get a large-scale piece of software built out. The bottom line is that you can get the majority of everything you need from low code in a fraction of the time, and still hire a full stack developer to make the specific personalized tweaks you might require with money and time to spare.

‍

Then comes the question that we as an app development agency get regularly: “Can low-code development scale with us?” Beyond the initial build- can it handles thousands or even millions of users without crashing, can reliably handle our data, will the low-code platforms be around if we are still around in 10 years? The short answer is, most of the time, yes. Many low-code platforms that are just now gaining significant traction are already 10+ years old, like our favorite, Bubble.io. Having grown to its current state with just cashflow while having also recently raised a 100M round, Bubble, and many others, are here to stay.

‍

As far as being able to handle large user loads- we’ve personally had app development clients with 1000+ simultaneous users where the app handles it just fine. Most apps will lag or crash with too many users at once if their servers can’t handle it, so depending on your model, 1000 users at a time may rarely happen, but we do know other low-code apps with 10,000+ simultaneous users and 100,000+ overall users. While we’re confident the technology will grow to support even larger scale apps with time, if you hit 100k+ users we can help you transition from low-code development to full-stack app development, as you’ll likely be doing very well at that point!

‍

As Chris Wanstrath, the former CEO of code-sharing repository Github, put it,

“The future of coding is no coding at all.”

‍