Hello! I am really enjoying Honeycode and am working on building my first app. I am a consultant who works with smaller businesses who are desperately trying to cut their overheads and increase efficiency during lockdown. Some of my clients have asked me to create apps for them in Honeycode which they would be willing to pay me a low ongoing fee for. I intend to charge a low ongoing fee for my time on an ongoing basis so that I can help them with continuous updates and new apps, but I don't understand how I can set up an app for multiple clients to use. Is this possible in Honey Code and what is the best way to set that up? Do I need multiple accounts even if they are small customers (5 users or less)?
Hi @Sarah-honeycode, welcome to the community! Great question and idea you have and I'm excited to hear that you will be helping small businesses improve efficiencies with Honeycode. As @AndrewB had mentioned, we currently have a 1:1 relationship between a Honeycode account and a team. So in your case, you may want to consider having separate accounts/teams per client of yours. That will prevent sharing profile details across multiple clients, such as name, email, and role, of everyone on their team. For more info I'd suggest checking out these two articles article Adding Team Members & Upgrading Your Team Plan (contains our three plans).
Hope this helps but come back if you have any additional questions! Happy Honeycoding.
Hi AJ, Thanks for trying to help - unfortunately your solution doesn't work for me as that would mean I have access to the customer's data, which clearly causes quite a few GDPR issues. Clients want consultants to help with the app but don't want to give access to their data which may be confidential. Ideally it would be great to have a solution whereby as a consultant we can build apps for our clients and maintain them, but then charge those apps out to be used on an ongoing basis (similar to what Bubble.io offer).
@Sarah-honeycode thanks for the follow up and additional information. I understand the requirement now and you are correct, the current sharing model in Honeycode does not directly support that type of engagement with customers, where a builder can build and maintain an app while not having access to the data. Perhaps there could be ways around this such as using temporary accounts, sample data, etc. but that could become burdensome and may not scale well.
Will take a note and communicate the need to our product team. Thanks again.
I'd also be interested in how we as consultants can work on the apps without having access to the client's proprietary information.
I am in talks with a local charity farm about building them an app to manage and categorise incoming donations, so data-confidentiality is an important requirement.
Yes unfortunately Amazon don't seem to have thought this through and could therefore miss out on a lot of opportunities to increase the usage of HoneyCode. I currently have at least 8 customers who I could build an app for using Honeycode if there was a way to keep data confidential for the customer.
I think the best option for now is for the client to create their own account, and I would then build the app using their log in. Once built they can change their password and I can give them some basic training in how to add users and make simple changes. If they need more development in future it would have to be done via screen-share so they can observe. Not ideal but as it's a fairly straightforward solution it shouldn't be too much of an issue. Matt
Great conversation here and the input really helps. Internally we had a lengthy chat discussion on this topic because of this thread, so thank you for that.
There are certainly workarounds but they are a bit kludgy and therefore not really recommended. The reason is that most if not all of these become more complicated when it comes to ongoing maintenance of the app once in production with real data. It's one thing to build something and hand it off, it's entirely different when it comes time to tweak or add improvements to that app later down the road.
I'd say for now just rest assured that your feedback has been heard loud and clear and we will continue to think through and explore future options related to this topic.
Thanks @aj. @Matt_BicycleBook I would be careful around your solution - it may seem straightforward but as AJ pointed out it has potential pitfalls around ongoing development and maintenance. Also, another thing to consider here is the commercial aspect. With Bubble app, you can build the app and charge the customer to use it, while you keep making it better for the customer as time goes by. This way you are able to offer more value to the customers and also monetise your skills and efforts for an ongoing income. This solution would benefit us as the consultant / developer, the customer and also Amazon.
