Hi @Alyssa !
I am Simon Lee, owner of a few IT companies such as Simafri. We even have a company which create software based on Symfony and ReactJS.
So why did we decide to go for Honeycode if we can built our own software ? Because we mainly use Honeycode for our inventories and to manage our administrative process workflows. And this is not worth it to develop it by ourselves. Moreover our processes evolve regulary, and so we have to adapt the database in a regular basis too, but these small improvments are so time consuming for so minor changes....
Before we were using Google sheets, because of its simplicity of set up and the fact that we can work on it with a team (and also remotly, even from the phones). But there was a huge lack of basic features (or too difficult to set them up), such as to link data from one sheet to another. And Honeycode perfectly address this issue.
Another problem with Google sheet is that we have to give a kind of all or nothing access to data. In Honeycode we love to build an app for that or that user, with data and a specific UI for his own needs.
But hey I'm not here to advertise for you You have a great product. Actually, 2 years ago I was thinking to build a similar product as we noticed that many clients need a simple but very specific software. And using Symfony / ReactJS from sctrach for their use case is kind of smashing a fly with a hammer... For these clients, the needs in development were almost the same: few basic tables with some basic ManyToOne/OneToMany/ManyToMany relations, a CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) structure, which we can implement with Rest API, and a specific UI (simple but time consuming to build and secure). But we didn't have time and resources to go further in this idea. It needed a higher level of abstraction.
Then I discover the no-code solutions, and a few months ago, your software, and that's it, you did it.
So we jumped into it, and we are almost very happy with it.
Ok so what are we expecting now:
- Support for uploads... Moreover you can use the very good S3 service for this... We really need this, take a photo with the app, store it in S3 and kind of link it to Honeycode. That would be terrific. In a more general idea, take advantage of all the features of a smartphone (GPS, etc.).
- More beautiful UI for apps. And maybe a easier way to build them. For example, if you want to drag and drop a block, sometimes it doesn't select the right block, but the segment below it... It is annoying and stressful
- Possibility to give access to guests for our apps (not team member). So we can build some kind of survey for example. I know that your business model is not adapted to this, but that would be cool.
- I know that you aim people/companies who/which do not have IT knowledge, but hey you know, clients won't do it by themselves anyway... I can buy buns, cheese and meat and do an hamburger by myself, but if I have money, I would prefer fo to MacDonald's and make someone does it for me... So what would be nice is maybe to set up a more developped program for partners like us, a way that we can work for the final clients, set up their own Honeycode. But we don't want to be paid one time as a consultant. We try to be as smart as Jeff Besos, and we want to be paid as a maintenance IT company with a recurring subscription, otherwise it doesn't worth it
I have another question: how secure is Honeycode ? I guess you do regular backups, but how often and where are they stored ? How can we do our own backups and download them (or store them in our own S3 bucket) ? Or can we restore tables by ourselves ?
And please do not rise prices when Honeycode will become more and more popular, because this is one of the main drawback of an external SaaS service, and also why clients (and us) sometimes prefer to develop our own solution even if something already exist in the market...
Ok I think that's enough for now.
Sorry for my English, I'm French.
Cheers
Simon