redSling?
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Anybody ever use this product?
any thoughts on it please? -
@Yonah-S As a developer I'm always a bit skeptical of no code and low code solutions. That's how MS Access was touted and what a disaster that was. It all sounds good, but normally it's "pay nothing up front" but then "pay forever because you are trapped."
redSling doesn't seem to show any pricing. That makes it really hard to know how much it will be potentially beneficial. It sounds nice, but do you have access to the resulting code? Can you run anywhere? Does it generate quality code? Is it secure? how will it be hosted? How do you make the kinds of decisions that make all the big difference when writing software if you can't write the software? This appears to take all of the important protections that both your IT team and your development team are tasked with doing and says "don't worry about all that important stuff, trust us to make all those decisions for you without any insight into your business or decision process and no alignment with your needs."
The idea of a code builder like this is great, in theory. But in reality, how do they pay for it without screwing the end users? Maybe they do a great job, but nothing on the site gives me confidence. And there's nothing on the site to build that confidence on... how do we find out the important bits? It looks like it is designed for people not smart enough to ask the basic questions from either a business OR a tech perspective. As a CEO, this looks downright scary and if my managers started using this, I'd have to question their sanity.
Pricing would help. But more importantly, lots of security and safety questions that they conveniently don't mention - which along speaks volumes.
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Here's another way to look at it... coding is hard. Companies that do nothing but produce code often screw it up big time because people think that it is easier than it is and treat those teams like low code solutions. Doing that leaves knowledgeable engineers out of the loop and the IT oversight out of the loop. This type of solution feels like it is designed to prey on people making those mistakes - people who know that their stuff is going to fail so they at least can fail while feeling a bit more in control (while actually being less.) It feels like they are targeting really proud CEOs who have no clue what they are doing and will think that they are being "smart" by not getting the oversight of their CIO and CTO.
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Is their website built using their own tools? Because none of the links on the site work. Go down to the menu, it's hidden at the bottom (who designed this site?)... it's all broken. It's just words on the page, not links. This can't be a legit company, the basic pieces you need to talk to their first customer aren't there! It's a scam, run away.
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Also the login button isn't plumbed. jajaja
Their video is a joke. This doesn't appear to be a real product.
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It seems relatively new based on a quick Google search. What made you consider it as a viable "no code" solution? What other options are you considering?
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That they say "can build any business application that you can build with Java or .NET" is super weird. That makes no sense. First, neither of those frameworks would make a ton of sense as a starting point. But given them the benefit of the doubt, either one CAN work, they just seem to be odd choices. But okay, assume that one makes sense. Why would they make their solution have to support both? That's SO much more work than building a system to only do one. It means you have two development teams replicating their work for no reason. It implies that the system was built by people who don't know how to make software. That's a pretty bad starting point - I wouldn't trust them to write software, but I have to trust them to write the software that writes my software AND to be my IT team. That's asking a lot.
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We use Zoho for a lot of our infrastructure, but even thought they offer no-code solutions, we are always super wary of it. Even if it does an okay job and we trust them as developers and their security, it's such a massive risk to have software built this way. As a business, we could never put anything important into a database that we don't control. What of Zoho gets out of that market or gets breached - we have no access, no control, no safety mechanism. We are trapped. I can't fathom any qualified CEO allowing a "no code" solution for any business app. It's such a staggering degree of risk and I've yet to find one that would save money versus hiring a developer to do it.
And it requires the existing team to do the work instead of handing it off. So let's say redSling costs $10K and a developer costs $10K. In one case, you have to pay for a dangerous product AND you have to pay the people who work on it (from your in house team.) In the other, you outsource that work (or hire additionally in house) and maintain control AND you don't tie up your existing staff doing the work you just paid to have done. Instead you have an expert doing expert work rather than a random person doing random work.
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Just priced out Zoho Creator just to remind myself of the cost...
It would cost the same as 1-2 full time dedicated developers for us to use Zoho No Code. And we'd have to have a "no code developer" work on it. So we'd need one full time "no code dev" making the apps instead of having developers doing the apps. And since the product cost as much as two developers for our size company and we'd have to hire someone to make the apps, that's about the cost of three full time developers using professional tools with the results being things we can deploy and use ourselves.
And with Zoho we are trapped with paying to use the apps even once we are done developing. If our apps are done being made, we have the safety of being able to reduce some or even all of the developers in case we ran out of money but would not also lose access to the app in that case.
So not only is the cost for Zoho no code absurd, the risk is also crazy. Now that's just one example, but I think that it is indicative.
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@Danp I am not considering any solution right now. This was a product brought to me by a buddy and I am just vetting it.
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It seems relatively new based on a quick Google search. What made you consider it as a viable "no code" solution? What other options are you considering?
Pocketbase is a decent solution for self hosted.
Dgraph is another solution for self hosted if you want a graph database and GraphQL.
Pocketbase has an admin interface and Dgraph uses Ratel for an interface, but neither have a customer facing interface. That would need to be written, so not 100% no code but the db and APIs are auto generated with both of these.
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