I used Bildr for over a year running many projects through it.
If you love, absolutely love to build things and enjoy endless ways and configurations to test out ideas, Bildr is for you. For all others, it is a technology that requires a serious commitment of time (think 20-40 hours a week) to learn if you are not natively a developer. Here are some notable learnings from a non-developer who used Bildr:
* Despite the no-code marketing, you need to know CSS and Java to make anything really impactful that can scale.
* The collections (a variation of databases) is really difficult to use, connect and refresh.
* Bandwidth and speed are a big concern if your project intends to house all your data and frontend.
* 3rd party support to integrate is very limited and leads to many members in the community to help if they can.
* Regular updates to the product create regular breakage in other parts of your project, leading to many hours, days or even weeks of troubleshooting and rework.
* Pricing is a bit steep for what you get.
* Pro users only get access to personalized 1:1 sessions that provide focused help. To Bildr's credit, these sessions are very valuable, but happen every 2 weeks. If your project requires much more extensive help, it is very hard to get support for it on a more meaningful basis.
* Training was getting better but still is far behind other players in the market. It is hard to get started on doing Bildr without a serious learning curve.
* Plugging in AI beyond the usual ChatGPT prompts was very difficult if not impossible to do.
Bildr has some really really good people. Nice members who help out when they can. Bildr is really a good tool for a person who knows software development, CSS, Java or database structures and how to build APIs.
I imagine things will only get better and look forward to the great advancements in the platform in the future.
