We decided to limit what we currently market it as to first try and get some traction in a smaller niche for now. However, since resources are limited for an early days startup, we also made this decision based on the following technical considerations.
When designing internal tools, the aesthetics often takes less priority than functionality, thus it's ok and maybe even great if most internal tools look the same, which makes building a great component library a whole lot easier. Also for internal tools you mostly have repeat users, so browser caching helps a lot and thus we can be more lenient on bundle size. When building consumer apps aesthetics and load time is often a high priority, although we have a few ideas to improve on this as well in the future when we have more resources available.
However, if you are building an app where these two constraints is not a high priority, Lowdefy can be a great fit! We really tried to design config schema which can really scale as well.
As far as auth goes, that number 1 on our roadmap. We will be adding OAuth/OpenId Connect authentication, and then you will be able to use services like Auth0, Okta, or any OAuth provider.
We plan on providing our own user service, with group based user authorization that will integrate easily with Lowdefy apps, and offer different pricing tiers to support the needs of business users and SAAS apps.
Currently we don’t have any authentication or authorization built in, but it is the next feature we are adding. We will be adding OAuth/OpenId Connect authentication, and then you will be able to use services like Auth0 or Okta.
We also plan on providing our own user service, with group based user authorization that will integrate easily with Lowdefy apps.
We have developed a simple application schema that is easy to understand, write, remember and of course version control. Yet, flexible enough to create UIs that require advanced logic. This makes it easy to learn how to write applications and easier to maintain consistency from one application to the next.
Lowdefy only provides the application layer and connects to your external data sources or APIs, allowing you to access data where it is stored.
Lowdefy uses webpack module federation as a micro-frontend strategy to load blocks on demand. This enables developers to further extend the functionality by building custom Lowdefy blocks.
Our story:
We have been building Lowdefy since May 2019, and have been using it internally for client software projects since January 2020. We planned to sell it as a SaaS product but decided that an open-source approach is more in line with our ultimate vision for Lowdefy.
Why open-source?
It is important for us that our clients are not locked into a single provider when building a tool.
Building a community and trust is one of our primary objectives, since Lowdefy apps can be shared and open-sourced with ease, we hope to see many open-source Lowdefy apps in the future.
On our roadmap:
We plan to monetize Lowdefy by providing optional, nice-to-have services, that integrate well and empower the community.