Build apps instead of themes and cruds

There are a large number of end users who are managing their data in excel sheets or even tools like gists or notes and they want to move [1] to a more robust system, in terms of consistency/stability/user friendliness.

There is a clear scope for a large variety of data management applications and get this available to (non technical) end users at conveniently and cheap.

These are the options at present which these users have:

1. Talk to a freelancer/company to build a website
2. Use something like WordPress and customize it infinitely

Both of these approaches have issues:

• Costly or time-intensive (here in my country people are being charged up to USD 300 for those old 5 page sites)
• You don’t know what you are going to get
• Both in terms of back-end features and front-end quality and features
• Further customization becomes exponentially costly in both cases
• Building such apps targeted to each niche is currently prohibitive

The demand for niche apps is going to be low for an individual app (unless you go heavy on marketing)

The cost cannot be high as well, a well informed end user is okay with up to ~50–100 USD in subscription, or a one time cost of up to 300–500 USD

Obviously the concept of CMS is not new and was originally intended to fight these issues, and they have been very successful at this. But since the last 15 years we have seen a lot more penetration of internet compared to the time before that in major countries. Their needs are similar same and different at the same time. Everyone wants to move away from document based management to logical data management. But wine-cellar management is different from kennel management. If you would search for available options today, you would notice that the tech industry has yet to keep the pace in those areas.

• Many target a single OS
• Some are not multi-user
• No mobile apps available
• No responsive websites

A collaboration of frontend and backend open source developers can fasten bridging this gap

Backend

• No vendor lock in, APIs following some standard
• No saas, but cloud
• No artifical restrictions
• Independent APIs which can be easily re-implemented otherwise
• Can be run offline (no internet dependency)

Frontend

• Component based UI
• Tailored for specific use case
• Customizable, allow end user to predictably customize his views
• Can be run offline
• Independent, can be plugged to any backend

How would the execution look like ?

Current:

• Browse through a catalog of generic themes [categories like: free themes/admin themes/angular themes]
• Buy a theme which looks closest to end users needs
• Customize it to make the actual site using components
• Plugin in a HTTP client to talk to backend
• Expose couple of APIs for data/user from backend
• Integrate, deploy

New approach:

• Browse the a catalog of app specific themes [categories like: wine-celler/kennel management/blogging/… ]
• Buy a app (app is basically a theme + backend exposing app specific apis)
• checkout the YML and Dockerfile here to see implementation https://github.com/daptin/todomvc-examples/tree/master/vuejs
• Deploy anywhere
• Customize looks

An example, If you are familiar with docker, try this:

docker run -p 9999:8080 daptin/todomvc-vuejs

and browse to http://localhost:9999/ . This is a todomvc.com app backed by a relational database.

[1] Based on personally conducted survey of about 80 customers.