When you adopt an internal app builder for the first time, you adopt a new framework. You a adopt a new way to build apps and a new process to build them i.e. a new workflow. Your hope is that they are also an easier, faster, more maintainable and scalable way to solve your business problems effectively than building them from scratch. While the value app builders bring is clear in most cases, there are also costs to consider aside from pricing. Some of these costs can meaningfully change your value equation.
One often underestimated cost is the cost of transitioning your current tools, scripts, and workflows to make them compatible with the new framework. A significant aspect of this transition cost is that what you've built may not fit into the new framework.
When your existing scripts aren’t portable but you still need their functionality, you have 3 options when adopting a new internal app builder:
To decide which approach to take, you’ll have to make a tradeoff between the value that the existing scripts (or part of it) provides and the total cost of one of the 3 options you choose (cost incurred x how often the cost is paid). It's not a trivial decision, especially when the script is an important part of a critical business operation. This decision can be paralyzing, resulting in delayed adoption of tools that can meaningfully add value to the business.
When we designed Dropbase, we thought about this somewhat arbitrary constraint and realize it can be expensive for businesses. We asked whether it’d be possible to provide all the benefits of internal app builders while minimizing the costs of adopting them. In other words, instead of re-building your existing tools to fit yet another framework before you could benefit from them, could our framework fit you?
Our version of a framework that fits you is one that lets you import your existing libraries, custom logic and automation scripts as-is. One that lets you effortlessly layer a beautiful UI atop so you can easily interact with them. This would give you the best of both worlds: a set of components and tools to easily build internal apps that are easy to maintain, manage, and deploy and the benefit from continuing to use your existing scripts, leveraging the developer effort you’ve already put in building apps that have taken your business this far.
With Dropbase, you can bring your existing Python libraries, files, and functions, by simply importing them into Dropbase Functions. By import we really mean import:
Then with our UI builder, you can easily lay out a dashboard atop that lets you trigger these functions, with the option to pass in user inputs.
To learn more about how this works, request a demo.
