Hi everyone,
2 years in the making, and many tears and late nights but my husband and I have finally launched our site…
www.illumini.ai
View our Ad Here
I think we pushed Softer and many 3rd party plug ins to their absolute limit, but we are happy with what we achieved.
Now we will sleep for a month 
Congratulations on your launch!
Thank you!!
Congrats! That’s an amazing milestone. You two should be proud of all you’ve accomplished already, and yet, you’re just getting started!
Good effort Amelia. I’m glad you mentioned how long it actually takes to build a complete app, even with Softr. Did all of the native “plugins” work as well as expected?
Thank you! and yes, for this particular style of site, it was not a quick build, plus what we wanted two years ago needed technology to catch up, so we build as Softr was delivering items, thank goodness we are an Agile business!
With plug ins, sadly not everything was seamless, the biggest issue was trying to get help, lots of “no sorry talk to the other company”, only to be met with the same back from “the other company”, so after a lot of back and forth we got there in the end. One of the bigger pain points, as an example, was Iubenda, as they don’t do a direct integration the same way they do with WordPress etc. so I had to alter their code, and not use some of the more useful things like IP tracking, we can get around it, but we lose an element of what we still have to pay for sadly and it isn’t ideal. They are very difficult to work with as well, so even getting to that point took 3 weeks of back and forth, through several different people.
We also found that some of the 3rd parties we wanted JV’s with were not used to working with Softr as a platform, so we will need to hire dev’s longer term to try and work through some of the more finite integration we want, but I don’t feel it is particularly a Softr issue, but a wider issue on any no-code/low code platform. In most cases it would be wise for them to try and meet people the middle, instead of hard lining their approach. Time will tell.
Overall, as painful as a lot of it was, I found my use as an IT Project Manager and a Technical BA, along with my husbands experience on large scale projects incredibly helpful to approaching what we are creating. I think without that background we may not be where we are today. We have seen, and been part of big corp projects that deliver less in the same amount of time, with 10x the budget and resource, so we are VERY proud of ourselves 
and as we have self funded everything, we were also able to be flexible as we didn’t have stakeholders making demands!
Awesome to hear, @Amelia !!
I can identify with your pain since I’ve been building on Softr since 2021 and on the business plan for almost two years now. Your experience explains all of the custom coding that’s necessary with Softr and the increased reliance on Zapier/Make over the years.
That’s unfortunate you can’t use Iubenda for IP tracking. I was wondering why it rendered the way it did on your app. Guess the lesson is that all “Native” integrations are not made equal 
.
It sounds like you have great experience. Hope your project gets traction, ideally with Softr .
Thanks for sharing Amelia!