Good day everyone. I’m looking into Kodular because I’m unhappy with my current app. But Kodular is so different, and so powerful, that I’m just stumbling around in a fog. So bear with me while I look for some guidance.
I run a small charter transport company for secondary school kids and some students. I need to have their parents (later maybe they themselves) book them for whenever they want to be on the bus. From this info I then create a bus list cum schedule with the names, pickup times and place, drop-off ETA and place.
Parents and kids are currently connected through a helper table to handle the many-to-many relationships.
Interaction with the app is through a form that consists of buttons for various other forms, with user authentication and roles to limit a booking to a logged-in user’s own children, and billing security and privacy etc.
Now right at the start I don’t know which database to use that can handle this. Firebase? The Realtime or Firestore? From what I’ve read connecting to Firestore is a royal pain. Google Sheets? What are the cost and response time limitations? We are a very small company that basically only operates over weekends and with our currency hovering around 20 to the Euro…
We are looking at around 30-40 passengers per trip, 8 trips a month, maybe 200-300 transactions p.m.
Thanks a million Taifun. I was not sure about Sheets because I read you need scripts to link it to Kodular. I will read the FAQ, seems to have a lot of super helpful topics
Yes, you need to link a script to perform operations such as creating/deleting/querying of data, but I assure you that it is not complex at all and there are many guides online.
Good day everyone and thanks again for the feedback.
A few more questions:
Firebase Realtime database
a) Firebase changed their SMS authentication 2 years ago, with only 10 free SMS’s per day.Does this auth run every time a user logs in, or or only for 1st time validation of a user? I should probably ask Firebase, but I’m sure someone here knows.
From the looks of it, every time.
From other sources it seems I don’t need SMS auth, I can stick to email? There are so many tiers, structures, plans, quotas … In my current app users register once with their email address, from their phone, and thereafter simply log in to the app. This is what I want to happen now.
b) The realtime database has “limited sorting and query capabilities.” Will I be able to query trips done for a specific user’s child/children for a specific time period? Or for the child individually, but link the result to the parent for billing?
Am I correct in thinking Kodular handles the reading/writing to/from the database in the code blocks?
Firebase is not a relational database and the core of my db structure is relations - clients who pay the bills and their children who use our transport service, boarding schools and their hostels, children and their school and their hostel and their bus stop, parents and the (number of) trips their children made… How does Kodular handle that?
Baserow seems like a good fit. But in their pricing structure they mention 3000 rows per workspace for the free tier (they host) which will be reached within a year. Also there is then no user validation which I currently use to identify the logged-in user and give them access to only their own child’s booking.
The first paid plan cost $12 PER USER PER MONTH which is simply crazy for a one-man operation like ours.
I’m sorry if this sounds like nit-picking but we are really small. We have many users in relation to the income they generate because many of their school-going children make use of our services once or twice a month, and students maybe once or twice a term. A small core of self-employed users pay a fixed monthly fee but salaried workers mostly pay per trip done. In my current app I pay for processes that update tables and during development, when I had to try our these processes, I got stuck with a bill 3x the cost of the app. Not sustainable.
Looking forward to more clarity. I am already on the Premium plan and am raring to get started.
This is not the answer to your questions but I noticed that you got stuck because you new in app development
Here’s why I said this, let’s me ask this,
Did you try creating the app?
After creating it did you reach any of the limitations you mentioned?
I remember you said it about 50- user’s, with the resources mentioned above I think you can be okay, since the user with will not use the app frequently.
Reminder SMS sign up menthol it’s not working anymore for now
I recommend that you should try creating the app then see if you reach limitations usage