Transcription
In this video, you are going to watch me build a real app with user authentication and an API connection using Base 44. By the end of the video, you are going to see if Base 44 can successfully add these features to an app and if it's something that you should use for your own AI app building or should you stick with tools like Lovable and Bolt.
Base 44 was just sold for $80 million to Wix. So, the stakes in the AI app building game are very high. Let's jump into it.
So, the prompt I'm going to use is building a podcast finder should discover new podcast based on topics of interest and listening habits. We're going to go to styling instructions, which is a really nice feature base 44 has. And I want to choose glass morphism. So, I'm going to add style instructions. So, it's going to add that to our prompt. And we're going to go ahead and send it off.
On the left side, base 44 creates a high-level plan and then what's nice is it creates this task list and it tells you what it's completing as it is working in the back end. One thing you should know about Base 44 is everything is all integrated in one. So the database, authentication, even LLM calls or other integrations are all built directly into the platform. So you don't have to worry about connecting to external services. This can be really helpful, but also could be a little bit limiting if you want full control over every tool and kind of service in your stack. So, just keep that in mind when you're choosing the platform that you want to build. But make sure to stick around as we continue building this out cuz you're going to see what's possible here with Base 44.
So, we have the first version and there is an issue right now. We can see the design is hard to read. So, I sent a message to improve the design. It's all light text on the background, so I can't see it. So, here what it said is it's going to make that change. Let's see how it does here. So, it's having some trouble. So, what I did was I'm sending a screenshot. And usually this helps AI app builders resolve the issue to give it more context. All right. So, it did finally fix it. And this looks really good in my opinion.
So, on the top on base 44, you can preview it. You can also refresh the page, view it in mobile as well as desktop. It doesn't look like it has built out a mobile design yet, but right now we can just view it in desktop. And let's see what it's built with just that first very simple initial prompt. So we have podcast to browse. You can browse by technology, business, health, etc. I believe these are I don't think these are real podcasts. I think these are fake. So, I'm curious to dig in a little bit more to see where this data is coming from. If I go to search, it does seem to be like loading, but if we put in like Tim Ferriss. So, yeah, nothing is coming up. And now it changed the design back to a lighter design, which is interesting. But at least it's visible. So, I'm not exactly sure what happened there, but okay. So, here we have preferences, favorite, search, discover. All right, cool.
So, let's go in now to the workspace. So in Base 44 because everything is all integrated in together they have this tab called workspace where you can see the data. So under data we can see there are podcasts and it looks like it did just basically make up these podcasts here. And then we have user preference which we have no data is in there yet. There's users. It automatically adds you as basically the admin user. There's analytics built in and everything like that. It also creates a name which is cool. It can be public, private, login required or login required for public or private. Can invite users etc.
Okay, let's go back to the preview. I want to add some additional features. One thing that I'm curious is I'm wondering if it can connect to an API for podcasts to actually pull in real data. So, I'm going to say, can we pull in real podcast and real podcast data from a podcast API? Maybe a free one. And let's start with discuss and send. So I'm curious in discuss mode what kind of research base 44 is going to be able to do because this is something that I know other tools do have the ability. So let's see. It says yes, we can do it. There's backend functions. And then it says you want to find a free API. So would you like to explore? So I'm going to say yes. I want to explore enabling backend functions to proceed with this. We're going to send this off and we are going to see in real time together if base 44 is able to do this and how it attacks this problem.
So it looks like this is something that Base 44 is telling me to update in my settings. So we're going to go to settings, look for an option related to B. I don't know if this is true. Let's see. App settings. Let's see. Backend functions. Oh, I see. Okay. So, this is a new feature and it needs me to enable server-side functionality. It's and it wants me to upgrade my plan to unlock. So, it wants me to upgrade to the builder plan here to unlock it instead of the starter. You know what? I'm going to do it just so that we can see if this is actually able to work. All right. So, I just updated this. We're going to go to app settings. We're going to activate backend functions. And now what I'm going to say is great. I just enabled backend functions. Okay, hopefully that was worth the $50 that I just spent on it.
So it says, now that backend functions are enabled, let's integrate with a real podcast API. It's going to use the podcast index API, which is a free open podcast database. No API key requirements. Perfect. That is exactly what I wanted. So, it's cool to see that Base 44 is able to do that research. I hope that you're learning something as well as me as we're going through this together. So, here what it's doing is building out this function here to fetch that data. So, this is pretty impressive that base 44 has this just all integrated in.
Okay, so now it is trying to do it, but on the right side I can see there's an error. So, we're going to try to resolve this with AI. So, it said there's an error trying to call the function. Let's see. The API request failed. So, let's see if base 44 is able to resolve this. So, it's telling me that I actually do need an API key from the podcast index API. So, let's see if I can get one very quickly. All right. So, now it looks like it actually did successfully connect me to the podcast API. Really cool that this actually worked. It did take a lot of back and forth, but I was able to resolve it. One thing that just to keep in mind when you're building with this is don't give up too quickly. Sometimes it just takes back and forth with the AI and trying to describe what issues you're having or let the AI debug to actually solve it.
So here I can see under discover this is showing me a bunch of podcasts here that are pretty random, but I guess that's under all. I'm wondering if this category is going to work. So now I'm under technology. So maybe not because this is showing like education under business. Let's see. Again, I don't know that the categories are fully working here, but it's still at least pulling in some information from the API, which is cool. So I could keep debugging with the API, but I'd like to focus on adding another feature here, which is just user authentication. So let's say I want users to have to log in to view the app. Build a simple landing page for logged out users and a way to log in log out. So let me send that prompt and let's see if we're able to add that user authentication because that's a really important part of building an app. And if Base 44 is able to do that, I will be pretty impressed.
All right, so it says that it created it. I can see now I have my user on the left side. And let's log out and see what happened. So let's try to create this account. All right, cool. So that actually did work. So now I'm logged in under this new email. Pretty impressive that it was able to build all that in just in that one step and that it has all of the authentication automatically added.
So now if we go to the workspace and if I go to users we can see there are multiple users. This was that new user I just logged in as and it put me as a user and by default base 44 has user role and admin role. So my initial email was admin. This was that other one that I was trying to create but it did not I didn't verify the email but it still shows up even though it's not verified. And then you can also invite users as well which is pretty cool. And then under schema, these are the user roles for the schema that are built in by default. So user roles built-in. That's pretty cool.
One thing I want to ask is let's say I want to charge money for my app. How would I do that? And let's go to discuss mode. And I'm just curious what base 44 is going to say. Now, what I'm thinking is we could use the same basically backend functionality which is on that $50 a month plan to add Stripe. But let's see what Base 44 says. So, first it's saying whether you want subscription or one-time, etc. Technical, you do Stripe. So, that's what it says and the webhooks and all of that stuff. So, I'm going to say how would I use base 44 to implement this? And again, I think it's going to be the exact same way I just talked about. So that is if that is the case, that is a bit of a just something let me keep in mind that with base 44, you have to be on the $50 plan. Whereas if you're using Lovable or Bolt or Cursor, you just integrate it into the app that you're building. You don't have to have an extra plan for that.
So here's what it's saying to do. You would update the user. So yeah, it's you would use the backend functions exactly to be able to do it. it would I'm not going to go in and actually build and debug all that right now, but it is possible with base 44 to add in that type of purchasing and Stripe functionality. There's also domains, which is pretty cool. So, you can add your domain and it has analytics built in. So, all that is is built in, which is pretty cool.
So, I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial of Base 44. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get more free content like this and leave a comment if there's anything else you want me to cover about Base 44 or about other AI app building tools. Thanks again for watching. We'll see you in the next.