Transcription
Welcome back to our Builder Series Challenge. If you're new here, quick recap. I'm building the same coffee app across six AI and no-code platforms. It's going to be the same app using the same budget and the same set of rules, and I'm sharing the real experience right here with you.
Today, we're taking on Base 44. Now, Base 44 is a Wix company, which honestly made me a little nervous. I didn't have the best experience with Wix back in the day, but I hear this is a completely different beast. And it looks like they might already have one up on tools like Lovable because they claim you can export as a native iOS or Android app right out the box. Pretty huge if it actually works.
So, let's not waste any more time. Let's get right into it. Here we are in Base 44. We're on the website and we're on their pricing page. We have four plans to choose from. I'm going to go with the most popular plan, which it says is $40 a month, but that's if you buy the annual plan. I'm going to be going month to month, so that's going to be $50 a month. This gives us 250 monthly credits and 6,000 monthly integration credits, which should be more than enough for our needs.
Also, this plan includes unlimited apps, unlimited collaborators, Base 44 branding removed, choice of our AI models, so we get to choose the AI model when building, uh in-app code editing, and two-way GitHub sync. So, we can own our own code outside of Base 44, which is critical. That way we're not um stuck on the platform. All right, so I think we're ready to get started here.
And here we are in the main builder. You've got that big chat box prompt area just like most normal AI agent chat experiences. That's pretty much, you know, the gold standard at this point. And at the top, there's apps and super agents. I'm guessing super agents let you create agents that can perform tasks on your behalf. Uh haven't had a chance to play around with that and we'll be focusing on apps today though. Okay, great. All right.
So, again, I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to grab our PRD that I made in the first video, which I get a link down below. And I'm going to turn on playing mode here. And I'm just going to paste it right into the text box. I'll just click the button to get us started. Base 44 starts thinking and it's working through everything. Okay, and it's starting to come back with a plan mode that includes all the details from our PRD. And it looks really good. Let's go ahead and click the button to start building. And just like that, Base 44 is on the move. But, I'm not going to make you sit here and wait while it builds. We're going to skip ahead and we'll be right back.
Okay. So, it found some issues before we can really get going. It says it can resolve these though with AI, so we'll just click that and let it take a shot. Perfect. Now, everything's fixed. And now it's hooking everything up and loading up the preview. Great. Here's our first look at the app. It's called Brew Order. Which I'll keep since that keeps Base It's called Brew Order. Which that kind of works. I'll keep it since it makes the Base 44 version a little unique. It seems we already have our images, our categories menu, and a search bar. Not bad at all. Just taking a look here through the products on the home page. Seems like we're missing a couple images, but that's fine. We have our account page. We have our sub pages. And everything's works. We can click an item. We can click into it, see its main view, the details. See the item detail screen. We can add an item to our cart. So, this is great. We have a really solid starting point in my opinion.
I guess uh the first thing we'll do is we'll go ahead and fix these broken images. So, I'll just let it base 44 know that the chai latte and the macchiato images are broke. Please fix those. Okay, and it's fixed those images, but the macchiato image is now actually dogs. So, I asked it to fix that as well. Nope, looks like it's still broken. Let me try prompting that one more time. Okay, awesome. Now it's finally fixed. It's using the default coffee image that it used for another product, which is fine for these demo purposes though. Because again, ideally, if this was a real app, you'd add your own images anyway.
All right, I'm just going to test out how it looks on each version, you know, desktop, mobile, tablet. And we have responsiveness. But we need a tab the bottom navigation, you know, to make it feel more like a proper mobile app. And I'll just ask space 44 to create that real quick. And it does. Did a pretty good job. That's much better. It's already starting to flow and it feels more like a native mobile app. Okay, we have our sign-in screen. But we can't sign in yet. We'll skip that for now. Let's publish the app and take a quick look in the browser. Yeah, so far so good. This has our favorites. Has add to cart. All these features are functional. This is a pretty good starting point.
I'm going to fix the categories menu. It works, but I want it to be horizontally scrollable as well as draggable on both desktop and mobile with the scroll bar hidden so it just flows more naturally. Okay, there it goes. It's done and it looks a whole lot better. Again, just those two improvements, the bottom navigation and the category menu fix, it's already starting to look and feel more like a native mobile app. And I'm pretty impressed with everything so far. Uh, I think I'm going to head back to the AI and ask it to build out the admin functionality, the ability to like manage the inventory, setting items as out of stock, etc.
All right, and base 44 says it's done. Let's check it out. Okay, nice. It's already looking really good. Now, let's just add a search bar and the ability to organize items by product category to make it easier to browse and digest. >> Boom, and there it goes. There's our search bar, and now the items are organized by category. That's pretty good. We can mark items as out of stock. We can edit item details, change prices. Let me go ahead and change that back. But yeah, everything's working. This looks really good, and the functionality's there, which is, you know, critical.
Next, I'll try to delete an item from the menu. Okay, it works, but the default delete warning isn't great. It's using just the default browser one. So, I'm just going to ask Base44 to create an in-app style pop-up warning for when deleting an inventory item. Okay, perfect. It looks like it's done. Okay, it's done. I'll go ahead and try to delete classic drip coffee. Okay, yeah, that's a much better pop-up, but let's cancel out leave that. But yeah, I love that.
Okay, so now I'm going to publish this so that way we have all this saved to a live link, and then I can share this link to my phone and test it from my phone just to test the responsiveness from phone and to see how that functionality feels on an actual mobile native device. So, I'm going to just publish. All right, and then send that link over. Okay, I'm noticing that everything's looking good on the phone. The products are there. I can click. I can add to cart. But now I'm going to go an ask Base 44 if it can separate the navigation in the two sections. Regular user links, so um just my regular past orders, my favorites, and then admin links for specific admin users with links to manage the orders.
Okay, yeah, that looks much cleaner, much clearer. Love it. Yeah, let's work through the flow of changing the order status just to test to see if that works. Um All right, I'm clicking through. Doesn't seem to be working. Oh, okay, yeah, it does. It's Actually, okay, okay. It is working. It's just the builder has a little lag when you're working in it, it seems. At least it is for me. But um yeah, it's all right. Um the the flow's functioning well, so that's good. So, we have the ability to order. We have the ability to favorite. We have the ability to reorder from past orders. We have the admin now. I think we can go ahead and start adding the Stripe integration. Let's integrate Stripe. And since this is my first time, I'm just going to ask Base 44 how do we connect it?
Okay, it's going to walk us through the setup. Okay, everything's configured already to use a Stripe test sandbox. So, we can go ahead and make a test purchase and use the 4242 test card. All right, so I'll just go ahead and order Let's add a butter croissant and an iced latte to the cart. And it takes us to a separate Stripe checkout page. And I'm just going to go fill out the test info and hit pay. Awesome. So, we land on an order status screen. It says the order's been placed. On the back end, we can update the status to preparing and ready. So, I'm going to go ahead and do that from my phone real quick. Okay, awesome. And it's updating. It's almost in real time. There's probably a couple seconds of delay, but it's pretty close. And overall, though, this is really great. This is exactly what I wanted to set out to build. It has a lot of that functionality. And we I feel like we can put it together pretty quickly, pretty easily.
Now, let's go back and move beyond the testing sandbox and set up the real payment processing. So, if we just click here, Stripe's going to walk us through creating a new key account step-by-step. You just fill out the info, verify your phone and email. Get everything set up. Then you'll land on the dashboard. And it'll let us grab the API keys. But again, it'll make us verify through phone and email. Once we have those, we can copy those. We'll bring them back over to Base 44, paste those in. And boom, just like that, Stripe is officially set up and we're accepting real payments. Not too hard at all.
Okay, but I'm noticing the top navigation, you know, the logo, the account links, they're still kind of centered with too much padding on each side. And it just it looks a little weird. So, I'm just going to ask Base44 to make them as wide as the main content, so the app looks more uniform. I'll also ask it to make the order tracker progress update use native push notifications, cuz again, we want all of the native functionality that we can build in our app. And again, I want that to function across not only the PWA, but the mobile app build as well.
All right, and it's done making those updates. So, I'm just going to go ahead and publish it again. And while we're here in this menu, let's hit run scan, so we can check for security issues. And again, this is very similar to the security scan feature on Lovable. We'll just wait. Oh, wow. Okay. Again, it's way faster here. Again, in the Lovable video, I had to severely edit the wait time just so we could get through it. But here, this is how long it actually took. So, let me click fix on some of these flagged issues. Let Base44 start working on them. Okay, and they're starting to disappear. Base 44 handles them on the back end. Okay, this is great. So, I'm going to just uh come back once everything's done, and then we'll move from there.
Okay, I'm back. It took me about four passes of, you know, letting Base 44 do this of letting Base 44 do the security scan, and then asking it to fix all the issues it found. But, after going through that loop about four times, everything looks really good. So, I think everything's good to go. The app's functioning really well. Uh I tested it on my phone. The PWA's working. I can save it to my phone as a PWA. It opens up. It has the splash loading screen. So, it's again, we're pretty good to go.
And now, I want to go ahead and export it as a mobile app. So, now that we have that web version published, let's let's toggle over to mobile app publishing. And let's start by running the app scan. And we'll start with the iOS Apple app scan. Okay, and it said it found a few issues. But, it says it can fix them with AI, so I'll go ahead and click that button. Okay, it's working on addressing some of the issues. Okay, it's done. It's created both the light and dark mode, and it's defaulting to dark mode based on my system preferences. Makes sense since my computer's set to dark mode. Let me just run the scan again for the Apple. Okay, all good. Everything's green. We have a couple warnings, but nothing's blocking us from proceeding.
So, now I'm going to run the same scan but for the Google Play version. Okay, awesome. It's done, but it also found a few issues. So I'm just going to hit to fix with AI. We'll let base 64 handle it. Okay, and it's done now. So I'm going to run the scan again. Looks like everything is green. We have one warning. But uh again, we're good to go to proceed. So we're just going to keep pushing on. Now we have both apps ready. Let's go. We can generate store files. Then we need to create the app icon. All right. So we have the Apple app icon. So it looks like everything should be generated and loaded. Now we can download the Apple App Store files. That's the full project, everything we need. Now when I get to the Apple App Store, I'm still going to have to fill out, you know, metadata, screenshots, app description, all that stuff. But the actual project files are done. We're just going to upload those. We have everything we need.
So now let's do the same thing for Google Play. Let's generate the files. And make sure we have our app icon. Okay, perfect. Now it's all done generating. Now let's download everything. Okay, awesome. That's it. That's everything for the base 44 build. Everything came out really well in my opinion. Like the experience, I feel like this was smoother than Levelable if I'm being completely honest. It went faster. This took about an hour and a half to two hours. And that's to create all three versions. Of course, there was a few times I had to re-prompt. There was some general laggingness or, you know, just um slowness in the builder. But overall, honestly, I cannot complain. It it did what we set out to do. It generated all three versions.
And I'm going to follow up the end of this series with a special dedicated episode to taking your no-code or AI-built app to the App Store both in iOS and Android. But I will just go ahead and do a little spoiler alert. It did generate both versions. One version of the app, the iOS version of the app, is already live in the App Store right now. So, yeah, that's really cool. Um I pretty much was able to build it in no time. It took, you know, like I said, less than a day. I was able to submit it in a few hours. It probably took me an hour or so of worth of work submitting, and that's with asking AI to help me. And then from there, later on that evening, I got price submitted midday, and then by the end of the night, um I had an email with a couple things to fix. I fixed those and then within a couple hours after that, it was approved and live. And again, that's just strictly the iOS Apple experience. For the Android, there's a lot more requirements. You have to have an Android device. You have to have had the app tested with 12 test users for 14 days minimum, etc. So, again, we'll cover all this at the end when we do that special bonus episode, but I just wanted to show that Base 44 can get the job done.
In my opinion, Base 44 is a pretty good option for non-technical users who want to use AI, who aren't afraid to give up some of the control, who don't want all the details, but uh just want to get something basic out the door shipped on all platforms. This is a great solution. All right, but that's enough about the build. Let's get straight into the scores.
For ease of use and UX, I got to give Base 44 a 4.5 out of 5. It has that traditional AI coding assistant UI that's intuitive and easy to navigate, that experience you know that we're all used to, but also the back-end menus were well organized. I never really felt too lost or distracted. It was a smooth intuitive experience for the most part.
When it comes to the build speed, I got to give it a 4.5 out of 5. Again, I built the full project in about 90 minutes of real time. Plus another 90 minutes later for iOS deployment, you know, metadata, App Store details, all the critical details that are unavoidable, no matter what builder tool you use. Now, of course, I encountered a few errors along the way, but it was nothing major. But it was nothing major. Notably, this took about half the time compared to Lovable. And unlike Lovable, I built all three versions, web, iOS, and Android.
When it comes to customization and control, I'm going to give Base44 a 3.5 out of 5. Prompting worked well. Again, it wasn't flawless, but it was very adherent and reliable. You can also edit the code directly, which is a plus. Now, I did take points off for the lack of a visual editor and some noticeable lag or slowness in the builder.
When it comes to web and native mobile support, I'm giving it a 5 out of 5. It was excellent across the board. The PWA features, like splash screens, were included from the start, from the very beginning of generating the app. Uh native iOS and Android builds were built, and they obviously worked. The iOS app is already live in the App Store. So, I was pleasantly surprised and uh you know, very impressed, to be quite honest.
And lastly, when it comes to cost-effectiveness, I got to give it a 4 out of 5. It's very fair pricing. The builder plan provides more than enough credits for a simple project like this. Now, to give it a 5 out of 5, I would love to see a lower tier, maybe around $20 to $25, that includes the GitHub syncing and removes the Base44 branding. And you know, of course, it comes with fewer credits. I feel like that would be like the sweet spot for beginners looking to jump in and build a project just like this.
And that leaves us with a grand total of 21.5 out of 25. Base44 is a great solution, especially for non-technical developers, non-technical users, who are looking to get started with building their first app, and don't mind using AI to do some of the heavy lifting and give up some of the control. I think this is a nice solution. But that's going to do it for this video. Please join us again for the next one, and I'll see you there. Take care, everyone.