My experience with zeroqode.com

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So… I have 0 experience on coding.
I can understand what the code does, I can change it a bit… but not build from scratch.
Wanted to build my app and found bubble.is as an alternative to construct 2 (a game building platform similar to this for focusing on games) - visual programming.
Started my app and then I thought of searching for templates.
L.E.: I found tutorials on https://codefree.co/. And I thought how cool it would be if he would’ve just share the app (paid or fee), but again didn’t thought it was possible. Then searched for templates and I did find one, from zeroqode.com.
I though that a template SHOULD speed things up. I mean:

  • it’s already built;
  • I just need to modify it to my needs;
  • I will have support for it;
  • I will have PAID support for custom modifications if needed.

Well… the reality is that they were nice at the beginning, before purchasing it. Then I found out that:

  • they take some time to respond;
  • they don’t offer support (NOT EVEN A DOCUMENTATION…)
  • they don’t assist you with any customization (as it takes time).
  • they won’t accept jobs that are less than $2500.

When I asked Bubblewits (they’re the same) for an app as I needed, and they knew they already had the template that matched 80-90% of what I needed, it gave me a price that NOT EVEN the guys coding it (so using code not a visual programming or a template to modify it) told me prices 10 times cheaper…

This is not a rebellion, I am just SO disappointed and I don’t want other to buy it without getting support.
I don’t think it’s a fear deal, but what is done is done.
Be careful out there and ask all the questions before you buy! Now I am too deep into the template to back out and search for another one (if existed)

Regards,

Andrei

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Oh i feel sorry about your experience. Thats why i pref build from scratch (0) and progress on my way with my own modifications.
I think they should give you some at least “documentation” Even Wordpress themes they come with documentation and 1 year support and costs around 50-60$ not 200$.

Hope you find the support your need.

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I did on the forum. @andrewgassen helped me! ON that issue.
But there will be more on the way… can’t keep bothering him.
A documentation and SOME support should be available. At least a chat or a forum…

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Hmm, I guess a name like zeroqode does set certain expectations. I think, however, that anyone who has spent time making a bubble app knows that whilst it is easier than coding, it still takes a significant amount of time, especially to get a polished look and a responsive design. Therefore I sort of disagree that custom Bubble dev work should come cheap.

That being said, I agree that there is no excuse for not providing adequate support and/or documentation. I guess the team, like other Bubble dev shops, is probably new to this. Hopefully, they will all sharpen up their processes as they, and the Bubble platform/ecosystem as a whole mature.

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BlockquoteTherefore I sort of disagree that custom Bubble dev work should come cheap.

What I wanted to say is that they were asking for WAAAY to much.
Not that should come cheap.

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I agree. Compared to what you can get from one of the freelance pages the price is high here. I also bought a template here. It works ok but it would be nice with at least 3 month support I have a lot of errors in mine referring to an unknown missing plugin. The templates I have bought for other sites comes with support for much less…

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In my opinion Bubble is just not made for templates.
Templates are good to see how things are done so that you can achieve similar things in your own app.
I see templates more as “code snippets”. Aside from that, I wouldn’t use them to build my website.
If you really need Bubble for your website instead of other tools like wordpress, etc, then it means you want to do a lot of custom stuff. At the end you will have to modify most part of the templates.

Bubble has already all the tools you need to build without coding in a very short amount of time, and with full flexibility.
Templates removes that flexibility from you : what’s the point ?

On the other hand, plugins rock ! :smiley:

Just my 2 cents on this topic :wink:

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Dear Andrei and All,

My name is Vlad, and I represent the company Bubblewits, that has also created and is running the project Zeroqode.

First of all - thank you very much for taking your time to share the feedback with us. We really believe it is always better to have a dialogue about anything that is a concern and can be done better.

We are sorry that your expectations on using our services were not met, and we want to make sure that you know that we are taking your concerns seriously.

Now to your points in details:

they take some time to respond;

  • We will include the response to this point to the next point, if you don’t mind.

they don’t offer support (NOT EVEN A DOCUMENTATION…)

  • Well, that is an understatement to say the least :slight_smile: we have covered tens of questions from you during our conversations about the template, a lot of which where questions about the platform that we have also covered in details. We have also fixed a couple of issues that you have found when you started to use the template, so not sure why you are not mentioning that.

It a bit unfair to say that there is no documentation, because most of the information you were asking about and we provided is also available in Bubble Documentation ( Here and Here, for example), and on this very Forum which you seem to be getting good at :slight_smile:

they don’t assist you with any customization (as it takes time).

  • I assume that you meant - for free, which we have to admit is the case :slight_smile: we are happy to solve any bugs or inconveniences that are found by the users for free, but if you require the development or consulting services, we have to charge for it.

they won’t accept jobs that are less than $2500.

  • It’s less than that actually, but yes - with the current load on the projects we develop, we have to take a call and prioritize the incoming requests. I am not sure why it’s a bad thing, since this is our company’s internal business decision.

The main point here is that we commit to deliver value for the prices we quote, and If the cost is inconvenient for some of our customers - we are just saving one another’s time :slight_smile:

When I asked Bubblewits (they’re the same) for an app as I needed, and they knew they already had the template that matched 80-90% of what I needed, it gave me a price that NOT EVEN the guys coding it (so using code not a visual programming or a template to modify it) told me prices 10 times cheaper…

  • I am not sure we fully understand what you mean here, so we would appreciate if you could clarify it for us :slight_smile:

You are right that you can absolutely find the resources to develop the responsive web applications (with or without code) for ~200 USD, but unfortunately, our costs and price model are different from that, so we are offering what we believe is right for our business to continue to grow and develop both Bubble as a development environment, and our business as a whole.

This is not a rebellion, I am just SO disappointed and I don’t want other to buy it without getting support.
I don’t think it’s a fear deal, but what is done is done.

We agree that it’s unfortunate that your expectations have not been met, but we also want to emphasize that we did not advertise that the price for the template you purchased includes the custom development and free Bubble development consultancy :slight_smile:

We are happy you have been able to find the answers you require here on the forum, and we hope that you will continue to contribute to Bubble community the same way as lot of the good folks here on the forum does.

I think they should give you some at least “documentation” Even Wordpress themes they come with documentation and 1 year support and costs around 50-60$ not 200$.

I agree, and as mentioned before, pretty much all the documentation you need to run a Bubble application is included into the standard Bubble documentation. Bubble is fairly intuitive at times, but even we still go and check out the new and old features from time to time at the Manual and the Reference to make sure we understand how things work.
Without the understanding of the basic concepts, pretty much all the additional “Documentation” we will give will not be very helpful.

And yes, we have the ideas of offering the support packages to the people working with our templates, but we currently don’t, so I don’t think it’s fair to be angry on us for something that we didn’t offer.

A documentation and SOME support should be available. At least a chat or a forum…

Yep, that’s exactly what we have suggested to you in our latest chats :slight_smile: the forum has all the answers, and we are glad to see you have leveraged it’s power :slight_smile:

Hmm, I guess a name like zeroqode does set certain expectations. I think, however, that anyone who has spent time making a bubble app knows that whilst it is easier than coding, it still takes a significant amount of time, especially to get a polished look and a responsive design. Therefore I sort of disagree that custom Bubble dev work should come cheap.

Thanks :slight_smile: we’re glad you like the name. And yes, we were also not sure why the custom work should come cheap or free, and why we are not able to set our own terms of engagement on custom projects.

That being said, I agree that there is no excuse for not providing adequate support and/or documentation. I guess the team, like other Bubble dev shops, is probably new to this. Hopefully, they will all sharpen up their processes as they, and the Bubble platform/ecosystem as a whole mature.

Yep, we agree to that as well.
I hope that the standpoint we have described above is helping to make the situation a bit more clear for everyone interested :slight_smile: But yes, you are right to say that we will be working to improve the processes to make sure that the expectations are clearly communicated and set right from the start with all of our customers.

I agree. Compared to what you can get from one of the freelance pages the price is high here. I also bought a template here. It works ok but it would be nice with at least 3 month support I have a lot of errors in mine referring to an unknown missing plugin. The templates I have bought for other sites comes with support for much less…

Thanks! Would you mind reaching out to us at bubblestore@bubblewits.com or via the intercom at https://zeroqode.com to let us know what exactly is the error you are facing? we would love to help to resolve that.
And we will definitely think of the monthly support package, but currently we don’t offer that, unfortunately.

As mentioned, we really appreciate the time each of you have taken to share your thoughts, and we highly encourage the community to do the same - that’s the best and the quickest way for us to improve and make sure that everyone is happy.

Cheers!

 

Vlad Larin
GM@Bubblewits - #1 No-code Developer & Bubble Certified Partner
  Bubblewits.com - Get in Touch!
  Zeroqode.com - Buy Great Bubble Templates
  Builtwithoutcode.com - Bubble Apps collection
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Thanks for sharing your opinion Florent, I respect your point of view.
But at the same time I can’t agree that templates don’t make sense for Bubble. We spend hundreds of man hours building each template. And those templates are not just mockups but fully functional apps, beaufituflly designed and made responsive, where most of the scenarios and flows are already preprogrammed. We are convinced that modifying a template is less work than building it from scratch. Just making an app responsive can turn into nightmare if you don’t have that skill, leaving aside configuring the workflows or setting the database.
it still requires Bubble knowledge and experience but it’s easier than going from zero.
We try to build as many different templates for as many use cases as possible so that the amount of modifications would be kept at the minimum.
Bubble will someday become the “Wordpress” for the more complex apps and as you know most wordpress web-sites are built on templates. You just pick the one which is closest to your idea and then modify it.

can’t agree with this one either, templates don’t remove the flexibility, you still retain full control over the app you are building because you can customize absolutely everything in it.

yes, but this requires much more time and efforts.

Thanks,

 

Levon Terteryan
Founder@Bubblewits - #1 No-code Developer & Bubble Certified Partner
  Bubblewits.com - Get in Touch!
  Zeroqode.com - Buy Great Bubble Templates
  Builtwithoutcode.com - Bubble Apps collection
10

the amount of work to build a wordpress template and Bubble template is incomparable. Wordpress templates are mostly static pages, while Bubble templates that we build are packed with complex functionality.
We could of course provide support with templates but then the template prices would have to be a few times higher. We thought that Bubble community would appreciate the affordability of the templates that we build, thus we keep the costs low. Templates that we sell for maximum $197 would cost at least $10 000 - $15 000 if built on Bubble by a professional development company or it would cost tens of thousands if built traditional ways with coding.
check out this link for example to see the cost ranges http://howmuchdoesawebsiteco.st/
Thus we believe our templates still provide a great value even if we didn’t yet create documentation or don’t offer support for modifying them as it can require endless hours with users like @mvandrei asking general questions about using Bubble.
I personally spent a few hours of my time answering his questions before and after the template sale. When I was doing skype consultations about Bubble I was charging 75 USD/hour. So that comes already to about $150-$200. Then I decided that it can’t go on like that forever and politely refused further assistance to Andrei.
The template was sold for $137. and still Andrei believes that the deal isn’t fare
I’ll leave it for others to judge.

 

Levon Terteryan
Founder@Bubblewits - #1 No-code Developer & Bubble Certified Partner
  Bubblewits.com - Get in Touch!
  Zeroqode.com - Buy Great Bubble Templates
  Builtwithoutcode.com - Bubble Apps collection
11

So why does every wordpress template and ANYTHING that you buy from sites like themeforest, come with documentation? They could easily say: read wordpress documentation, it’s the same.
About the 2500 it’s $50/hr minimum 50 hours. Or am I wrong? I can search the chat if I am wrong and my memory fails me.
So I pay $200 for the template and you condition me to a minimum of $2500 of work to customize it?
As I said, everything that I wanted to modify, I would’ve allowed you to use it in the template. So it would’ve been a BIG win for you: you get the idea, make it for the template helping more users mean more users that will buy it and I would STILL pay for the customization. But not $2500 I can hire a freelancer for much less.
I want to learn while editing it, but also want to go forward, to not be stuck on something.
You could make pakages: 10 modifications for $100. Small ones like… instead of system rating, display business hours that I already made, but it won’t work on responsive. All that was needed was to place all the info in a group and center the group. I did that except centering the group. $10 to center a group is too little for you?
It’s hard to learn EVERYTHING you need. If you have to watch tutorials, it will take a lot of time, wasted to what 99% of what you don’t need to perform a quick fix after you understand it. But if you did the fix and told be: we had to center that group and we did it like this, then I would’ve learned and applied it elsewhere in my project.
So for each tiny thing that I am stuck on, I would’ve consumed from that 10 small fixes package.

As for my project, I told you want I wanted. You had a template that was 90% similar. All you had to do were some customization.
You told me "I’d also like to mention here that if you’d like your app to be native ios/android app that would that would cost another $2K. A significant part of that cost is the GoNative fee, which is a container that is transforming web apps to a native apps.

Another option would be to make you app responsive (so that it renders well in mobile browsers), in that case it will be additional 3-5 hours per page."
So gonative charges less than half for two apps (ios and android. You get 100% fee for what? Just taking my order and place it on their site?
If it’s that for a gonative app, then how much for my app that was up to 10% customization of existing template?

When I told you that I need some functionality that is similar to the one in trello clone, you said that you can’t do it, I mean you can’t do any custom work for less than 50 hours of working, at $50/hr

Now I am angry, that you want to pass the guilt.
I came to you and explain what I wanted to do… you were very nice and had time to respond immediately, until I bought the template so you got your money and I had a few questions to which you shut me down …

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we do not condition you. You can modify yourself or hire any other freelancer who can do it for you. It’s just our preference to choose projects with budgets of more than $2 000 - I don’t see anything wrong about that, everyone can have their choices and we made ours.

we are not interested in projects like that, why do you think it’s wrong?

wrapping the app into gonative requires making configurations both in gonative and in Bubble app. Especially if you want to enable push notifications. I guess you simply are not aware of the amount of work that should be done in order for the app to be wrapped into a webview container like gonative or any other.

yes, that’s true, again, we don’t involve in small projects, which is perfectly normal for a company like us to choose.

we do not pass the guilt, but we don’t understand why are you so unsatisfied or angry. We never promised to provide customization or modification assistance and support and we never said there was a documentation for the template either.

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wrapping the app into gonative requires making configurations both in gonative and in Bubble app. Especially if you want to enable push notifications. I guess you simply are not aware of the amount of work that should be done in order for the app to be wrapped into a webview container like gonative or any other.

LOL! It costs NOTHING. I’ve already made my native apps, with 0 cost. For push notifications and app. But I need to finish the (bubble) app first, and then submit the iOS and Android apps to app stores.

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Hi @levon i’ll share with you one of my experience like 5 years ago and i think its the same here.
A day i bought an wordpress template (i was using prestashop so i had no IDEA how wp works). So i decided buy an template. When i had the template, comes with a documentation stuff. When i opened the doc i could see how everything works. EVEN I HAD NO IDEA, in documentation says example: If you want to edit This form you have to go to your CMS admin panel -> Settings -> Plugins -> Contact Form -> Select Home contact form then you edit.

Was SO EASY, i was never used Wordpress but i was able to do whatever i wanted because reading the documentation i was able to do it. And it was LOT MORE easy spent 20-30 minutes reading and searching something in the doc. than look videos, try to find it yourself in a environment (in this case bubble) because @mvandrei said he has 0 knowlegde about coding or using bubble.

I think @levon your templates “should be” for everyone. I mean; for all experiences. People that know use bubble, maybe they dont need an documentation, but and the non-experienced people? I think should be FAIR for both sides. And as you said a company like yours, should be focused on all publics.

Just its my opinion, i think your company templates are very good, but i agree with @florent.bocquelet i think the most important of creating a website its the flexilibity that you have. Yes the templates dont remove the flexilibity but as you are not the own designer of that template, you dont know where is each X item on every page you have to spent lot of time to find every thing. I know for other people templates are a good option, and i respect that. (I want to create some templates too for market) But FOR ME, the choice is start from a scratch ABSOLUTLY.

I know my english is terrible, but i think the essence of the message you will get it anyway. :joy:

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Andrei, of course it does :slight_smile:

You would need to at least create the logic within the application to communicate with GoNative to know when and what to send via push notifications, as well as setup the application itself (splash screen, native config, etc).
And more, depending on what exactly you want to accomplish using the push notifications interface itself.

We appreciate your experience with native apps, but you go via GoNative, it does have both costs and overhead to run correctly.
We hope we have been able to clarify some things for you :slight_smile:

We also appreciate if we can keep this discussion civilized and the feedback constructive.
If you have something specific that you need to discuss with us - you are most welcome to send us either a private message or an Intercom request.

Thank you!

 

Vlad Larin
GM@Bubblewits - #1 No-code Developer & Bubble Certified Partner
  Bubblewits.com - Get in Touch!
  Zeroqode.com - Buy Great Bubble Templates
  Builtwithoutcode.com - Bubble Apps collection
16

Thanks for sharing your experience and your English is good, no worries :slight_smile: I’m not a native speaker either.
we of course agree that having a documentation for each template would be better, and we will do that some day, but right now we are focusing on creating new templates, as many as possible to cover various use cases. Creating templates is very resource consuming and we have to prioritize our tasks. And besides templates we do client projects which we have to balance too. I think you can imagine that if creating Bubble template is way more difficult than creating a wordpress template, same is true for Documentation. A documentation for Bubble template would have to contain tens of pages, with an instruction for each little input, group or repeating group with screenshots etc .
So while we understand its importance and value, it’s not our topmost priority right now.
thanks again for sharing your feedback.

 

Levon Terteryan
Founder@Bubblewits - #1 No-code Developer & Bubble Certified Partner
  Bubblewits.com - Get in Touch!
  Zeroqode.com - Buy Great Bubble Templates
  Builtwithoutcode.com - Bubble Apps collection
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There are always cheaper ways, or free ways, which have certain limitations. If you are happy with your solution we are happy for you too.
You have an almost ready product which you paid only $137 for, can you imagine how much time or money it would cost you if you started from scratch?

 

Levon Terteryan
Founder@Bubblewits - #1 No-code Developer & Bubble Certified Partner
  Bubblewits.com - Get in Touch!
  Zeroqode.com - Buy Great Bubble Templates
  Builtwithoutcode.com - Bubble Apps collection
1 Like
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it has no limitation. I can send individual push notification to each user, based on whatever action I desire.
As for the template, that’s why I bought it. To save TIME. Money I am already saving building on bubble.
I am keeping this conversation civilized, why would you think otherwise, @vladlarin. When you are angry you tend to have a certain tone… but I didn’t say anything out of place, did I?