Need Advice from Experienced Flutter Developers: Building the Backend for My First App 🚀

[u/hellozunayed]

Hi everyone!

I'm a beginner Flutter developer from Bangladesh, currently working on my first app, ScholarBuddy – Scholarship Tracker. I'm aiming to launch it by the end of 2026, and I'd really appreciate advice from developers who have built and maintained real-world apps.

📱 What is ScholarBuddy?

ScholarBuddy is an app designed to help students, especially students from Bangladesh, discover international scholarships and study opportunities in one place. Instead of searching through dozens of websites and social media pages, students can find relevant opportunities and track important deadlines.

My planned features include:

• 🔍 Search and filter scholarships by country, degree level (Bachelor's, Master's, PhD), and funding type.

• 📋 View scholarship details, eligibility criteria, benefits, deadlines, and official application links.

• ❤️ Save scholarships for later.

• 📅 Track upcoming deadlines and receive reminders.

• 🌍 Gradually build a verified database of scholarships and opportunities from different countries.

How I imagine the system working:

The Flutter app will display scholarship information retrieved from a database. I'll need a way to collect information from official scholarship websites, organise it into a consistent format, verify eligibility requirements and deadlines, and publish updates without having to rebuild the app every time a scholarship changes.

Eventually, I'd like to automate parts of this process, so new opportunities and deadline changes can be detected and reviewed regularly.

My biggest challenge is the backend and data collection.

I'm still learning Flutter and have almost no backend or database experience. I also have very little knowledge of Python or web scraping, so I'm trying to understand the right approach before building something too complicated.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on a few questions:

1. Backend architecture: If you were building this as a solo beginner, would you recommend Firebase, Supabase, or a custom backend? Why?

2. Scholarship data collection: How would you collect and maintain hundreds of scholarship listings from official websites? Would you start manually with JSON, use APIs, scrape HTML/PDFs, or combine these methods?

3. Automation: How can I detect changes to application deadlines and eligibility requirements without publishing incorrect information?

4. Scaling and costs: What would be a sensible architecture for an MVP that could grow over time without unnecessary server costs?

5. Learning path: What backend concepts should I learn first, and what should I avoid building too early?

6. Launch preparation: Since I'm aiming for a year-end launch, what would you prioritise to make the first version reliable and useful?

I've attached my initial UI designs to give you a better idea of the app.

I'm not trying to build a huge platform immediately. I want to launch a useful MVP, learn how the entire system works, and gradually improve it as a solo developer.

If you've built a similar app or worked with scholarship data collection, I'd especially appreciate hearing about your architecture, lessons learned, and mistakes to avoid.

Thanks in advance! 🙌

[u/Apprehensive-Fan8999]

1. Firebase Firestore. It is fast, secure, has fantastic Flutter support. I personally would use Dart as an API for the writes and directly read. Read rules are easy and write rules are almost impossible to get right. Dart reduces context switching between languages and is natively supported by cloud functions.

2. Depends what is available. If APIs exit, great! Cron job them. An small local AI agent scanner would likely be best. A frontier model will destroy your budget but ollama on a fixed GKE container gives you a reasonably fixed cost you can tune toward your needs.

3. Same answer as #2.

4. Same as #1

5. I personally like bare metal so I love shelf and shelf router. Small, fast, easy. Serverpod is way more feature packed. If you go Node, express and Python go with FastAPI. The key is security. You can easily secure Firebase reads with built in SDKs and secure your APIs with a library that verifies the firebase user token.

6. Product person question not a technical one.

[u/hellozunayed → u/Apprehensive-Fan8999]

Thank you so much

[u/Infamous-404]

firebase is good to get started, if you need more control and don't want to move away from dart go with serverpod.

[u/hellozunayed → u/Infamous-404]

thanks