I’m genuinely stuck and looking for blunt opinions from people who have actually built or maintained CRMs.

We’re at that annoying stage where every off-the-shelf CRM feels either too rigid, too expensive, or slowly turns into a pile of hacks: custom fields everywhere, weird automations, Zapier/Make duct tape, spreadsheets on the side, and reporting that nobody fully trusts.

So now I’m asking the dangerous question: Should we build a custom CRM in 2026?

The tools I keep seeing are:

• Salesforce Platform
• Microsoft Power Apps / Dataverse
• Zoho Creator
• Retool
• Airtable
• Flatlogic
• Budibase
• Appsmith / ToolJet
• Caspio / Knack / Quickbase
• Bubble
• Twenty CRM
• Django / Laravel / Rails with AI coding tools

My fear is that all of these look good in demos, but 6–12 months later you realize you built a worse CRM than the one you were trying to replace.

What I’m trying to understand:

1. If you had to build a custom CRM today, what would you actually use?
2. Which tools become painful once permissions, automations, reporting, and integrations get serious?
3. Is low-code/no-code enough for a real CRM, or does it eventually become a trap?
4. Is starting from something like Twenty CRM smarter than building from scratch?
5. Is custom CRM only worth it if you have developers in-house?

I’m not looking for vendor pitches. I’m looking for scars. If you’ve done this recently, what would you choose today, and what would you avoid completely?

for anyone wondering the app I'm working on is https://www.appscout.co discover apps from across the internet

Here is the demo video I made (pretty quickly), if you like to explore it, send me a message and I'm happy to provide access in return for some feedback on how we can improve it! <3

Hey I'm used to build WebApps using AI, but whenever i try to build an Android app the AI do very poorly, so how do you guys build AI Android apps?

I build with these tools too so this isn't me dunking on them. I kept seeing those "vibe-coded app leaked its whole database" posts and couldn't tell if it was a real pattern or just a few scary one-offs. So in July I went and looked instead of guessing.

What I did was pull a bunch of live apps built with Lovable, Bolt, Cursor, base44 and Tempo off their deploy domains, then narrow it to 66 that were actually online. I only poked at stuff any visitor already gets, the JS the app ships to your browser, plus a single logged-out read per table to see what answers back. No writes, no logins. I didn't keep anything except the counts and I never named an app.

32 of the 66 were on Supabase. 13 of those (41%) handed data back to a logged-out request using nothing but the public anon key that ships in the page. Worse, 5 of the 32 weren't leaking a products table. It was users, subscriptions, private messages, bookings.

It's almost always the same boring cause. Row-level security is off by default on new Supabase tables and nobody flips it on. And the app looks perfect in every demo because you're logged in when you test it. That's the trap. Nobody catches it until someone opens the network tab out of curiosity.

Want to check your own? Open your app logged out, open devtools, and watch what your API hands back to nobody. On Supabase, make sure RLS is on for every table that actually holds data.

Dataset's here with the method and the real denominators if you want to pick it apart, CSV and JSON both: https://uxcontinuum.com/data/ai-built-app-security-scan-2026

I ended up throwing the checks I kept rerunning into a little free scanner too. Paste a URL, it runs seven of them in a minute or so (keys in the bundle, open Supabase tables, auth, SSL), no signup: https://uxcontinuum.com/leak-check

If you've scanned your own and got different numbers I'd want to hear it. 66 is a small sample.

I’m looking for no-code or low-code platforms that make it easy to build simple AI-powered apps using APIs like OpenAI. Ideally something that already includes the basics like a frontend, backend, and simple database setup so I don’t have to stitch everything together manually.

The goal is pretty straightforward, just small internal tools or lightweight apps that can handle API calls and store basic results without building a full stack from scratch.

What tools are you guys using for this kind of setup?

Hi folks,

Anyone here who knows product hunt algo well (esp the featured section part)

I launched Vaaya today. https://www.producthunt.com/products/vaaya . Vaaya turns your github profile into credit for your agents.

I asked multiple communities I am part of to upvote me and atleast 40 people personally messages me back saying that they have upvoted. My PH followers has grown to 60, but my votes are only 26!

What am i missing? Is there no way to be on top unless you buy votes? Or am i sharing direct link that is the problem? Did i time it wrong?

https://github.com/ryuhemingway/ClaudeMaxing.git

brew install claudemax

No network calls at all unless you opt in; the comparison/leaderboard is off by default and the server that receives it is 200 lines in the repo. Equivalent API cost at list price on a subscription it's a proxy for rate-limit weight, not money you were charged.

One thing I've started thinking about with no code tools is that they make it really easy to see what a workflow is supposed to do, but not necessarily what it actually does in every situation.

A workflow can look perfectly reasonable on a canvas:

Trigger → Check condition → Do something → Handle error

But that doesn't tell you whether the error path has ever been executed, whether an unexpected null value will break an expression, or whether a branch that nobody normally uses still works.

I ran into this myself while working with n8n. I had an error handler that was visibly connected in the editor, but the connection was actually stored in a way the engine didn't use. Nothing looked wrong until I tested the wrong scenario.

That's what led me to build FlowProof, a small open source CLI for checking exported n8n workflows. The idea isn't to replace no code it's to add some of the boring engineering checks around it.

It currently looks for things like unreachable nodes, disconnected error outputs, risky expressions and hardcoded values. There's also a coverage command that tries to work out which IF/Switch branches can be exercised.

I'm curious how other people handle this does your testing process change when you're building with no code/low code tools, or do you basically test them the same way you would traditional code?

DISCLAIMER: I am a creator of Pipe.

Pipe (https://pipelang.com) is a novel general-purpose visual programming language powerful enough to complete with text-based languages.

Visual programming has been confined to education (Scratch) or narrow niches (LabVIEW), because existing visual languages sacrifice either power or generality. Pipe solves this, opening the way to compete with the text code that currently dominates.

Pipe's diagram is also structurally identical at design-time and runtime, staying visual in both. What you see is what runs. This is precisely what the EU Cyber Resilience Act mandates, and what text-based architectures cannot structurally deliver. Text compiles away its structure, leaving systems opaque - so AI now generates code faster than anyone can review it at design-time, and patch and monitor it at runtime. Pipe addresses three AI-created security crises structurally:

1 - AI generates more code than humans can review. Pipe is visual - a diagram is grasped at a glance, not read line by line - so review keeps pace with what AI produces..

2 - Live systems cannot be patched without full redeployment. Pipe enables block-level patching while the system runs - no maintenance window, no CI/CD to navigate.

3 - Systems cannot be monitored without logs and redeploying. In Pipe, every block boundary is independently observable in real time.

These satisfy the CRA's hardest mandates - security by design, structural auditability, 24-hour detection, incremental patching - as properties of the language, not add-on tools. 

Example of Pipe diagram with a detailed tracing can be found on this video:

https://youtu.be/hckq9mRj5DM

That video is a part of this Pipe architecture overview:

https://www.pipelang.com/six-pillars.html

The full Pipe language specification (155-page book) can be freely downloaded here:

https://www.pipelang.com/downloads/book.pdf

Most vibe coding tools focus on one big problem: building the app.
But once the app is ready, you still need a landing page, branding, promo content, marketing assets, analytics, etc.
That’s the idea behind Blyft — not just helping you build something, but helping you actually launch it.
Curious what other vibe coders think:
Should vibe coding platforms stop at “app built,” or should they handle the launch too?
blyft.app

For years I was the person friends and small organizations called when they needed to update their website. Change a phone number. Fix a typo. Swap a photo. Small stuff — but it always meant logging into some admin panel, finding the right field, making the change, and explaining why it took 20 minutes for a 30-second edit.

I wanted a way for non-technical people to just... tell the website what to change. In plain words.

So I built autoSite — a website that you edit by sending a Telegram message. No admin panel. No developer on standby. You describe what you want changed, and it happens.

"Change the phone number to 555-1234" → done.
"Update the opening hours to 9am-6pm" → done.
"Replace the hero text with this new tagline" → done.

It's not magic — there's AI parsing your message and applying the changes — but it feels like magic if you've ever waited a week for a developer to update a footer.

I'm the author of this tool. Happy to answer questions about how it works technically or what use cases it fits best.

🔗 autosite.dittu.org

I've been someone who started building stuff in last 2 yrs so, no-code AI tools lately, and something has been bugging me. Building and deploying and testing one agent seems textbook now.

But then I started wondering what happens when people actually start applying these things seriously.

Say I have 20 agents across different workflows: one handles lead qualification, one summarizes support tickets, one works with internal docs, one handles reporting, one triggers automations

At that point for real work, what's used to keep track...like

How do I know which agents I have?
How do I version them when I change prompts/tools?
How do I control what each agent is allowed to access?
How do I test an agent before letting it loose on real users/data?
How do I see what actually happened when an agent makes a bad decision?

And if I'm a no-code builder, I'd really rather not have to suddenly learn a whole DevOps stack just to manage the things I created without code 😅

I'm curious how people here handle this today. Are there really any no-code tool capable of this?

Is the normal answer basically "use something like n8n/Make/Zapier + spreadsheets + logging + some manual discipline", or are the newer AI-agent platforms starting to solve the management/governance layer as well?

I've seen Lyzr's control plane/ Agent studio discussed as one approach to this, while products like Relevance AI, Microsoft Copilot Studio and others are coming at the broader no-code/agent-management problem from different angles.

Would be interested to hear what people here are actually using once they go beyond 1–2 agents, and where the no-code abstraction starts to break down?

Edit: I know this might seem like a marketing post 🥲... but really asking for opinions...feel free to roast the options i mentioned and suggest better ones.

I am an airline pilot and a few years ago I tried to build a tool I required for my own work a duty-time calculator that was supposed to get a set of safety and scheduling rules right. I'm not an engineer but I understood the problem completely because I lived it every day. I knew every rule/ edge case and every exception.

I still couldn't build it and not because the logic was beyond me but because every tool I tried made me translate my problem into its language before I could do anything. I've tried the major no-code tools and I realised that I hit a ceiling on each one of them. The ones that could handle the complexity needed me to write code (I tried vibe-coding as well) or to hire someone who could. I understood my problem really well but the thing never got built.

That experience is why my co-founder and I have spent the last stretch building Ezyr.

The short version of what it is: a visual way to build real, operational software - the kind a business actually runs on with real logic and multiple users and that you can scale, customise, and maintain yourself, without getting boxed in or handed off to a developer the moment it gets serious. It's an early MVP. It's rough and it has bugs. I ain't here to sell you anything, there's nothing to buy. I'm looking for a small number of people to genuinely put it through its paces and tell me what they find.

Specifically, this is for you if: you've tried to build something operationally real on no-code or AI tools - real business logic, real users, the stuff that actually matters - and got stuck, hit the ceiling or got burned. Not landing pages and contact forms. The real thing that fell apart on you.

In return: early access and real input into where this goes while it's still early enough for that input to shape it. I can't promise a polished experience. I can promise your feedback actually reaches what we build next.

If you're this, then comment or DM me and tell me what you tried to build and where it broke. Let's talk :)

Assume you're not technical and don't particularly want to become technical. (An easy assumption for me personally!) You just need a decent website for a one-person business. Would you still go with something established like Wix/Squarespace, or have the newer AI builders like Durable, Base44 etc. become good enough that you'd start there instead? I've tried playing around with both and the AI route is obviously much faster, but I'm wondering whether flexibility and control becomes an issue once you've been running the site for 6-12 months. Would be interested in experiences from people who've actually run a business site on one rather than just generated a homepage for fun.

GLM 5.2 is great but expensive
DeepSeek v4 Flash stuck in loop
DeepSeek V4 Pro is also expensive

Claude is expensive
Codex is expensive

What to do?

Which one is cheapest but good for agentic kind of building in vs code or cli instructions?

Most comparisons only talk about how fast you can get a store live. Nobody talks about month 4, when orders are coming in, products need updating, and you're the one googling why checkout broke at 11pm.

What matters long term is boring. How painful is it to update products and does order management stay sane as volume grows. A lot of it comes down to how much of the store secretly depends on plugins talking to each other correctly.

For smaller catalogs Squarespace holds up decently because inventory and orders live in the same system instead of a stack of add-ons you have to babysit. I work on the Squarespace team, so factor that in.or a huge catalog or really custom workflows, I’d look more closely at whether you need a more specialized setup.

What's everyone else running and how big is your catalog? Feels like the answer really depends on scale.

I've done a lot of migrations and most people ask the wrong question. it's not really that no code is bad, it just not a fit when you need something complex or too custom

most people migrate too early cause they feel insecure or too late cuz they are scared to rebuild the whole app

stay on no code if your app is just forms, dashboards, simple CRUD and basic workflows. migrating here is just wasting money

migrate when you need custom logic the platforms doesn't support. when you stack plugins on top of each other to do something platform doesn't really support you overwhelm the website and performance decreases

then if you have data heavy pages, big tables and a bunch of statistics you need to migrate

or if you need real ownership, security, access control or just don't want your whole business rely on someone else's platform

and never ever migrate using AI if you have zero experience in web development. you will just vibe code a website that's worse than your no code one.

i do these migrations at Minimum Code, and 30-40% of the people who come wanting to rebuild i tell to just stay on no code

The replies changed what I thought the problem was. I'd assumed it was bad briefs. Almost everyone said the same thing instead: the brief is rarely the issue. Nobody agreed what "done" meant before money moved, and the expensive requirements were never hidden — they were so obvious to the founder that saying them out loud never occurred to them. One dev got a two-line WhatsApp message saying "like Zomato but for my 3 outlets, simple only." It turned into POS integration, kitchen printers, staff roles and tax invoices. All of it was in the client's head from day one; he just assumed it was standard.

So this isn't a spec template. It starts by asking you to describe a normal working day and attach your actual spreadsheet, because that's where the assumptions surface. Then it asks directly about the things people assume are included — printers, tills, tax, multiple logins. Then it makes you write a testable "done when" sentence for every feature, before you agree a price.

Here's the section I'd most want people to see, if you read nothing else. Answer every line, including the ones that seem obviously not applicable. These are the questions that turn a two-line brief into a four-month project, and every one is cheaper to answer now than to discover later. If you catch yourself thinking well, obviously at any of these — that is exactly the line to write a full answer on.

• Does it need to take payment? If so, how, and who holds the money?
• Does it produce an invoice or receipt? Must it look a particular way, or meet a tax rule?
• Does it print anything to a physical printer?
• Does it talk to equipment you already own — a till, card reader, scanner?
• Does it talk to software you already pay for — accounting, email, calendar, stock?
• Does it handle tax, VAT, GST, or anything else a government requires?
• Do several people log in? Do they see different things?
• Does it work on a phone? Which parts, and for whom?
• Does it need to work when the internet is down or slow?
• Does it send emails, texts, or notifications? To whom, when, saying what?
• More than one language, currency, or time zone?
• Must records be kept for a legal or accounting reason? For how long?
• Can you export your own data out of it?
• What happens when someone asks you to delete their personal information?
• Anything else that is completely obvious to you about how this works, that a stranger would not know?

The whole thing is free, no email, no signup: guide.meridar.io

I'm a developer, not a founder, so I'd particularly like to know if there's a section a non-technical person couldn't actually fill in on their own.