Mobile App with a tight budget? Investigating Flutter and BaaS services

If you are a small business that needs an app, or are looking for a proof-of-concept app on a moderate budget, you are interested in getting a small but efficient team to do the job. The solution is multi-platform app development (Flutter or React Native) and BaaS. 

As we mentioned earlier in our blog, multi-platform app development–such as Flutter or React Native–are good for getting things going with small teams. The apps for both Android and IOS have a single codebase so even a single developer can handle all mobile app development. 

But what is BaaS?

BaaS means Backend-as-a-Service. This easy-to-setup development platform provides hosted back-end services such as a real-time database, cloud storage, authentication, crash reporting, machine learning, remote configuration, and hosting for your static files. BaaS is great for small projects, because it can handle all back-end tasks without a back-end team or with only a little help from a back-end developer.

Right now there are two main providers of BaaS for Flutter apps – Firebase and Supabase. 

Firebase is a BaaS owned by Google. It has all built-in features for building, hosting, and maintaining apps. Firebase is easy to set up with Flutter. It has great documentation, a lot of tutorials for developers to explore, and a free plan to try. This makes Firebase great for proof-of-concept apps.

Firebase is scalable so if your app is ready to grow it will be easy. Firebase has a Spark Plan that is free and a Blaze Plan where clients will be charged after reaching the limits of a free plan. The disadvantage of Firebase is that on a loaded app with a lot of traffic price, it can be expensive.

Supabase is an open-source Firebase alternative. It has all the features that Firebase provides, but it is open source and more compatible with other multiplatform solutions (also compatible with Flutter). Another great feature of Supabase is that it can be self-hosted so clients can host it on their servers. Supabase has a free plan with unlimited API requests, up to 50000 active users, 500 MB database space, 5 GB bandwidth, and 1 GB file storage. Currently, the Pro Plan starts at 25 USD per month.

Advantages and Disadvantages

BaaS and Multiplatform app development solutions are great when it comes to small projects that may be scaled to bigger projects in the future. It is great because clients need a small team or no team to maintain the project, and only a small developer team (or even only one developer) to develop, test, and push an app to an App Store or Google Play.

The disadvantage of BaaS solutions is the price if a client’s app grows fast and get a lot of clients and that most of BaaS is not self-hosted.

If you’re ready to start a project and need the right technology partner to do so, contact us to find out how we can help.