About the desk

AppStitch covers one narrow category: platforms that let somebody without a programming background build software with state and logic in it. A request tracker, a client portal, a field app, an internal tool. Not brochure sites, not landing pages, not anything whose job is to be read rather than used.

Within that category we cover four platforms properly rather than twenty superficially, because four is how many can be held to the standard below.

The standard

Every price, allowance and limit published here comes from the vendor's own pricing page or product documentation, is recorded with its source, and carries the date it was read. Where a vendor's page cannot be read directly, the copy names the documentation the figure came from rather than quietly borrowing from a review aggregator.

Where a vendor publishes nothing — and in this category the most important numbers are frequently the unpublished ones — the page says so. It does not estimate. The most damaging thing a site like this could do is invent a consumption figure that somebody then budgets against.

What we stay away from

We do not benchmark. No load times for generated applications, no performance scores, no measurements from a lab we do not have.

We do not quote customers we have not spoken to, and we do not compose an illustrative user out of several imagined ones. Where an example appears, it is arithmetic wearing a scenario, and it is written so that is obvious.

We do not cover website builders, page builders or anything whose output is a document rather than an application. Adjacent, frequently confused, genuinely different product.

Why the meter, specifically

Because it is the thing that decides whether a platform was the right choice, and it is the thing nearly every comparison skips.

Feature lists converge. Every platform in this category will eventually ship the same table view, the same form builder, the same permissions panel. What does not converge is what each one counts — server work, changed rows, people, published apps — and a year into a project, that difference is the only one you will still be thinking about.

The method is set out in full in how we judge, and the conclusions are in the best no-code app builders.

Corrections

These platforms change their pricing pages more often than they announce it. If a figure here has drifted from what the vendor currently publishes, tell us and it gets corrected with a fresh date attached. That is the entire correction policy and it is the reason every page is dated.