Good luck battling the hubris in this group. Out of sync documentation is a problem but many of the so-called ‘ambassadors’ are anything but friendly or diplomatic. The only thing more frustrating than needing help is trying to get it and receiving attitude instead.
Let’s keep the conversation here civil, please, and to the topic.
Everybody here is to help each other.
Also a lot has changes in the docs since your last post here 7 months ago.
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I don’t think documentation will be a problem for them given that they have a coding background. It’s a certainty that absolutely anyone with a coding background won’t have problems understanding how to work with Wappler.
They are just evaluating if the software can become part of their workflow not if they will eventually learn it.
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Wappler is far superior compared the tools you mentioned!
There is a learning curve, but if you have coding experience, in some weeks you will be able to create a lot of things way faster than Laravel!
Worth it!
Can’t say from the perspective of an experienced developer, but from the perspective of nocoder 7 days is too little indeed.
And often it doesn’t mean “7 days of understanding Wappler”. Sometimes people have only a couple of free evenings during a week. Or even just one weekend.
But maybe 30 days is too much either.
So, I think, 14 free trial days for onboarding would just be great.
But of course, there is a question of finance reasoning behind it. Will this measure really attract more paying customers then now? Would future income from these additional customers exceed the loss from the extended free trial?
And of course, pricing for Wappler is extremely affordable. It is not a big deal to buy a month for learning. But it is still money, it is still investment.
Also, keep in mind that many of the Wappler competitors have free/starter plans that allow you to learn and play as long as you need till you are ready to make your project serious. Wappler doesn’t have that ladder. So this is also a point to extend trial period.
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Anyway, we have honest reasonable feedback from the real potential Wappler customer here. And I heard a lot of the same in our local Wappler community too.
It would be strange to ignore it or argue with it. Definitely some changes would be suitable if possible.
Im a noob so take what i says with a big grain of salt:
I really struggle with the lack of documentation particularly on the mobile side of things, everything else seems much better documented.
I often think my life would be a lot easier without app connect as then i could just simply follow the documentation of the frameworks i am using without being met with surprises when trying to follow that documentation that i cant use that feature unless i use it in a very particular way, or that when i follow that documentation that its going to have unintended consequences to app-connects integration.
Part of the documentation helped to sell me on using app connect was this " Step 8: Adding it, will allow you to add any component you might need within your page:" https://docs.wappler.io/t/framework-7-including-the-framework-on-your-mobile-app/2843 which while technically true i felt misled by this when i discovered that adding anything that is not already implemented to be a struggle. I stick with it knowing there will be a payoff there sometime down the road but its can be really difficult and often times frustrating to stay the path.
The only hints on the forum i found to use anything that was not already implemented was to “read the router documentation” which i did and eventually made some headway. However then when doing that i have now found that i cant use app connect as i thought i may be able to with very little on the forums pointing to how that may be able to be done, and what is there being heavily outdated to 2019 era pre “framework 7 with app connect” days. (a question to be asked/answered in another thread)
I spend a lot more time in the code editor than i do the UI which is i feel is not how it was sold to me initially how i would be using wrapper where much of my work would be done easily inside the UI. It feels like that is the case where you may be having a server doing your heavy background lifting. As i am trying to perform as much in app, due to the need for my app to be able to work offline as much as is achievable i do not feel i am able to leverage wapples stronger points. The server side of the application feels like that is where actions to manipulate data and present it back to the client are much better documented, supported and thus much easier to achieve within the confines of the user interface.
Hence, I do not feel like i am getting the same value for money that other people may be getting when it comes clarity of documentation and wealth of knowledge on the forums compared to more server focused leaning projects.
It also feels like a lot of the documentation exists on the forums, a good example of that is this post: List of all the dmx functions? These to me feel like critical features in the program that make wappler worth using but to find these features you need to dig through the forums to find them in the first place.
There is also a bunch of components in the UI i do not have the feintest idea what they do except for what their name suggests and do not know where to go to see what they do because there is no list that documents what each do that i have been able to find. Each of these undocumented components needs to be searched on the forum on as case by case basis with the hopes there is a user that asked for clarity and a developer has had time to answer the question. Even if if a developer has answered the question its still doesn’t feel like documentation as the answer can be specific to the users query.
I do understand that the program is still being developed and that things are in flux so that documenting things may lock things in so they are limited in the future as has been explained with some features (like custom components). I feel like it would just be better to document these things and be front up about the fact they would change in future than to have to dig through forum threads to find functionality with no word that they may or may not change in the future. There appears to be plenty of great features in the program but due to documentation being sparse and spread throughout the forums its really a struggle to make use of them and im often unsure if a feature will still work the same way it has in the past as the threads can often be pre-date other features that may have superseded them.
Its not all bad though, at the end of the day i know that i can eventually implement anything i would want because at the end of the day i own and control every last bit of code in the project (even if i dont know if how most of it works. I am not beholden to anyone when it comes to server hosting, nor do i have gun next to my head asking for dollars if i wish to export the code i have made to a different platform; i can do that anytime i please. I can also have an app that works totally offline and does not require someone else’s sever to handle the most basic of tasks.
That comes with a cost though and its the real struggle it takes to understand what exactly wappler can and cant do for me.
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It’s the documentation discussion again!
For me…
An app with incomplete or inaccurate documentation is software.
An app with complete, accurate and regularly updated documentation is a product.
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I think the trial is to establish if it’s right for you and you have some confidence to go further. It’s not a period to completely master it. So, with that in mind, 7 days should be plenty. And this community will play a huge part in that, too.
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sorry i went a bit off topic, to bring it back on topic i do agree that the 7 day trial isnt long enough, i came pretty close to dropping the software because 7 days was enough to work out what i needed to do was going to be a PITA but not long enough to actually overcome that hurdle of getting the ball rolling. It was long enough though to get a hold of concept of the program and while i am unable to execute well on it so far i can see the appeal and vision. I was literally having an aha moment the exact moment my trial ended and if it wasnt for that i likely would have switched to visual studio.
I’m going to chime in here because I think it’s a pretty good discussion.
Many of us here were part of the beta program, so we had a long period to learn the software, and we had input on how it was developed. Back then, the product was no where near it is now as far a capabilities. I can say with 100% certainty that if this was my first exposure to the software and I only had 7 days, there is no way I could make a purchasing decision or a commitment in time and effort in that time.
So put yourself in the place of someone never have seen this software before. Looking over the documentation, watching the awesome videos from Ben, or Ken’s excellent set of videos and then diving in to the software, no way 7 days is long enough. Who has 7 solid days in a row these days to set aside to learn about a piece of development software, not learn how to use it but just learn enough about it to determine if you want to make the time and effort commitment to learn it? What if you start the trial on Wednesday? Does anyone have 7 days in a row to devote to it including the weekend?
Wappler’s challenge is that it is not as well known as some of the other low-code tools out there. You can do a lot of reading and researching and determine if you want to go with some of the other tools without even doing a trial. There is very little data out there about Wappler other than the You Tube videos, so you need to keep that in mind as well.
So to the Wappler team, shouldn’t you be so sure of your software that you wouldn’t mind a few more days to allow people to dive deep into it? Why be so quick to charge someone for using it? If they are allowed to have a little more time to dig into it and really see the power of it, you may get more paying users. Just a thought, I don’t know what your turn rate is. And remember for a user, it’s not the cost, it’s the time and effort that is the biggest expense of using something new like this.
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If the only option after the trial was a year’s license then I might think 7 days isn’t enough but I do think that it’s plenty enough to establish if it’s at least worth a one-month license to dig even deeper and get properly into a project.
As I said previously in this thread, I invested before it was released and all I had to go on was a 2-minute video and a presentation by Joseph Lowery. Just seeing what could be done with it was enough to decide it was worth the money. Actually learning it is not supposed to be done during the trial, the trial is purely to help decide if you want to go for it.
In fact, I would buy at least a month just on the basis of seeing some of the sites in the Showcases in this forum.
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Imagine that you met a new tool today other than Wappler, you would pay a monthly fee to try to learn this tool knowing that it doesn’t bother to have updated documentation and gives you only 7 days of trial where you spend half the time trying to find it any updated information about something that is on the screen and doesn’t exist in the documentation or something that exists on the screen and is now gone because it has been moved to another location or replaced and doesn’t exist in the documentation?
I met Wappler 2 weeks ago and I’ve been studying since then, I signed up but honestly I’ve been seriously considering giving up because it seems that the tool is designed to please people who have been following it since the beginning and not new users.
I think this makes the tool and the community restricted to a few people and that’s not good for both sides.
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Have you tried any of the courses? @mebeingken’s course should get you up and running pretty quickly.
Actually, it doesn’t really matter much if you have 7 or 30 days trial. Because people have to make time to really test the software and they usually postpone that to the last moment.
So by rushing you to just 7 days, we actually encourage you to make time and look seriously to Wappler and if it suits your needs.
If you have had 30 days you will probably, just look from time to time and the days will fly by anyway and eventually you will be spending less time in Wappler hat if you had just 7 days.
But that said we do plan to increase the trials to 14 days when Wappler 5 gets released, together with many improvements in our subscription services.
We will be also improving the onboarding of new users so that you can get acquainted with Wappler more easy, with more inline tours.
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yes i have bought courses on wappler but still, it’s all outdated, i understand the tool is constantly changing and some things are changed for the good of the tool but why not document these new updates? There are tools like GitBook made just to help easy document your applications.
I hope the team and community take this as constructive criticism I don’t know if Wappler has a marketing team to but I think it would be interesting to think about it.
The tool seems to have huge potential but as I mentioned above seems to be made for a restricted group has been here since the beginning, but maybe the focus is really on keeping it more restricted so if that’s it, disregard what I wrote.
Thanks for that! 
Did you guys get sidetracked?
This indeed was my experience, I set aside a week to learn the program. I think your point about keeping the time restricted has good grounding as that was my experience. An additional 7 days is likely to be a better sweet spot than where it is currently.
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Yes - priorities 
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Damn priorities. Always getting in the middle!
I have to laugh at the absurdity of this thread. I’m in the same boat as the OP. I started the 7-day trial, then got sidetracked by various other business priorities and now the trial is over. I really don’t care about paying the $39, it’s like whatever. However, I also feel that the justification for the 7-day trial is completely ridiculous.
Could someone, starting from scratch, use Wappler to build a fully functioning web application in 30 days? I guess it’s possible, sure. But then what? They’re never going to change anything to the application in the future? No need to ever add any new fields, or create a new page? They’ll just live with this app, frozen in time forever, right? Or they’re going to manually edit the code each time? It’s just a silly argument. The value of Wappler is not just in the ability to build a site, it’s also in the ease of maintaining and adding to the site over time. If someone is using it for a commercial application that’s making money, then of course they’re going to buy a license, regardless of whether the trial is 7 days, 30 days or 90 days. They’re going to buy the license because the time saved using Wappler to maintain the application versus manually editing code would be massive. It would make no commercial sense to not buy the license.
@George, you could quell this endless debate by simply making it a 30-day trial, which is the industry standard that virtually all competing products offer. I guarantee you, it would not cost you a dime in lost revenue, and it would go a long way toward enhancing good will for new users.