What exactly is Frontly?

Frontly is a powerful software platform enabling business owners to create internal business tools that enable their team and clients to work more efficiently and securely manage data without any technical skills required.

Is there a product roadmap?

Yes, the roadmap can be found at this link.

Where is Frontly hosted / can it be self-hosted?

Frontly is a fully-hosted solution, like Shopify or Squarespace, which means you don’t need to worry about anything, or any additional hosting fees outside of your Frontly plan. We do not currently have any plans to offer self-hosting.

Can I add a custom website domain?

Yes! On all paid plans, you can add a custom domain name purchased from a domain registrar such as GoDaddy or NameCheap. Initially your Frontly site will exist at a ‘subdomain’, which would be something like yourapp.frontly.ai. Once you add a custom domain, your app will be accessible there instead.

What are Frontly’s data privacy / compliance policies?

Frontly never shares any of your data with third-parties. We strive for maximum security and compliance, however at this time we are unable to confirm whether we are fully compliant with specific requirements like GDPR, HIPAA, etc. We plan to continually work on improving our security and compliance policies.

Where is Frontly located?

Frontly is headquartered on the west coast of Canada in beautiful British Columbia. Our servers and database are hosted on AWS / Heroku in the United States.

Is there a Google Sheet row limit?

Frontly does not set any row limits or sheet usage limits. Most users and use-cases do not have any issues with speed or scalability, but we’ve found that when sheets reach 5,000+ rows, they tend to create slower page load times, but usually are still usable.

To solve this and support our higher scale users, we’re considering other database solutions for the future.

Can I set up a page that shows different data based on who is logged-in?

Absolutely! This is one of the core features of Frontly and we think we’ve made it really easy. In the Block => Filters settings, add a ‘Hidden Filter’ with the spreadsheet column and value you want to filter for. This could be the user’s team, or any custom value you want.

View the tutorial here: https://help.frontly.ai/en/articles/7971258-hidden-filters

Can I turn my existing Google Sheets into apps?

Yes! You can import your sheet and then manually build an app with it, or select your sheet during the AI-Generation process to generate an app using your sheet as the data.

Read the full article on Google Sheet formatting: https://help.frontly.ai/en/articles/8049487-google-sheet-setup

What kind of apps is Frontly for?

Frontly was designed for building custom internal business tools like Analytics Dashboards, Customer Login Portals, and CRMs.

What kind of apps are not supported by Frontly?

Frontly is not designed to support public-facing, consumer products like e-commerce marketplaces, or customer-facing SaaS tools, or apps where payments are core to the service.

Why? Every unique type of app requires a different set of features, and as a startup, we want to make sure we can fully support the customers who find our product useful. If we try to move in too many directions, we’ll spread ourselves thin and the product will become overcomplicated to use, since the number of settings will grow. For now, Frontly is dedicated to supporting internal tooling use-cases and apps that allow your clients/customers to login and manage their own data.

Are there video tutorials showing specific use-cases?

You bet! Check out https://www.youtube.com/@frontlyapp for our up-to-date tutorial videos and other useful content. For text articles, Check out https://help.frontly.ai

Does Frontly support payments?

Frontly does not directly support payments, however using workflow automation tools like Make and Zapier, you can create a payment flow that updates your Google Sheet when a successful payment is made, which can then be used in the Frontly app for conditionally allowing the user to see certain pages, blocks, etc.

With our goal of empowering businesses to create internal tools, we have chosen to focus on features related to internal dashboards and viewing/managing data, as opposed to features like payments that tend to be required for public-facing customer applications. We may support payments directly in the future to support certain workflows that might require collecting payments from clients or contractors, but we do not have a firm timeline on this.

What is an ‘App’ in Frontly?

Each App in Frontly is a separate project, with its own domain, users, pages, and imported Google sheets. You can almost think of them as separate Frontly accounts, except that you can manage them all from within one Organization login. Admin users can access all apps, whereas end-users are only able to access the specific app they were created in.

Can the app be exported to code?

Currently, there is no option for Frontly apps to be exported to code, and this is not on our roadmap. Frontly’s proprietary platform was designed in a very specific way to be optimized for no-code app development and AI-generation. The customers we aim to support are business owners focused on streamlining their business, and are not looking to add more technological complexity and infrastructure to their business.

If I build an app with Frontly, am I ‘locked in’ to the platform?

With Frontly’s AI-Generation feature and no-code builder, we aim for your app setup process to be quick and painless. Since your Frontly app is powered by your actual Google Sheet, you always have full access to that data. No need to ‘export’ the data, just do whatever you want with it in your own sheet.

Does Frontly offer Webhooks or workflow integrations like Zapier and Make?

Currently, Frontly has a basic outbound Webhook (POST request) action, which can be triggered via Button click or a record click in a Table, Grid, etc. This feature requires knowledge about APIs, including endpoints, headers and request body parameters to correctly work with the third-party platform's requirements.

Even without the webhook, since Frontly apps are powered by Google Sheets, a common use-case is to use an external workflow platform like Zapier or Make to inject new rows into your Google Sheet when an action happens in another app, which will then appear in your Frontly app.

Can Frontly be embedded inside my external app / website?

The best way to use Frontly in conjunction with an existing website or app is to use a custom subdomain. For example, if your main website is www.yourapp.com, you can host your Frontly app at a custom subdomain like clients.yourapp.com. Then, you can simply add a link on your main website to the Frontly site. Once you’ve configured your brand color and logo, your Frontly site will feel like an extension of your main website without technically being embedded.

Due to limitations around the required browser cookie storage used in authentication systems, Frontly's login system does not function properly inside an Iframe, so only 'public' pages will work embedded within another site.

Can I build mobile apps with Frontly?

Frontly apps run on a web browser, but are fully mobile-responsive by default. While they are not 'installable' mobile apps like ones you would download from an app store, users can easily login and use your Frontly app on their mobile phone, tablet or desktop computer.

Does Frontly offer SSO?

Frontly supports the dynamic creation of users inside your app, triggered from an external system via Zapier or Make. An example might be if a new row is created in your spreadsheet, create a user with those fields in Frontly. With this setup, you could create a flow that involved users joining Frontly without manually creating new accounts.