Software for small startup businesses that don’t want to pay big-business prices.
Affordable Apps began with a simple mission: to help small startup businesses get a real mobile app into the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store – without the eye-watering quotes that came from traditional app development agencies.
Every business these days is told it needs to be on its customers’ phones. But the standard path – hire an agency, spend tens of thousands of dollars, wait six months, hope for the best – was completely out of reach for most startups. We wanted to change that.
We believed there had to be a smarter way to give a small business a genuine presence in the app stores without bankrupting it. And, at the start, we found one.
Our chosen technology stack was MeteorJS. If you’ve never heard of it, Meteor lets you build a web application using plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – and at the time, it could take those very same files and wrap them in an Android project and an iOS Xcode project, ready to compile.
One codebase. Two app stores. A startup’s app written once, shipped everywhere, and built affordably.
We genuinely believed we’d found the perfect way to deliver on the Affordable Apps promise: real apps, real app-store presence, real value – minus the big-agency invoice.
Reality arrived in the form of SDK updates.
Apple and Google don’t sit still. They are constantly updating their software development kits, their platform requirements, and their app store policies. Apps that compiled perfectly last year wouldn’t build this year. New minimum deployment targets. New permission models. New review guidelines. Every single update meant more work just to stay current.
Keeping up with those updates is a full-time job. Big companies have whole teams dedicated to it. A small business building software for other small businesses cannot spend its life chasing a moving target.
And MeteorJS fell behind. The platform that had promised so much struggled to keep pace with Apple and Google’s constantly changing SDKs. Every release gap meant our apps were at risk of being rejected from the stores – or worse, breaking for customers who had already installed them.
It was a hard lesson, and an honest one: we had built our original business on a promise we could no longer reliably keep.
So we stopped. We stepped back. And we asked ourselves something far more useful than “how do we fix this?” We asked: what do small startup businesses actually need from software?
The answer turned out to have very little to do with app stores.
Startups don’t need an app on their customers’ phones to prove they’ve made it. They need tools that work – tools to invoice customers, capture leads, send email campaigns, take bookings, build a website, and sell online. They need those tools to be affordable. And they need them without being bled dry by a dozen separate monthly subscriptions before they’ve made their first dollar.
That question led us to web apps. And web apps led us to the Small Startup Business Toolkit – SSBT.
Today, Affordable Apps builds SSBT: one affordable, all-in-one platform for solopreneurs and small startup businesses. Invoicing, lead capture, email campaigns, bookings, landing pages, a website and blog, and an online store – all in one place, for a single low monthly price.
The mobile app dream is still there. We still love the idea of giving small businesses a real presence on their customers’ phones. But we learned the hard way that a promise you can’t keep is worth nothing. So now we build what we can genuinely deliver: honest, affordable software that does exactly what it says.
If that sounds like the kind of software you’ve been looking for, come and see what came out of the pivot.
The Small Startup Business Toolkit – one flat price, everything a startup needs to run.
Visit the Small Startup Business Toolkit Demo Page
The Demo is completely usable – no need to create an account to try it out.