Builder.ai (discontinued) vs. Firebase

TLDR: 28 months into a 6 month project. They stopped developing it without a working MVP, fired all the developers, and do not respond to my requests that involve figuring out what’s happening and when I will be getting a refund.First, please feel free to reach out before removing this review. Builder.ai has taken down our bad reviews in the past saying they couldn’t verify them. I’ll be happy to point you in the direction of the people I’ve worked with including Jason.Second, when I say this is a fraud from the top down, I’m not exaggerating. Please take a look at the news articles that have come out within the last two years regarding their CEO, CFO, and official auditor.If you are still reading, that means you’re still considering it, so let me tell you about my experience.I started this process by meeting with the sales team at the Silicon Slopes Conference in late 2022. I told them about what I wanted to build and they said that would be very easy and doable. We spent the rest of 2022 meeting with developers who reconfirmed how simple this would be and that even with a relaxed timeframe, we could expect a product in about six months. January 2, 2023, I signed the contract.We had a number of problems from the very beginning, including them giving me the wrong documents to sign and mixing my product up with another. We kept meeting, moving forward, struggled constantly with getting the money flow correct. Weeks turned into months and eventually all of the deadlines were past due with no communication on when they would get updated. Near the end of 2023, we escalated and very clearly said that if they cannot develop this, it’s OK to just say as much and give us our money back. They repeated that they could, added additional developers to the team, and said they would be pushing forward with an MVP shortly.When they released the MVP, the flow of money still didn’t work. Whenever I would bring that up or that I wanted to do end to end testing, they would say that they will be able to do that when it’s ready for full release. Again, months passed of this and I stayed patient. I have to say my patience has been the biggest mistake of this entire process.In November 2024, 23 months in on a six month project, they marked it complete. It wasn’t. The money was still wrong, features I had previously approved had vanished, and when I asked why features I paid for weren’t on there, they said they had questions but decided not to ask them and just mark it complete instead. I was furious, but once again I was trying to make it work. I worked with my project manager, and we spent December creating an entire list of every acceptance criteria. I required photo or video evidence for each piece that it was complete or I wasn’t going to mark it done. I also told them they had until the end of March.As we moved through January and February 2025, they started slipping in comments about how they didn’t think we would make the deadline. I continued escalating, people tried to work with me on it, and I decided to once again, find my patience. It did me no good.On March 26, my project manager told me that they were no longer working on developing my project. They had fired everyone who would’ve been part of developing it and had no plans on what to do going forward. They were supposed to tell me the week before when it happened and he expected that I should get an email about it that week. When I tried reaching out to the legal team that same week about canceling any sort of ongoing contract and getting my money back, they told me they were going to refer me to another group. It is April 18, 2025 and still I have received no communication. My patience now means that I have signed myself up for a painful legal battle. I’m leaving this review to let others know that if they already have a contract, chances are no development work has happened for the last month and they need to demand answers. This is also here for people considering this company. Do not fall for it.

Firebase should be your first choice if your platform is mobile first. Firebase's mobile platform support for client-side applications is second to none, and I cannot think of a comparable cross-platform toolkit. Firebase also integrates well with your server-side solution, meaning that you can plug Firebase into your existing app architecture with minimal effort.

Firebase lags behind on the desktop, however. Although macOS support is rapidly catching up, full Windows support is a glaring omission for most Firebase features. This means that if your platform targets Windows, you will need to implement the client functionality manually using Firebase's web APIs and wrappers, or look for another solution.

Incentivized

• Extremely robust. Has about any tool you can think of under one roof making it extremely useful as a backup platform for data analytics or small teams that need something quickly.
• Intuitive and easy UI/UX. Being made and owned by Google, you expect nothing less. Very easy to use for anyone that has any marketing or analytical experience especially in Google Analytics (which I just assume all marketers do).
• Safe, secure, and sturdy. Never need to worry about downtimes or misinformation as it's as clean and safe as it is being run by Google.
• FREE! What else is there to say. Unless you're an extremely large application handling hundreds of thousands to millions of users, this pay as you go plan will stay free.

Incentivized

• Firebase/Firestore has very limited support for querying more complicated items; for example, performing a simple string search is not possible.
• While upfront costs are low, costs can grow quickly if you're not careful about what you are being billed for.
• Dashboards have at times shown different information to what is billed, and support from Google is less than stellar and not as effective as that from Amazon or Microsoft.

Incentivized

See previous review

I don't use the Firebase UI much, but rather connect it to GA4. GA4 has a great event model but the GA4 UI and analysis capabilities are limited. It's harder to measure product usage type of engagement but if you have the time and resources to leverage the GA4 to BiqQuery export you'll have all the raw event data you'll need for deep analysis, segmentation, and audience activation.

Incentivized

Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.

Incentivized

Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.

Incentivized

• Firebase has been able to help us understand reliably, the drop-off in our user flows with their funnel feature. This has made it easy for us to be able to pinpoint weaknesses in our funnel and test and optimize with data as the dependent variable.
• From an economic standpoint, we don't pay for Firebase which is great, but as the saying goes "You get what you pay for" also holds true in this context. As we looked to grow and scale, we looked for a paid solution.
• From a developer resource standpoint, Firebase has been extremely easy to integrate into our app. Whether it be the event tracking, dynamic links or crash reporting we have not had to waste too much developer time thanks to their well-organized developer docs.

Incentivized