Hi. I would like to know what is the working process with those clients that ask you to make a website that requires many third party apps installation? Is it something that has to be pre-agreed? You know that many websites require either online chat or budget/price calculator or multi step form with some logic or booking forms where you book appointment or flight trip with date and time pickers or clients commenting and reviews sections and what not that webflow is not yet capable to do without a third party apps? So do you usually reject this kind of offers and tell the client that he needs to find coder so that the client doesnt pay monthly fees for all of the multiple apps he requires or client will be happy if you tell him "I will make the website and connect all of the third party apps but you will need to pay all of those monthly fees for them forever? Thanks
It depends on lots of factors-
- Your skills and what you are comfortable delivering
- Your client’s skills and what they are comfortable using and maintaining
- The project complexity, and very importantly, the likely future path of the project, future features it will probably need in a year or two
- The client’s payment preferences. Invest (less) up-front, or pay (more) over time.
These are all important discussions to have but first you need to know those options. My advice is, the tech space is simply too large to track for an individual designer, or even a small agency, so partner with people who can answer those questions and give solid estimates, and do that work.
Later if you get a lot of those requests ( e.g… multi-step forms ) and it’s something you want to do yourself, then you’ll have already learned a lot from those prior projects by the time you start implementing your own.
Even though my team focuses on the more technical aspects of site builds- development, reverse proxies, integrations, automation, technical SEO… we still use a range of tools. For a multi-step form, we build some custom, for others we’ll use an integrated tool like Formly, and for still others we’ll drop in an embedded form service like Jotform. Each project and each client have different needs.
This isn’t really a Webflow-specific question. It should be posted on another forum somewhere, however… I always scope the project in fine details. The client must agree to those details at the estimated cost you provide. Items that change/expand during the job will result in a change-order. I typically update the estimate and resend, to keep a documented record.
I wouldn’t reject anything before fully investigating. If it’s a third-party service I’ve never used, I include a range based on my research. Many times, I want to learn how to integrate other services to expand my skills for future projects, so some of this time can be considered personal. If something is out of my skill level, I higher contracted help for that part.
If the client wanted a full SaaS business created or something, I’d partner with a developer and simply take on the visual design and frontend coding piece. It’s always possible to reject a job if it feels like too far out of reach.