Let’s talk about the real cost of going “cheap” with low code.
We’ve all seen the flashy promises: spin up an app in minutes, drag-and-drop your way to digital transformation, all for the price of a fancy lunch. Sounds great—until you’re neck-deep in workarounds, your dev team is rewriting half the platform, and your CFO is asking why the “cheap” option is suddenly blowing up the budget.
I’ve been there. And I’ve seen too many teams fall for the same trap: low-code platforms that look inexpensive on the surface, but slowly bleed you dry through limitations, vendor lock-in, and “hidden complexity taxes.”
Let’s break it down.
Here’s the dirty secret: many low-code tools are built for demos—not for real enterprise development. They’ll let you prototype something cute fast, but the moment you need:
You’re stuck. You either hire a bunch of consultants to build brittle workarounds, or you start custom coding outside the platform. Either way, you’re now maintaining two systems—and paying twice.
That’s not cost savings. That’s technical debt with a shiny UI.
Another big trap? Vendor lock-in.
A lot of platforms make it really easy to build with their tools—but make it nearly impossible to move your data, logic, or code elsewhere. Try exporting your workflows. Try editing something in Git. Try using your own CI/CD pipelines. Suddenly that “cheap” platform starts looking like Hotel California: you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.
At Lonti, we’ve taken a different approach—because we’ve lived through all that nonsense too.
We didn’t set out to build the cheapest low-code tool. We built the last one your team should ever need.
Take Martini, for example. It’s our low-code platform for API integration, automation, and data management. You can build fast—but you’re never boxed in. Need to drop into custom code? Do it. Want to integrate with a legacy system that other platforms would choke on? Go for it. Martini is API-first and fully extensible, so you’re in control, not the vendor.
Or look at Bellini. It’s our app development tool that lets you drag, drop, and bind to APIs—but also bring your own components, JavaScript, CSS, and logic. Because real applications aren’t cookie-cutter. They evolve. They scale. And Bellini grows with you.
And then there’s Negroni, our data modeling tool that generates ready-to-use APIs from a common data model. No more spending weeks translating data models into usable endpoints. No more being forced into someone else’s opinion about what “standard” looks like.
What we’ve learned—over years of building this platform and watching dev teams struggle—is that freedom is the biggest cost-saver of all.
Freedom to build what you want, when you want. Freedom to integrate with anything. Freedom to scale. Freedom to leave if you want to (though most folks don’t).
That’s the opposite of false economy. That’s real return on investment.
So the next time someone pitches you a low-code platform that’s “cheaper,” ask yourself: Cheaper for whom? Cheaper when? And at what cost to your team’s sanity six months from now?
Because if you’re serious about building enterprise-grade solutions, you need more than drag-and-drop. You need power. Flexibility. No limits.
And that’s exactly what we built.