Frontly
Frontly is an AI-assisted no-code app builder for internal tools, client portals and dashboards. Describe your app in plain language, connect Google Sheets, Airtable or Supabase, then refine everything in a visual block editor.
What is Frontly?
Frontly is a no-code platform for assembling internal business applications, with AI writing the first draft. Its own positioning line is blunt: Frontly is the front-end for your back-end. The FAQ describes it as a no-code platform that allows businesses to create internal tools, customer portals and dashboards without requiring technical expertise. The starting point is a sentence. You describe the application you want, AI App Generation reads the structure of your data and produces a first version, and from there you work in a visual block editor - tables, charts, forms, containers, detail views, timelines, modals. Data can come from Google Sheets, Airtable, Supabase, Xano, NoCodeBackEnd or the platform's own Frontly DB. An AI Copilot sits inside the editor to help build, running on gpt-4.1, gpt-4.1-mini, gpt-4.1-nano, o4-mini-high and claude-3.7-sonnet; the privacy policy also names GPT-4o, GPT-4o Mini, o3 Mini, Gemini Flash 1.5 8B, DeepSeek R1 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet across AI App Generation, AI Copilot and AI Request. AI use is metered in credits that vary with page size, model, prompt length and the number of iterations. Two generations of the product run side by side. V1 is documented in 68 help articles and remains supported; V2, rebuilt from the ground up, has 58. A direct app migration between them may not be feasible, although user credentials can be carried over. The platform is fully hosted - the vendor compares the arrangement to Shopify or Squarespace - and there is no self-hosting option. Every plan meters monthly operations, meaning each CRUD interaction between your app and the database: 1,000, 10,000 or 50,000 per month depending on the tier, reset monthly, on plans purchased after January 2025. No row limit is imposed, though Google Sheets slows down beyond 5,000 rows and Supabase or Frontly DB are recommended at scale. A community Marketplace offers blocks, pages and actions that install free of charge, and a REST API exposes Frontly DB records. The publisher is based in Vancouver, British Columbia; its database sits on AWS in Canada and its servers in the United States. The home page claims a Discord community of more than 1,850 members.
What it does
- Generate a first working application from a plain-language description of what you need.
- Edit it visually, without code, using blocks: Table, Chart, Form, Container, Detail View, Timeline, Modal and Text.
- Connect Google Sheets, Airtable, Supabase, Xano, NoCodeBackEnd or the native Frontly DB.
- Control data access row by row, with login portals, user roles and hidden filters.
- Build workflows and automations: webhooks, custom actions, a JavaScript action, a Web Scraper Action and AI Requests.
- Publish on a frontly.ai subdomain, then point a custom domain at it on any paid plan.
- Read and write records through the REST API at api.frontly.ai/records/.
When to use Frontly / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Frontly is the right fit.
When to use Frontly
- Operations and business teams that need internal tools - custom CRMs, admin panels, request trackers - without hiring a developer.
- Teams already running on Google Sheets, Airtable or Supabase who want a real interface on top of data they already own.
- Companies building client portals, where each customer must see only their own records thanks to row-level access controls.
- Product, project and analytics teams that need dashboards, analytics tools and project management apps assembled from existing data.
- Agencies and freelancers who build applications for their own clients, a use the terms of use explicitly permit.
When not to use Frontly
- Founders building consumer SaaS products: the vendor states that marketplaces and e-commerce platforms are not supported.
- Anyone who needs to take money inside the app - direct payment integrations such as Stripe are not available.
- Organisations with a self-hosting requirement: Frontly does not currently offer any self-hosted option.
- Regulated healthcare workloads and strict European data programmes, since Frontly cannot confirm full GDPR or HIPAA compliance.
- Teams that need a native iOS or Android application - Frontly produces web apps only.
How to use Frontly
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account through Sign Up or Start For Free: the Starter plan is free with no time limit.
- Describe the application you want in plain language.
- Connect a data source: a Google Sheet, Airtable, Supabase, Xano, NoCodeBackEnd or Frontly DB.
- Let AI App Generation build a first version from the structure of that data.
- Refine it in the visual editor: blocks, display conditions, dynamic variables, URL parameters.
- Set up authentication with Login and Signup, custom user fields and row-level access rules.
- Add actions and automations: webhooks, JavaScript, transactional email through Mailgun, AI Requests.
- Publish on a frontly.ai subdomain, or connect your own domain on a paid plan through your registrar.
- Optionally drive your records through the API: generate an x-api-key in Advanced Settings and enable CRUD endpoints one by one.
- Lean on the Intercom help centre, the Discord server, the YouTube channel or a demo request when you get stuck.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- A genuinely permanent free plan: unlimited apps and unlimited users, with no time limit.
- Unlimited users on every tier including the free one, and no row limit imposed by the platform.
- Builds on data you already have - Google Sheets, Airtable, Supabase - instead of forcing you into its own database.
- Access control down to the individual row, which is what makes client portals workable.
- A documented REST API on the native database, and a choice of AI model across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and DeepSeek.
- V1 is maintained alongside V2, so apps already in production are not forced to break.
- Substantial support material: 127 help articles, a Discord community of over 1,850 members and a free community Marketplace.
Cons
- No claim of GDPR or HIPAA compliance, no published DPA, no Article 27 representative in the EU and no data protection officer.
- The monthly operations counter can bite: 1,000 on the free plan is quickly spent by an app that is actually used, and Google Sheets slows down past 5,000 rows.
- No built-in payments - Stripe and similar integrations are absent, so money has to go through Make, Zapier or Pabbly Connect.
- No self-hosting, and no native mobile application: the output is web only.
- Migration from V1 to V2 is not guaranteed one for one.
- Frontly branding is imposed on the free plan, and fees are non-refundable under article 6 of the terms.
- A very thin public site: no About page, no Contact page, no robots.txt, legal documents kept inside the Intercom help centre, a single published email address on a neighbouring domain, and an admin interface available in English only.
Pricing & Plans
Frontly offers a permanent free plan rather than a time-limited trial: the Starter tier is free with no time limit and includes unlimited apps and unlimited users. The lowest paid entry point is the Basic plan at USD 30.00 per month, followed by Professional at USD 100.00 per month, with an Enterprise tier quoted on request. The pricing section displays amounts with a dollar sign without naming the currency and the publisher is Canadian, so the exact currency is worth confirming at checkout. Fees are non-refundable unless separately agreed.
- Unlimited Apps
- Unlimited Users
- 1
- 000 Monthly Operations
- 250 AI Credits
- Community Support
- Frontly Branding.
- Unlimited Apps
- Unlimited Users
- 10
- 000 Monthly Operations
- 1
- 000 AI Credits
- Team Support
- 1 Custom Branded App.
- Unlimited Apps
- Unlimited Users
- 50
- 000 Monthly Operations
- 5
- 000 AI Credits
- Priority Support
- 3 Custom Branded Apps
- Custom Limits
- Personalized Onboarding
- Priority Support.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Frontly handles your data.
GDPR overview
Frontly claims no GDPR compliance. Its FAQ, updated 25 April 2025, states that while it prioritises security and compliance, it cannot yet confirm full compliance with GDPR or HIPAA - an explicit refusal to claim conformity rather than mere silence. One commitment does align with the regulation: the privacy policy of 27/03/2025 answers and executes erasure requests within the thirty-day maximum the GDPR sets, and explicit consent has been collected since 18 September 2024. The rest of the apparatus is missing. No representative in the European Union under Article 27 is designated, no data processing agreement is published or offered on request, and no data protection officer is named. A single address, support@frontlyapp.com, serves legal, privacy and support requests alike. The terms are governed by Canadian law, with arbitration before the ADR Institute of Canada.
Who owns the data?
Under the terms of use in force since 12/02/2025, article 5 (Ownership), you retain all rights to the content you submit, post or display through the service, which Frontly calls User Content. What Frontly takes is a licence, not ownership: worldwide, non-exclusive and royalty-free, granted for the sole purpose of operating and providing the service. You remain solely responsible for that content and warrant that you hold the rights to it. The privacy policy of 27/03/2025 adds that Frontly does not sell customer data to any third party. Records held in connected sources such as Google Sheets, Airtable or Supabase stay with those providers, and since 18 September 2024 Frontly no longer caches them by default.
Reuse rights
Your own content remains yours to reuse as you see fit: the licence granted in article 5 of the terms runs one way only, towards Frontly, and is confined to operating the service. On Frontly's side, the privacy policy of 27/03/2025 sets out what the collected data is for. Its database holds your email address, your name and your app configuration, plus the column header names of connected sources and everything typed into the admin; an Admin Data Policy setting decides whether your source records are cached for the admin preview. Data is shared with third parties only for customer support, marketing and analytics. Prompts sent to the AI providers carry only what you put in them, and AI is also used to guess field types and pre-configure blocks. Explicit consent has been required since 18 September 2024, and refusing it revokes access and automatically files an erasure request. One caveat worth knowing: through RB2B, cookies and advertising partners may link browsing on the marketing site to an email or postal address, with opt-out handled on an external page (app.retention.com/optout).
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The privacy policy of 27/03/2025 is the most precise source: the database is hosted on Amazon Web Services in Canada, the front-end web servers run on Heroku, the back-end API servers on Google Cloud, and all servers are located in the United States. The FAQ, updated 25 April 2025, puts it less carefully - headquartered in British Columbia, Canada, while servers and databases are hosted on AWS/Heroku in the United States - and so places the database in the United States too. The two documents therefore disagree on where the database lives; the privacy policy is the more specific and more recent legal text, and both countries are recorded here. Files and media go to the Cloudinary CDN, on a Frontly account by default or on your own. Transactional email goes through Mailgun. Records held in connected external sources - Google Sheets, Airtable, Supabase - stay with those providers and, since 18 September 2024, are no longer cached by default. There is no European hosting region and no self-hosting option.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Frontly.
- The publisher itself states it cannot confirm full GDPR or HIPAA compliance, and there is no DPA, no Article 27 representative in the EU and no named data protection officer - a real obstacle for any regulated or European workload.
- Data is split between Canada (the AWS database) and the United States (Heroku, Google Cloud), which amounts to a transfer outside the European Union by design.
- No documented way to keep customer data out of AI model training: the privacy policy describes the flows towards the AI providers without ever taking a position on training.
- Through RB2B, cookies and advertising partners may attach your browsing on the marketing site to an email or postal address; opting out happens on an external page, app.retention.com/optout.
- The operations counter is easy to underestimate: 1,000 per month on the free plan goes fast once an app is genuinely used, and fees are non-refundable.
- The public site has no contact page and no legal notice; the legal documents live inside the Intercom help centre, and the only published email address sits on a neighbouring domain, frontlyapp.com, obfuscated behind Cloudflare.
- No registered legal entity is published - the site names only "Frontly", with no Inc. or Ltd. suffix - which limits what you can verify before committing production data to it.
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low to start, moderate to go far. No code is required: a plain-language description produces a first version, and the only real prerequisite is a structured data source - a Google Sheet, Airtable, Supabase - or the native Frontly DB. Going beyond a prototype means learning the platform's vocabulary: dynamic variables, display conditions, relational data, actions and webhooks. A JavaScript action and the REST API are there for technical profiles but remain optional. Connecting a custom domain means editing DNS at your registrar. 127 help articles, a YouTube channel and a Discord server back all this up.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Frontly
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What is Frontly?
Is there a free plan?
How much does the cheapest paid plan cost?
Which data sources can Frontly connect to?
Which AI models does Frontly use?
Is there an API?
Can Frontly be self-hosted?
Is Frontly GDPR compliant?
Where is the data hosted?
What counts as an operation?
Should you pick Frontly?
Frontly is a credible answer to a narrow, common problem: you have data in a spreadsheet or a database and you need a usable interface on top of it, quickly, without a development team. The AI generation gets you a first version from a sentence, the visual editor makes it presentable, and row-level access control is what turns the result into a client portal rather than a shared dashboard. The free Starter plan is unusually generous - unlimited apps, unlimited users, no time limit - which makes the tool genuinely testable before any commitment. Pricing beyond that is legible: $30 then $100 per month, then a quote. Two reservations deserve weight. The first is legal. The publisher writes plainly that it cannot yet confirm full compliance with GDPR or HIPAA, publishes no data processing agreement, designates no European representative and names no data protection officer, while data sits across Canada and the United States. For a European organisation handling personal or regulated data, that is a decision to take with open eyes. The second is product maturity: two generations of the platform, V1 and V2, run in parallel and migration between them is not guaranteed to be one for one. Add to that a young and small publisher - a pre-seed round of USD 350,000, a team based in Vancouver - and a marketing site so thin it has neither a contact page nor a legal notice, and the picture becomes clear. For internal tools, back-office panels and client portals with non-critical data, Frontly earns its place. For anything load-bearing, regulated or long-lived, test it hard and keep your data source under your own control.
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