Has anyone had a response from Adalo support?

General Discussion
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I’ve submitted numerous support requests over past couple of months to Adalo support via their support form and have never heard back from any of them. Some of them were issues stopping me from moving forward. I’ve already abandoned one app I was working on because tables were randomly not updating and I could ever get any Adalo help or support.

Just wondering if it’s just me or does Adalo not respond to anyone, in which case not sure what the point of the support form is?

On the other hand, this community is awesome and so helpful!

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Hi, @paulh.

Yes, Adalo support team has responded my tickets in 3 times. I don’t know why you didn’t.

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I’ve always received a response from them.

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They have always responded to my tickets and I think lately the service has improved even more.

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I never get replies to any support ticket anymore. Even though after a few days I get an email asking to rate my support expirence. Sorry but I have to drop a bomb here: Adalo’s support systems is just a piece of crap.

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Strange that some people get support and some don’t…

@jessehaywood as the only Adalo staffer who seems to be on the forums, would you be able to find out why some of us aren’t able to get support?

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Here’s my explanation on support, and I ask for your empathy and for you to try and see things from Adalo’s perspective. Put yourself in our shoes for a moment.

We have 5 support staff that work in CX. We have 350,000 users. Our support staff answers tickets from the moment they login to the moment they shut their computer. It’s literally all they do all day, Monday through Friday from 7 AM to 6 PM CST.

I wish I could show you how many support tickets get submitted every day, but I can’t. They do their best to filter and prioritize based on various things. Granted, sometimes things fall through the cracks, and for that I apologize.

What we have found through support is that many people just want the support staff to pretty much build their app for them. In many cases the user didn’t read through help documentation, didn’t search the forum, and didn’t make a post asking our community for help before submitting a ticket.

We have a Statement of Support that outlines what our support staff is for. Here’s some highlights:

  • Informing Adalo of bugs or strange behaviors with features. This is a high priority and is then shared with the developer team.
  • Questions and issues with your account and billing and team settings.
  • Letting you know if something is possible within the platform
  • A prioritization of our paying customers support tickets before they get to the free customers tickets

The support staff is not there to build your app for you. We have created a platform for you to build apps on. A part of building any business is problem solving. So, we recommend the following steps before ever submitting a ticket.

  1. Search! Search the community forum, search the help documentation, search YouTube, search Google, just search.
  2. Ask the community. I’ve been on other forums before, and I may be a little biased, but the Adalo forum is the most helpful community I’ve been a part of. I get to see the analytics, and I’m blown away at how engaged and responsive our community is. We have community leaders that are responsible for making this place even better, and I’m going to be adding more in the coming months. @James_App_Maker, @Victor, @theadaloguy, @bhanu, @Yongki, and @iAppsNi. These folks are really smart and can at least point you in the right direction if they can’t help you. If you want to be a part of the solution, then let me know, and you can apply to be a community leader.

I hope this is helpful. I wish support could answer everything that comes through, but it’s literally impossible. Maybe someday we will have such a large support team that we can answer everything! But until then, this community is the best place for that.

I also urge you to be a part of the solution by becoming an active member in the community, if you aren’t already. This place is only as good as the people who are offering solutions. So many of you are super smart and you could be such a huge help to others.

For those of you who are actively engaged here, THANK YOU! You make my job a joy.

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Thanks Jesse. Appreciate the response, and totally get that the support team is busy. As I mentioned, this community is awesome and continuously helps solve some tough, and not so tough :slight_smile:, problems. The Adalo platform is great and love the mostly ease of use building apps.

However, I’ve reached out a few times over the past couple of months regarding some bugs (I assume) where a specific database record wouldn’t update, or Adalo-made components wouldn’t work. Most recently my first iOS TestFlight build failed in Adalo, but gave no errors (I couldn’t enter a 2FA code. Although the next day it just worked).

Each time, after I’d asked the community and then reached out to Adalo support, I never received a response. I stopped working on my first app because of the database issue and couldn’t get help. So while I appreciate the sentiments, as a paying customer, I’m not getting any responses from support, even if there seem to be showstoppers.

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Thanks Paul. I think in an instance like that, where you’ve done all the troubleshooting you can, and then you’ve sent a support ticket with no response, feel free to message me on here and I will do what I can to get you a solution.

Just give me the ticket number and all other pertinent information.

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Sounds good, appreciate it. If/when I revisit my original app, I may take you up on that…

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I agree with you 100%

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Don’t take this personal. It’s not about you, Jesse. It’s about Adalo’s customers.

  • Adalo’s community is good. That’s why Adalo’s employees should NOT ask too much from them. I feel for the experts you mentioned above; they do most of the helping. Adalo ought to rely less on “the community”

  • NEWS FLASH Not everyone learns by reading. especially founders. i.e. some of your customers. (ask psychologists, it’s true) I have a lower than average reading comprehension ability. So… Adalo can point to all the reading references it wants. I will read it. it won’t help. I won’t learn it well.

  • CUSTOMERS want service. NOT attitude. A statement of support is a cop-out. Not by you. By Adalo. It’s cool for startups. I think Adalo is beyond that stage.

  • Adalo requires a lot of hacks & isn’t easy for many reasons. so, RELAX

  • The fact that your support staff is so busy, all day, means:
    **Adalo’s sales copy is promising to fulfill a need the market wants. **
    BUT, the platform isn’t delivering the solution correctly. This is an awesome start. You should be fortunate to be in that situation. You are lucky. Adalo brags (first thing on the website) about how much money they have raised. Yet, you’re saying, you’re too busy to help?!? really? ok. if you say so.

  • Perhaps Adalo should think about making a more affordable (than 3rd party experts), better designed, service for building solutions in a way that lets your customers pivot…

BECAUSE I think, “Adalo founder users” want to pivot to “product/ market fit” They DON’T want a platform that they need to spend hours & hours figuring out

Adalo does help find experts… on the right path here.
but, I think it should be more in-house, and a more complete service (for many reasons)

if you don’t agree, read your own words:

“many people just want the support staff to solve their problem and pretty much build their app for them”

YES!!!.. that’s what people want to pay for, dummy. Build that feature /product. DUH!! (why are smart people so effing dumb. Think about it)

Adalo got my attention because it’s a cheaper way to pivot. NOT because it’s a platform. You MIGHT be confusing your value prop. Actually, I know it is. I am not here because I want to play with Adalo in my spare time. I’m not here for my health. I am here to help others…i.e. my customers. I think other founders feel the same.

(it maybe a, “I don’t want a drill bit, I want a hole to hang a picture” kinda of situation :wink:

  • YOU’re asking a paying customer to put themselves in your shoes?? really? If you think you’re demonstrating empathy here, you’re not.

  • “A part of building any business is problem solving” … again, really? That is a dumb-ass response. Really. (you are not dumb. your response was. don’t get your feelings hurt)

  • Why is Adalo so far behind on the QUALITY of video or in-person education? rhetorical question. I know you don’t know. Two Minute Tuesdays was a good start. Adalo is only worth a couple minutes, eh? And Adalo employees want to blame not knowing on their customers?!

  • When Adalo asks it’s users to jump through a BUNCH of HOOPS, in different places (as it is) It isn’t helping.

  • With that said. no-code is awesome. I commend Adalo for trying to lead the way. I just think, in my own opinion, Adalo might be better with a slightly different service, or a platform with fewer features.

I am trying to prove product market fit. Then, hopefully, I will have it built with code. Adalo is not a replacement for C++…Never will be in its current form. It SHOULD be a time-saver for building with code. It’s not a time-saver when everything needs to be looked up. I think it could be better with fewer features, more speed & ease of use.

FYI - don’t waste time with a response - just some thoughts for your team to consider

Have a good day, Jesse

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I think most of this is well said and definitely echos a lot of the sentiments that I have been seeing around the forums and customers.

As a thought, why not check with paulh and 2 others to see if they are interested in pooling their plan to get the $200/month plan. It comes with a dedicated account manager. At $50 you don’t get this, but if 4 makers (sign NDAs and whatnot) join together to get a $200 account this might fix the problem temporarily until Adalo figures out how to manage 350,000 users and growing.

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First off, relax. We’re all here to help each other out — not to complain about a dumb response. (or make fun of Adalo employees, they work hard every single day to make makers’ dreams become a reality)

Personally, I’ve learned how to master Adalo from reading forum posts and watching Youtube Tutorials. For anything in life, you’re not going to master it the day you find out about it. You master it from working on it for days, problem-solving, and research.

Since we’re talking about support, you should also read this post that I made a while back about support.

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Another angle we can see this,

Adalo provides a tool to shape screens into app, if the features are like directory or data entry without scheduling or complex filtering, I think most of the people can do this in their first month in their learning curve, so in this case Adalo keep their promises.

But if more and more additional features are needed, experts can play a part to help with this, they can provide stepping stones to something unopened if we do it by ourselves, later we can resume their efforts.

If you can’t spend time to read and do experiments, other people can do it for you, but they will need to exchange with compliments.

This is applicable to any no code tools such as Bubble which is rated more complex than Adalo or even low code which is advertised similar to no code, but require more learning curve than Adalo.

Anyway, after expressing that feeling to words, that must feel good. :smiley:

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I think that’s a little harsh. Any platform where you’re building apps is going to have a learning curve. You can’t expect support folks to hand hold you while you learn to build an app. Development is complex, even with Adalo/no-code, and developers need to spend time learning how to build on their own, with documentation and with a developer community. Adalo has decent support docs and an excellent, but small, community. If you want to build apps then you need to put in the leg work to learn how. I totally disagree that you should be relying on Adalo support to hand hold you while you learn the product. It has limitations for sure (as I keep discovering), but you learn what it can and can’t do and for things it can’t do, you either find a workaround, hope they fix it or move on. That’s the nature of the no-code beast, everything is a trade-off.

What is not OK, and what I was complaining about, is lack of support for things that are broken. Adalo really needs to step up its game regarding bug fixes, new features, tutorials and communication in general (which really, really sucks) but that’s just their crappy business model and I could always go to another platform if it got bad enough (and I almost did a couple of times).

Point being, there’s a difference between not getting support to help you learn and build, and there’s not getting support when there are bugs and problems that I can’t control. Big difference.

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A lot to unbox. I suppose the first thing is, if you don’t know how things work, how can you possibly tell the different between a bug and a lack of understanding. I received an email today about GeoLocation not working (happens often) where the maker had an issue running in PWA mode. Was this a bug? Surely she could not tell. My guess is that it is how iPhones work in PWA, location is disabled by default. I know this because I have been a top tier developer for 20 years. So asking for bug fixes or tutorials are the same thing to me.

Also,

You can’t expect support folks to hand hold you while you learn to build an app.

Why not? It might not be Adalo’s business model, but it does not mean that you cannot expect that.

I think James is a wonderful person, but as his profile states PLEASE do not DM for support. :slightly_smiling_face:. The Community leaders are not here as support staff, or to solve your problem, they are passionate people who care about the community. They can choose who and when to help.

If we look at Adalos principals they are as follows:

#1 COMMUNITY

We empower & engage with our community of makers.

We are committed to doing what’s right for our makers. We value their ideas, their feedback, their experiences, and their work. We believe every person should have the opportunity to make powerful apps, no matter their technical expertise & in our community we will do what we can to provide a platform that turns ideas into reality.

I think Toddy is pointing out, that in his opinion they are not living up to their first principal. I think that most of the venting I have seen is related to this as well. I think what Yongki wrote is spot on, that if you want to make a ToDo list, Adalo is good, if you want to do more, it is not easy. I totally agree, which again contradicts the no. 1 founding principal.

#2 TRUST

We tell the truth & act with integrity.

We trust each other & believe each of us is doing the best we can to fulfill Adalo’s purpose of empowering makers. Because of that trust, we are transparent & honest about our company. We give honest feedback to our co-workers & colleagues. We are candid, but not harsh. We know what is expected of us & we follow through on our words with actions.

I am not sure if this is an internal to the company principal, or external.

Skipping #3 and #4, moving on to

#5 ACTION

We always solve the problem.

We default to action & recognize that it is better to do something than it is to wait or do nothing. Because we own our work, we are responsible for the outcome & its impact. We don’t dwell on problems for too long, and instead work towards solutions — always.

I feel like most of the posts around are really about this one. Good intentions.

At the end of the day, I think that Toddy, and everyone else who vents is really just trying to hold Adalo up to their own principals.

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Fair enough and I agree with Yongki too. I guess in summary there’s a communication and support problem, regardless of whether it’s for bugs or learning.

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My 2 cents here:

I am an Adalo customer (forever) before becoming a Community Leader.

I do understand that there are gaps in support and sometimes it’s longer than usual. I have had my fair share of frustrations too.

But zooming out from the issue at hand, Adalo team has been continuously working to ramp up the platform capabilities ever since.

The platform’s ease of use is what made Adalo grow so rapidly, at a pace it’s difficult to handle the large volume of support requests. This is no excuse, but that’s part of the growth phase for any startup.

Adalo is one of the youngest NoCode platforms in the market with such a huge customer base, what they delivered in such a short period is commendable.

Having said that, I want to highlight a few things I noticed as a community leader,

  1. I receive way more DMs than I can handle and in most cases the answers are already in the forum, and I am assuming this is the case with support requests too. As a member of community a small effort to skim through existing solutions (before sending support requests) will answer majority of DMs and support requests in my view.

  2. If we all collectively focus on raising support requests only for items (i.e., platform bugs, billing, build issues, etc.) that are not already answered in the community and that are not related to our idea implementation, I’m sure we’ll get faster response with reduced number of actual support requests (that requires a response from platform team).

And as @jessehaywood mentioned in his comment earlier, feel free to tag him in case you don’t get response to support requests. He has been tirelessly working to make CX better from the day he joined Adalo.

:pray:t2:

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I think your point 1 nails the difference between and agile community and an a-fall (agile + waterfall) community. If the problem is that the solution is already posted on the forum and people still ask the question, and you try to teach people to search the forums, and that fails. Change tactics, don’t beat a dead horse. From your message, obviously the forum is not a place to find solutions and that needs to change, be adapted, not doubled-down. If you cannot change the community, then it is you (not literally you, but the forum solution) needs to change. I feel it too, I copy paste links to answer most questions, so the present solution is not working. A pivot is needed.

I think your point 2 has proven to be ineffective as within the last 2-3 months of off-hours messing around I have delivered most of the issues that have been open for years. Albeit not at large due to my small, black-market site that is off the beaten path to say the least. I end up speaking more Legalese than code.

The Agile manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/) states the following.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

When I hear release cycle in the context of non-delivery it raises an eyebrow. Stop dispatching actions from reducers.

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