We’re trying to figure out if a no-code builder actually changes the cost structure of our automation projects, or if it’s just moving the bottleneck around.
Right now, every automation needs engineering time. A simple workflow that should take a day ends up taking three days because engineers have to scope it, build it, test it, and maintain it. That’s expensive, and it’s why we only automate the highest-impact workflows.
I’ve heard that no-code builders let business users build automations themselves, which sounds great in theory. But I’m skeptical. Do business users actually understand what will work versus what won’t? Does it still need engineering review before production? Or do you actually get to deploy directly from business requirements without engineering involvement?
What’s been your experience? Did no-code actually eliminate engineering as a bottleneck, or did you just end up with business users building stuff that engineers had to fix later anyway?
We tried the “let business users build everything” approach and it didn’t work. Workflows they built often had logic gaps or missed edge cases. So we still needed engineers to review.
But here’s what actually changed: instead of engineers starting from zero, they started from a working prototype. That review pass went from three days to maybe four hours. Massive difference.
So it’s not that engineers disappeared. It’s that the model flipped. Business users do the initial building and thinking, engineers do quality assurance instead of development. And that’s a way cheaper model.
The other thing is that it unblocked us from automating smaller workflows. We couldn’t justify engineering time for a $5,000 annual impact workflow. But if a business user can build it in an afternoon, suddenly that workflow is profitable. We went from automating maybe five big workflows a year to automating forty-fifty smaller ones. That compounded impact was bigger than any single engineering efficiency.
We measured this carefully. A traditional fully-engineered workflow cost about $12,000 in development time. Using no-code with minimal engineering review, same workflow cost us about $3,000. The breakdown: business user builds it in two days, engineer reviews and hardens it in half a day. The time savings are real, but there’s still engineering involved—it’s just a different, cheaper kind of involvement.
The real savings come from volume. We went from completing one automated workflow per quarter to completing around one per week. Not because we hired more engineers, but because we shifted the initial building burden off engineers onto business users, supported by tools that actually work.
There’s also a governance consideration. Business users building without oversight can create technical debt. You need engineering in the loop to maintain quality and consistency, even if they’re not writing the code. So the cost savings are significant but not total elimination of engineering involvement.
This is where no-code genuinely shines. We’ve seen development costs drop significantly—not because engineers disappeared, but because they’re doing higher-value work.
A business user describes what they need. They build the initial automation using the visual builder. An engineer does a final review and hardening in a few hours instead of building from scratch over days.
You’re looking at workflow development costs dropping from $10,000+ to $2,000-3,000 per automation. And the real compounding effect is that you can now automate workflows that were previously too small to justify engineering time.
We went from engineering having to prioritize maybe five automations per year to handling a review queue of thirty-forty. Cheaper development, faster time to value, more automations launched.
The platform works because business users can actually express their logic visually without needing to code, but it’s structured enough that engineers can review and extend it quickly.