The App Nobody Had Time To Build, Live This Afternoon
Describe what you need to track, count, or log and get a working mini app with no code. Ask for custom screens or logic instead and AI writes real code. You approve either one first.
Three Ways To Create, Stated As Needs Rather Than Technologies
The first screen doesn't ask which stack you want. It asks what the thing is — and for most of the backlog of small apps nobody ever built, the answer needs no code at all.
Mini app — the default
Track, count, or log things. You get a data table with saved views, safe automations, and a live board. No code is generated and nothing is deployed — it is configuration on shared platform primitives, live in minutes.
Custom app — when it needs code
Custom screens, unusual logic, or an integration with an outside system. AI writes and deploys real code you can read, hand-edit, download as a ZIP, and roll back.
Start from a template
A ready-made shape you approve as-is, then make yours. Curated system templates and your team's own saved builds sit in the same gallery.
The two paths point at each other
Start describing a tracker in the code builder and a banner tells you the mini path is faster. Describe something a single table can't hold and the mini path declines rather than producing something that half-works.
Either way, it is a real app
Its own address, icon, and sidenav entry, its own permissions, and its own row in your apps list. Nobody using it has to know which path built it.
Private to your tenant
Mini apps never appear in the public app directory or another tenant's marketplace. Publishing a coded app to the community directory is a separate, reviewed opt-in.
What App Builder Does
Describe It, Don't Draw It
Plain-language description in, working app out. No forms designer, no drag-and-drop canvas, no ticket. Attach a screenshot or a document and the code builder reads it as part of the brief.
Nothing Is Built Before You Approve It
A mini app arrives as a plain-language approval card — fields, views, automations, board, and the quick-update form — before anything is created. A coded build's first turn is read-only and returns a plan you can approve, revise, edit, or cancel.
Real Apps, Not Embeds
Every app gets its own address, icon, sidenav entry, and permissions. A coded app additionally deploys to /apps/ext/<slug> with list, detail, create, and edit screens per record type, plus its own mobile and settings pages.
Three Gates Before Code Ships
Deterministic fit checks, an AST-level static security scan, and an AI QA review run before a coded app can deploy. Syntax errors, prohibited code, and broken screen-to-controller wiring block the install outright.
Edits Only Ever Add
Ask a mini app in chat for a new field or view and it is added. The AI never renames or removes, so anything you renamed or built by hand survives every edit and upgrade. Coded apps reopen in the same builder conversation, with version history and rollback.
Metered, Attributed AI Spend
Every token the builder agent spends — planning, building, verify-and-fix, QA, docs — is metered and attributed to your business and shown on Analytics. Each build also carries a per-session token ceiling.
Inside The Platform, And Deliberately Bounded
A Built App Is Inside The Platform, Not Beside It
This is the difference most people underestimate before their first build. A generated app doesn't get a blank sandbox and an HTTP client — it gets 79 platform APIs and reads your real organization live. No sync job, no duplicated directory, no second source of truth about who works where.
- Reads your real org — users, locations, departments, shifts, schedules, leave, attendance, timesheets, skills, and roles.
- Creates real platform objects — an actual Task assigned to a member, an approval routed through your own approval workflow.
- Shows up where people look — records project onto the unified calendar, ICS feed, and Outlook/Google sync, or post to the News Feed.
- Native e-signature — send a record for signature with a generated PDF, and read the outcome back on the record.
The Capability Model Is What Makes Generated Code Safe To Run
An app must declare which of 16 capability families it intends to use before it can touch any of them — email, outbound HTTP, scheduled jobs, notifications, webhooks, tasks, comments, approvals, feed, XP, e-signature and the rest. Anything undeclared is unreachable, and an undeclared call fails rather than degrading quietly.
- Read-only platform data — a built app cannot write to platform tables; it writes only to its own business-scoped record store.
- Static security scan — dynamic evaluation, shelling out, filesystem and process access, and cross-tenant queries block the deploy.
- Outbound guardrails — calls are limited to declared domains and blocked from internal addresses.
- Failure quarantine — repeated failures quarantine an app automatically instead of letting it keep erroring at users.
An AI Can Author Exactly Three Kinds Of Automation
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is what separates letting an AI build you an app from letting an AI build you an app you can trust. When a mini app is composed from a sentence, the palette the AI may draw from is three actions wide — update a field on the record, notify a person, or open a task — and the only recipients it can name are the person who filed the record and the person who created the app. Email to outsiders, webhooks, and row deletion are excluded by design, not by omission.
- No exfiltration path — a composed automation cannot mail anyone outside your company and cannot call a webhook.
- No destruction path — it cannot delete a row, so the worst a badly worded sentence produces is a wrong field value.
- No invented recipients — notifications reach the row's creator or the app's creator, never a list the AI assembled.
- The fuller palette still exists — Power Tables itself offers email and webhooks, authored deliberately by an admin rather than composed from a description.
App Builder In Practice
A practical scope check: what the app covers, which controls matter, and the builds teams usually run first.
Core workflow
Describe what you need, review the card or plan, approve it. A mini app is stamped into place from there; a coded build streams in and ends in an explicit Deploy click. Editing runs the same loop.
Controls that matter
Configurable per business: auto-continue for long builds, health alerts on built apps, update-available alerts, and an optional recipient group for built-app notifications.
Scope and specs
Useful specs: 79 platform APIs and 16 declarable capabilities for coded apps served at /apps/ext/<slug>; mini apps capped at 15 fields, 6 views, and 10 automations, with authoring admin-only and one monitoring-delegation tier.
Where a mini app stops
One kind of record per app — ask for two linked tables and the builder says so rather than half-building it. Triggers fire on record-created and field-changed, so a date-based alert becomes a saved view filtered to the next N days. How many you can run is bounded by your Power Tables table quota, five by default and raisable to twenty-five.
A narrow door for the floor
A mini app can expose one report-a-value form — match the item, enter what's left, add a note. The person using it never sees or edits the underlying table, the confirmation names the record and shows the movement, and the note lands in the same change log as every other edit.
The tracker IT never built
An operations admin describes a fleet-vehicle inspection log — fields, overdue rules, who gets notified — and deploys it the same afternoon instead of joining a six-month internal-tools backlog.
The spreadsheet that outgrew itself
A shared equipment-loan spreadsheet becomes a mini app in an afternoon — fields, a saved view of what's overdue, and a live board — with no code and nothing deployed. The office manager who owned the spreadsheet describes it.
A public intake with a real backend
A facilities team publishes a QR-coded public submission link for hazard reports. Submissions land as records with SLA timers, comments, and overdue escalation instead of an unwatched inbox.
Connected To The Rest Of MangoApps
→ Power Tables
A mini app's records are a real Power Table, not a private store only that app understands. Admins keep the full table with its own permissions, imports, and the wider automation palette the composed subset deliberately omits.
→ Live Boards
A mini app can ship with a live board — a ranked list or a stat tile driven by one of its saved views — built on the same board engine the rest of the platform uses rather than a chart bolted onto the app.
→ Tasks
A built app can create a real platform Task assigned to a business member — the follow-up lands in the same task list people already work from, not in a private to-do table only that app knows about.
→ Calendar
Records with dates project onto the unified calendar, the ICS feed, and outbound Outlook/Google sync — with the audience the app declares deciding whose calendar they land on.
→ E-Signature
Send one of the app's records for a native e-signature with a generated PDF, and read the signature status back on the record through the same signable link the rest of the platform uses.
→ Communications
Notifications fan out to a criteria-resolved audience — departments, locations, roles, groups — capped and deduplicated, honoring per-user settings instead of a hand-rolled recipient list.
→ Shifts & Scheduling
Built apps read shifts, schedules, locations, and attendance read-only, so an app can reason about who is on and where without you maintaining a second roster.
→ Ask AI
The App Builder agent answers questions about your built apps from the Ask AI sidebar, and a built app can declare its own agent that appears there scoped to that app.
REPLACES POINT TOOLS
One app-building layer instead of a separate low-code platform
Most internal-tools platforms build apps next to your systems — a separate identity perimeter, a separate portal, a per-user licence, and a connector to reach the data the app is actually about. App Builder builds them inside the platform your workforce data already lives in, and reaches for code only when the need actually calls for it.
Microsoft Power Apps
Low-code app platform
- Priced per deployed app rather than per user per app — a 5,000-employee tenant that ships two trackers pays for two apps, not for thousands of seats, and a mini app deploys nothing so it never touches that meter at all
- Reads your live people, locations, departments, and schedules natively; there is no connector to license, configure, and keep working
- Built apps appear in the app your employees already use on web and mobile — no separate portal and no second sign-in
Retool
Internal-tools builder
- The people who use a built app are never charged per seat — the fee is per deployed app, not per viewer or editor
- Generated apps inherit your SSO, roles, permissions, and tenant isolation rather than reimplementing an access model per app
- Every coded build passes deterministic fit checks, an AST-level security scan, and an AI QA review before it can deploy
Airtable
Spreadsheet-database hybrid with app layer
- Records live in your tenant under the same retention and audit posture as the rest of your platform data, not in a separate vendor workspace
- A mini app is composed from one description and stamped into a real Power Table with saved views, automations, and a live board — reviewed on a plain-language card first, and it improves as those shared primitives do
- What an AI may automate here is three actions wide — update a field, notify the person who filed the record, open a task — so an app described in a sentence cannot mail an outsider, call a webhook, or delete a row
Appsmith
Open-source internal-tools platform
- Apps are generated from a plain-language description, not assembled component by component by hand
- Nothing to self-host, patch, or operate — the sandbox, the scanner, and the runtime are the platform's problem, not your infrastructure team's
- Generated code runs under a declared-capability model, so an app can only reach the APIs it asked for and the platform granted
PLATFORM ADVANTAGE
App Builder inherits everything else MangoApps already does
A standalone low-code vendor has to build, buy, or integrate each of these. Every app you build here gets them by default.
Identity & SSO
Built apps inherit your SAML/OIDC SSO, MFA, and SCIM provisioning. Nobody creates an account for a tracker you shipped this afternoon.
Roles & permissions
An app reads your organizational roles, user roles, and permission hierarchy read-only — it inherits the access model rather than inventing one.
Mobile already in hand
Every built app renders on mobile from its record schema at /m/apps/ext/<slug> — in the branded app employees already carry.
Notification channels
In-app and email notifications, audience targeting, and duplicate suppression run on the same engine the rest of the platform uses.
Tenant isolation & audit
Records are business-scoped at the schema level and refuse to operate without a business — one app your tenant builds is invisible to every other.
Translation in 100+ languages
A built app's content translates inline using the same engine that powers Chat, SOPs, and Policy Hub — for a multilingual frontline.
INDUSTRY FIT
Built for the teams whose apps never reach the roadmap
App Builder fits any organization with a backlog of small internal tools, but it earns its keep where the gap between "we need this" and "engineering has capacity" is measured in quarters.
Facilities & Property
Visitor logs, hazard reports, and site-opening checklists with QR-coded public submission links and overdue escalation.
Manufacturing & Logistics
Vehicle-inspection logs, equipment loans, and yard checks that read the real shift and location data instead of a maintained-by-hand roster.
Healthcare
Rounding checklists and equipment-tracking apps with sensitive fields masked by default and every reveal audited.
Retail & Hospitality
Store-opening checklists and regional trackers a district admin can self-serve without a platform request.
Field Service & Utilities
Site check-ins that geocode an address, test a geofence against your real business locations, and assign the follow-up as a platform Task.
IT & Platform Teams
Hand a scoped, governed build surface to departmental admins — inside your existing permissions and tenant isolation — instead of absorbing every request.
Ask Questions With The App Builder Agent
App Builder has a paired AI agent for the questions admins ask about the coded apps they have already deployed. Six tools across the built-app register, health, audit history, and recent builds — with two writes, both confirmation-gated. It reports on deployed packages, so mini apps are outside its view, and it cannot deploy, roll back, or delete anything.
App Builder AI
List what your business has deployed, check an app's health, pull its audit log, review recent builds, and enable or disable an app — six tools, two confirmation-gated writes, no destructive verb.
Customer Success
How Customers Use It
Customer Case Studies
Customer Case Studies
Video Case Studies
Customer Case Studies
Customer Case Studies
Video Case Studies
MangoApps has enabled us to better engage with our employees, which is crucial. People today are very quick to move if a company’s culture doesn’t suit them. You have to understand who your staff are and what they want, otherwise you’re going to battle to retain them.
Alistair Mackenzie
Founder & CEO
Full House
Frequently Asked Questions
Those build apps next to your systems; App Builder builds them inside one. A generated app reads your real people, locations, departments, and schedules, creates platform Tasks, routes approvals through your existing approval workflow, requests e-signatures, and projects records onto the company calendar — 79 platform APIs in total, each gated on a capability the app declares. It also inherits your roles, permissions, tenant isolation, and audit trail rather than reimplementing them. It also asks a question those tools don't — whether your need requires code at all.
Start from what the thing is, not from how it should be built. If you are tracking, counting, or logging records — supplies on a shelf, visitors at a desk, equipment on loan — that is a mini app. No code is generated and nothing is deployed; you review a plain-language card and it is running the same day. If you need custom screens, unusual logic, or an integration with an outside system, that is a custom app and AI writes real code for it. You don't have to get this right up front. The create screen asks in those terms rather than by technology, and the two paths cross-recommend each other — start describing a tracker in the code builder and it points you at the faster path. The honest rule of thumb is that most of the backlog of small apps nobody ever built is the first kind, which is why it is the default.
An administrator describes a need in chat, an AI drafts a plan, and that plan is validated and shown as a plain-language approval card — fields, saved views, automations, the optional live board, and the quick-update form. On approve it compiles to a versioned manifest and is stamped into a real Power Table with its saved views, its automations, and optionally a Live Board. The app then gets its own address, icon, sidenav entry, and permissions, exactly like any other app. Nothing is generated and nothing is deployed, which is why it improves as those shared platform primitives do.
They can update a field on the record, notify a person, or open a task. That is the entire palette an AI is allowed to author, and the limit is deliberate rather than unfinished — a composed automation cannot email someone outside your company, call a webhook, or delete a row, so an app described in one sentence can't quietly become a way to exfiltrate data or destroy records. Notifications go to the person who filed the record or the person who created the app, never to an arbitrary list. Two consequences are worth knowing before you buy. Triggers fire when a record is created or a field changes, so there is no "alert me 30 days before this expires" — the answer there is a saved view filtered to the next 30 days, which stays correct without sending anything. And a mini app covers one kind of record; if you need two linked tables the builder tells you so rather than producing something that half-works. Power Tables itself has the fuller palette, including email and webhooks, for admins who want it.
No, on either path. A mini app is shown to you as an approval card listing every field, view, automation, and board before anything is created. A coded build's first turn runs in plan mode — it can read and search but cannot write files — and returns a plan with Approve & build, Request changes, Edit plan, and Cancel. Approving starts the file-writing phase; nothing reaches your users until you separately click Deploy.
A validation pass and a static security scan run server-side at deploy and block the install on failure — syntax errors, unparseable files, prohibited code such as dynamic evaluation, shelling out, filesystem access, or cross-tenant queries, plus broken screen-to-controller wiring. At runtime a built app is limited to the capabilities it declared, reads platform data read-only, and can only see its own business's records.
Yes. Every generated file is listed and editable before deploy, and saved edits are re-checked — syntax must compile and the security scan runs again, so an unsafe edit is rejected rather than deployed. Version history keeps snapshots per session, and restoring one changes the builder's files rather than the live app.
App Builder watches for it. A quarantined app, a failed load, a suspended event handler, or a rolled-back auto-update raises a lifecycle alert to the people who built and deployed that app — filed as an Inbox action request rather than mailed to every admin. From Your apps you can retry the load, roll back to a previous version, or reopen the build with Fix with AI.
Yes. App Builder issues scoped, revocable API keys and exposes an MCP endpoint, so external tools — Cursor, Claude Code, a CLI — can list tools, call them, and run read-only platform queries against your tenant. Keys track last use and can be revoked from the builder at any time.
Building, editing, and deploying — plus Settings — are restricted to global administrators. An administrator can delegate a monitoring-only App Builder app-admin grant that opens Your apps, Builds, Templates, and Analytics without the Build or Settings tabs. Regular members never see the builder; they just use the apps it produces.
Usage-based, billed per deployed app on an annual interval — no per-employee charge and no floor, so a business with nothing deployed pays nothing. Only apps that were built here and are actually running count. An app that fails to load or is quarantined is free while it is broken, redeploying the same app doesn't bill twice, and something you installed from the community directory isn't a build. Mini apps don't touch that meter at all — nothing is deployed, so they carry no per-app charge and their rows bill through Power Tables instead. Everyone in your business can use an app you built at no additional per-seat cost, and the AI tokens the builder spends are not billed separately; they stay on the shared platform AI-credits meter and are shown on Analytics.
Yes, and on the mini path every change is additive. Ask in chat for a new field, view, or automation and it is added — the AI never renames and never removes, so anything you renamed or built by hand survives every edit and every upgrade. Renames and deletions stay in the app's own settings and the underlying table, where referential protection lives. A coded app reopens in the same builder conversation with Fix with AI, passes the same gates again, and keeps version history with restore plus per-app rollback.
No. A tenant-built app is private to that tenant by default — records are business-scoped at the database level and the app is not visible in other businesses. Mini apps go further; they never appear in the public app directory or another tenant's marketplace at all. For a coded app, sharing is an explicit, reviewed opt-in — you create a directory listing and submit it, and MangoApps reviews it before publication. Even then it cannot be given a price or sold.
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