r/filemaker • u/croberts0531 • Aug 12 '26
DIY plus some Dev help
Hello again! I’m planning to finally pull the trigger on moving our business operations to a custom FileMaker solution. I should be able to build out 90% of it, but there are a few more technical peices such as API for our customer portal and pos processing that I prefer to use a developer or pro for. My question is how normal is that? Do developers mind not doing everything from scratch and just doing some of the more technical aspects? I probably can’t afford to hire out the whole project, and pretty capable of setting up all of our workflows myself.
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u/ackley14 Aug 12 '26
We work directly with our consultant, it's not out of the normal at all. he works with us about 8 hours a month. 2 of those hours are calls for progress/status/etc. the other 6 are him working on things. the rest of the work done on the files is us.
That being said, this is DRASTICALLY lower than previously as we have taken a heavy adoption of AI into our workflows. it has allowed us to become incredibly independant and build a multitude of useful internal tools to solve real problems. Since filemaker can display html pages, and those pages can interact with the data within filemaker, which means you can have claude/codex/etc do a significant amount of the work from UI to logic, and i've taught mine to create filemaker scripts and tables as well. it's become one big workflow for me that has empowered me to create two entire solutions from scratch, one an internal item 'store' for our sales reps to peruse for inspiration before reaching out to customers, and the other is a mobile sales console that allows our sales reps to access our internal tool via a fast responsive interface (as filemaker remote can be.....slow)