Dude, I’d email them now and see if you can get your money back now.

The Grid is putting more than half their budget into advertising to get as many people to buy in as possible and then they are going to abandon it and cash out. Also, what they promised is impossible. Read the first article on this thread and you’ll hear it right from an accomplished developer that what they are claiming is not possible with current technology and won’t be for a very very long time.

Here is a post on another promising app that gained a lot of early adopters who never got their money back and got no product. This happens a lot.

Another recent example is TideKit:

TideKit is the only app development platform that lets you develop HTML5, hybrid and native apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and the Web — all from a single source of code written in JavaScript. Create, manage and deploy apps that wow people and monetize everywhere.

I have been too one of the people who signed up for early bird access. After paying 100 USD I have been given a message stating something along the lines of “Thank you for your support. We will contact you when it is your turn.” That moment I realised that their entire purchase flow did not say explicitly that purchasing early bird access will give me access to the beta. I did not get a receipt either. I asked for a refund on the grounds that they are unable to provide the receipt (after repeated requests), they are unable to provide estimate when I will get access to the software and their entire purchase flow is misleading advertisement at its best.

However, TideKit soon released (5 months after I made a purchase) a progress page, which showed that some people are getting access to the beta and even included a progress bar showing completeness of the software (think, UI 90%, backend 95%). What do you think happened when the bar reached 100% Everyone got an email stating that due to bad PR the product is cancelled (here is the full email, http://stackoverflow.com/a/31369264/368691). Of course, no one is that naive to believe this.

The think is that as a programmer, you can more or less estimate what is realistically possible in the current time. While TideKit is not absolutely impossible, it is not a task for one developer (which later turned out to be the case with TideKit). Furthermore, existing products in the market (think http://electron.atom.io/ and http://nwjs.io/) are a good indicator of the technical challenges. These programs have a lot smaller scope, have a lot bigger backing, and are struggling with the complexity of the codebase.

How does this relate to the Grid? Well, there is nothing near in the market that compares to what the Grid is promising. The components of which the Grid is supposed to consists (which are well described in the original post) do not exist either, or are at a very early stage of maturity. There are no certain deadlines. You cannot name/find a single person who has used it already. There is a huge PR around it (Do you think you’d really need a huge PR for a fully AI web development software? lol, please.).

At its best, it is going to be drag-and-drop/answer standard set of questions, component driven web CMS. At its worst, it will be shut down in a similar way that TideKit has.

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