As always with using existing solutions, it will probably be a very quick shortcut to get you mostly there. Now, the ability to go from "there" to where you wan

As always with using existing solutions, it will probably be a very quick shortcut to get you mostly there. Now, the ability to go from "there" to where you want to be (customizing the app to fit your exact needs) is probably going to be where the headaches lies. You say you are not technical, so I guess it would go something as this: You buy an app from something like flippa etc. Possibly for a low price as well since you don't care about revenue. You hire someone to modify it for you so that it fits your need. Now if you just want to put it to your brand, that would be relatively easy. But say you have some custom features in mind, like sharing documents or whatever is your USP. Your programmer, who did not assess the app in the first place, might find it's actually crappy and or complicated code and is going to spend weeks on very simple things. Same for fixing bugs. So ultimately I would say: If you don't need to customise to test your platform at all, why do you need your own app for the mvp in the first place? Just use whatsapp group as a way to test your "diet support group startup". If you do need to customize it, then I would first find a programmer, and then discuss with him whether to do it from scratch or to buy some codebase, that your programmer is going to review. That said, I'm pretty sure group chat apps is a very common training app for programmers and they would be plenty of tutorials / bootstrap code to help him, without loosing control and understanding of the code.