Moving beyond a no-code setup that was slowing delivery down

JiNi helped Oxford Scholastica migrate from a no-code solution to a custom platform that could handle thousands of student bookings, eliminating the debugging delays and lack of traceability that affected the original setup.

Background

Oxford Scholastica runs academic summer programmes and online courses for students preparing for university. Each year, thousands of students register through their website.

Part of their application workflow was built in Bubble, a no-code platform that let the team launch quickly. The system worked well at first, but limitations emerged as usage grew: automations occasionally failed, data sometimes didn't reach external tools, etc. Debugging these issues inside Bubble proved difficult. The system behaved like a black box, making it hard to understand why problems occurred or how to fix them.

What we did

We joined the project to maintain and improve the existing Bubble-based workflow.

Over time, we discovered that many reliability issues stemmed from the platform itself. Rather than attempting a full rebuild immediately, we proposed a gradual migration to custom code.

The transition happened incrementally:

• rebuilding parts of the frontend outside Bubble
• temporarily keeping Bubble's database
• progressively moving core functionality to custom code

Once the new infrastructure stabilised, we removed Bubble entirely.

The new setup also enabled us to introduce A/B testing, helping the team experiment with and improve their booking flows.

Results & reflections

The platform now runs on a fully custom system that handles thousands of student registrations reliably, eliminating the bugs and unpredictable behaviour of the no-code setup while giving the team clearer visibility into how the system works.

Our collaboration continues on a flexible, on-demand basis. The team reaches out when they need new features or improvements, without the cost of a full-time developer.