Draftbit Brand Guidelines: A Chicago React Native Builder, Code Export & AI Agents

A visual builder that hands over its code.

Draftbit is an app-building company based in Chicago. Its founder and chief executive is Brian Luerssen, who, according to his Y Combinator profile, previously created and ran OkCupid Labs in San Francisco and before that co-founded a machine-learning software company that was later acquired.

Sources differ on the founding year. The tech-jobs site Built In Chicago and the review site Unite.AI, in a September 2025 review, both give 2017, and the company’s GitHub organisation, which lists Chicago as its location, was set up in February 2017. Y Combinator’s directory gives 2018, the year Draftbit joined its Winter 2018 batch; both years appear in public records.

The original idea, as Built In Chicago describes it and as the French site Services Mobiles summed it up in October 2019, was a new way to build cross-platform native iOS and Android apps “in minutes instead of months”: designers or developers lay out an app visually, then export clean, documented code and libraries that give them full control. Unite.AI says the founders were developers frustrated by how long mobile development took and wanted to bridge the gap between design work and code, without locking users into one platform. That promise of code ownership became the brand’s main point of difference from many no-code tools.

React Native under the hood.

Under the visual editor, Draftbit generates React Native code, the JavaScript framework for building native mobile apps. Unite.AI, which built a daily habit tracker with it for its 2025 review, describes a drag-and-drop builder for iOS and Android apps with a library of reusable components, light and dark modes, live previews on a phone through a QR code, custom JavaScript and JSX components, and connections to services such as Firebase, Airtable and Supabase. Its verdict was that the platform is fast and flexible for teams and developers, while beginners may face a steep learning curve and some features feel clunky.

The review also walks through the set-up: after creating an account, a user names the project, adds a short description, chooses a starting point and picks an app icon before customising components screen by screen. Teams can work together in shared workspaces with permissions, add multi-step actions and navigation styles, and publish to the app stores or the web with one click, Unite.AI says. On Y Combinator’s directory, Draftbit now adds that it can build games as well as mobile apps, web apps and websites, and that users can run its agents on the Claude or ChatGPT plans they already have.

The same review notes one less common feature: when a new user signs up, Draftbit offers to pair the project with a human expert. The company sells that work through an in-house team it calls Draftbit Experts, offering fixed-price builds, monthly retainers and help with apps that have stalled, and says on Y Combinator’s directory that it builds and manages hundreds of apps on the App Store.

Draftbit has also released small open-source projects. One is Personas, an avatar generator published on GitHub in October 2018 under the MIT licence.

The company’s current website has a light and dark theme toggle, short feature lines such as “Build for web, iOS & Android” and “Import, edit & export full code,” and a gallery of starting templates for mobile apps, web apps and websites. It says more than 200,000 builders use the platform.

Design and documentation.

No-code and low-code app builders sell a promise that is easy to state and harder to show: that a working app can be made without writing code, or while writing very little of it. Their websites tend to make the promise visible. Homepages often lead with the editor itself, shown as screens being assembled from ready-made components such as lists, buttons, forms and maps, with a properties panel beside them for colour, type and spacing.

Template and showcase apps do much of the persuading. Builders publish galleries of sample apps sorted by use, such as marketplaces, booking tools, internal dashboards or community apps, and some let visitors open a sample on a phone or copy it into a new project. Customer stories and lists of apps made on the platform play the part that a portfolio plays for a design studio.

Plan and feature naming follows a familiar pattern. Tiers usually climb from a free starter level to team and enterprise levels, and features are named for what they unlock: publishing to the app stores, custom domains, code export, user seats or workflow runs. In recent years several builders have added AI assistants or rebuilt their products around them, and product names now often describe how much of the work the software does, from hands-on visual editing to describing an app in a sentence.

Corporate pages are usually brief. About pages tend to state a mission about widening who can build software, introduce the founders, and name investors or accelerators. Funding rounds, takeovers and, for open-source builders, licence terms are the dated facts that give each company its history, and the guides in this series set them out where a source records them.

From a visual builder to AI agents.

Draftbit is now built around AI coding agents. Its “What’s New” page lists more than twenty product updates since July 2025, many of them signed by Luerssen. According to the company’s FAQ, last updated in September 2026, a user now describes an app, and an agent, either Claude Code from Anthropic or Codex from OpenAI, turns that description into a task list and builds a first version in a cloud sandbox attached to the project. The user can then ask the agent for changes, adjust the result in the visual editor or open the files in a code editor. Users can pay for agent time with Draftbit credits or connect their own OpenAI, Anthropic or OpenRouter accounts.

The product has also widened beyond phones. A project can now hold several apps: mobile apps still use React Native with Expo and can also publish to the browser as progressive web apps, web apps use Vite and websites use Astro, with an optional API or Supabase backend shared between them. Publishing to the web, the App Store and Google Play happens from the same project, and paid plans add a full code editor and export of the source as a zip file or to GitHub. In September and October 2026 the company added the ability to import existing JavaScript or TypeScript projects from GitHub, to preview several design options before the agent changes an app, and to send fixes to published mobile apps without a new store review. Desktop apps are not a target, its FAQ says.

For a design guide, Draftbit shows how a brand built on one promise, that the user owns the code, can carry that promise from a drag-and-drop builder into AI-generated apps. Compare FlutterFlow, another visual app builder, and Glide, which builds apps from spreadsheets. For this guide we use an indigo, a deep ink and a green with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Draftbit’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.