The expensive part of software development is not coding, but figuring out what needs to be done. It appears people are trying to optimize the less important thing.
Low code is absolutely not about optimising coding (although I can see how you might get that idea). It's about moving the executable work away from specialised coders and to the people who actually have the problem. And when you can do that, you should.
Low code is all about optimising the more important thing.
The downside is that all those software engineering concerns that the average business practitioner is poorly placed to cope with often find a way of reasserting themselves and when they do, you typically end up with a mess worse than if you'd started with a code solution in the first place. However, in the domains that they don't, or where the negatives are not business critical or can be adequately mitigated, low code can be incredibly empowering to noncoders (excel is probably the canonical example).
What I mean is that if the people who actually have the problem could describe the problem with sufficient detail and unambiguity, the core coding part would be very straight-forward, fast and cheap to do, regardless of the programming language.
Of course the additional things beside the core, like change management, monitoring, security, APIs etc. would add to the cost, but they are at least possible if you are not on low-coding platform.
The problem is that for anything basides the simplest applications, people cannot describe what they need in sufficient detail and unambiguity. This is where the cost of the application development comes from.
There are many means to bridge this gap: user interface design, prototypes, agile development, waterfall requirements gathering etc. Excel is a way to iterate, that many professionals learn to use. If the end users can develop software that solves their problems, and does not cause other problems, there is no problem.
From what I have seen, low-coding is sold to IT departments with promise of cost savings in the coding part, and to other departments as a means to bypass IT that they consider slow, expensive or not delivering what they want.
So we need to get down to what we mean by low-coding and what context we are talking about. In addition to Excel, Django appears to hit another sweet spot in many contexts. It is very fast to develop and iterate with, comes with built-in admin UI, but it is still possible to add fill all the corporate technical requirements as well.
The low-coding platforms the link points to that seem more problematic usually have some custom programming language, abstraction layers that often limit the extensibility for more complex applications, graphical ui designer, have difficulty supporting enterprise requirements (those security, auditability, monitoring etc.)
Why is it expensive? If somebody can describe the problem with sufficient detail and unambiguity, the core coding part will be very straight-forward, fast and cheap to do, regardless of the programming language. The problem is that very often it is impossible to do.
