What the two actually produce
A studio writes an app for your idea. A builder assembles one from parts that already work. The first can do anything and takes weeks; the second does the common things immediately and stops at its edges.
The question is not which is better. It is whether what you need lives inside the parts.
What the blocks cover
The Mini App builder is block-based: hero, product grid, cart, categories, search, reviews, bookings and availability, property listings, gift cards, bundles, FAQ, gallery. Eighty-eight block types, a theme engine for palette, fonts and layout, and more than a hundred ready-made designs across shop niches.
If your shop is a catalogue people browse and order from, that is the whole job.
Where a developer still wins
A flow nobody else has. An integration with a system only you run. A calculation specific to your trade. If your product needs a step that does not look like browse, add, confirm, the blocks will fight you and a developer will not.
The cost nobody quotes
A custom app has a second bill: it needs maintaining when Telegram changes, when a dependency breaks, when the person who wrote it moves on. A builder absorbs that for the price of the plan.
The fastest honest start
Describe the shop in a sentence to the AI shop builder: it picks a design, writes the copy, and fills a layout with example products in about a minute. Edit everything after, and replace the examples with real items before you share the link. Plans and limits are on Pricing.