David, sorry, but I would like to know your opinion. Should small businesses that need to manage customer relationships, that need 500+ users, should look for other alternatives to glide? As I understand glide’s focus is on large companies that can pay over 10k USD a year? In small users should we look for other alternatives in relation to the glide?
If a business has 500 customers using their app every month, I think our $99/mo Pro plan is a bargain. If you have 500 customers a month and think that’s too expensive, can you tell me more details about the business?
If you have 1k customers using your app every month, I still see our Business pricing as an absolute no-brainer at a $0.25 per customer, per month.
Also, these plans included unlimited apps. You could make several apps for the company, public or private. Going through this exercise makes it clear that Glide is underpriced when we’re talking about a business with hundreds of customers.
Will you make it even less users in the coming time?
Make some standard pricing not like changing now and then, please.
I’m still going with glide añd make my customers to limited but b2c on target.
At the moment is impossible creating a long-term business using Glide. It is not possible to take an annual subscription, the prices and conditions are constantly changing. I love Glide, I pay $99 a month and I am happy to do it, but I can no longer trust it, in my opinion the management of the company is unreliable, I am afraid of losing customers and therefore money.
I hope things will change soon and then I can change my mind.
Since you ask, if I were you I would want to make a big as possible imprint on the world by democratizing tech with the great tool you made. To do that I wouldn’t focus on big companies that pay 10k a year. I think a combination with a good offer for the starters / smb’s / schools etc that love Glide must be possible. I hope you are not further distancing from those groups. It feels like that reading your comments.
Not 500 customers, 500 users from 1 single customer, which is basically unfeasible for any company that works with the public, and also unfeasible to sell to a customer that needs more logins per month. If you have these companies that you say would easily pay more than 10k/month, why did you leave your platform open? Why are other “low cost” plans available? Isn’t it easier to sign a contract with them and close the glide for everyone? because with this concept you have for glide it is totally contrary to what everyone here in the community thinks, of being an easy and intuitive platform to make an application
Agree, it appears you have a handful of customers who are abusing the system and not paying a fair rate. But the fix actually seems to perpetuate the abusing companies model (they are grandfathered in?) while dramatically, based on feedback, limiting use-cases for your current base of consultants who are not abusing the existing policy.
I believe you need to have a NEW price model for these type of Glide customers who should pay more (OR sign up be references, write articles about the greatness of Glide, appear on Podcasts to talk about their experience - e.g. add value to Glide in a non-cash compensatory manner). I am not sure what your data says on App-usage and client counts to find a sweet spot.
Of course one of the best examples of B2C Glide Apps is GLide’s own reference: the PGA app and it was hugely successful! In regards to what B2C apps should be built with Glide - SCALE costs - Twitter spends $1.7B a year (~35% of revenue) for a private infrastructure to support 350M active users. ~$4.80 per user per year. 40 cents a month. No one should be expecting to build the next Twitter/Bumble/Uber on Glide. But they should be able to build web-sites that scale to the 10s of thousands and monetize them. Micro-market segments like the PGA App. And priced to be successful for Glide and the developer.
Glide should be better than Wix. Better than Bubble. Better than Squarespace (who spent $7M+ for a meta-ad during the Super Bowl) for ALL moderately complex, bespoke data-driven Apps.
Developing HIGHLY appealing and useful apps that support from 20 to 20,000 users should be your mission. And, of course, figuring out how to charge by the ‘SCALE/COMPLEXITY’ is the challenge.
Unlike buying commodities, scale costs incrementally more - not less. Corporation know that and can be sold a higher price. Also add highly valued features for Corporations (logins, automatic backup, multi-site replication, transaction logs, connections to other SAAS services, etc.) that will get you more revenue/margin for these type of customers. Amazon-style - one nickel and dime at a time
I step away from Glide for my birthday and look what happens!
Great points
The PGA apps were internal, for private users working at PGA.
My man. I work in switzerland, and trust me with 10K you didnt do nothing my friend. Maybe you can have dev from india…
$10K is suitable for most projects regarding small businesses. Big companies will not use Glide for sure only for little displaying projects…
“Small Business” can have a pro version or starter. For you, a company having 500 users per month are a “small business” ?
Edit: So why you think big companies can’t use glide ? Now we can use Big Query.
And what is a “big company” for you ? Mine have more than 800k per year and we gonna use glide, so what ? we are small company ?
I did not say big companies can’t use Glide… I said they will not… unless they need fast internal solutions… Small business has less than 1000 hits a day… so Glide might be a cheap solution for a small database (less than 25K rows)
for a more significant flow, I would use Google Webapp and code Java and HTML from scratch. much faster and with almost no limits…
Yes, but do not forget that you speak for you, you who surely know how to use code, there are talking about companies that need no-code app. And I repeat again, for some companies have preferred to pay 250.- per month than pay 10’000.- a developer in India for a project that will never evolve, while with Glide you can constantly update your application. Experience made with 10k according to your needs you will never be satisfied.
Yes… As I said is good for a small internal project… and it is absolutely better to pay $350/month than have a developer on the payroll, but to handle big traffic and large data… Glide is absolutely not suited for that, and then it is worth getting a developer with… one-time fee… no monthly bills, no third party involved, and no integrations…
If i were you i would have a little bit more love to simple persons who are not great companies and are using your tool as it was the simpler only 2 years ago ,but time are changed , nocode was a very big hit , and its a pity to see a tool like Glide basically axing itself by losing us , i’m sure you can find a way to avoid such abuses …thousand of employees…etc , you would have to make Starter better , raise public visitors to at least 1000, i mean people that logs in the public app…100 is…come on… put white labelling by default and give 2-4 API …put this at 40-55 at month ,as a basic CRUD Glide would be so great for example with other no code tools such as WeWeb or Strapi…, then i really don’t understand why now Pages are App and old app are Classic App , you are making users very confuse IMO , i know driving a company at scale needs funds but please don’t axe us , keep in mind as i’m sure you are really aware AI is exploding, how many Apps with 2 - 4 Api and maybe 2 integrations would benefit GLIDE with this ?, Glide is also a very good tool to learn the computational Logic way of thinking , and give some love to Javascript ( i see its experimental ) and CSS …, would be really sad to see Glide fading away from normal users, i hope its not. Just a simple thought and a little wish , Speaking to me i will rebuild my old app , a legacy one with Starter then if Glide won’t allow me to stay…it will be a sad farewell to a very good friend where i learnt a lot.
The truth is that I was reading this thread and I saw myself so reflected in my problem. I am a software developer, I have a SAAS application running for another PHP Backend business model without any limit on users, rows and so on, mounted on a simple MySQL database server, multiple users, thousands of rows, etc. When I discovered Glide, I honestly loved it for its aesthetics, ease of use, speed of development, etc. I thought it was and still seems great, but we have only one problem with the number of users assigned to a team. I understand David’s explanation and it is just that 500 users to be able to generate many applications is very good. But I give the example of a case that I cannot specify because of this. I have a client with a barber shop, we use another system in WordPress that has 1400 registered users who make appointments, although David says “If you have an application with 1400 users, you pay so many cents for each one, it’s very cheap.” The issue is that in this case not all users use and consume services every month. So maybe 1,400 users register and one month 300 consume the other 200 and so on. But my client must pay 100 USD for cloud services + services that we provide for development and support. It becomes very expensive and even more so if you live in Latin America. After reading this interesting thread and finding people’s constant interest in increasing the number of public users per plan, they should take it into account. It is a very worrying limitation. At least create more plans e.g. with 2000 or 3000 users at a higher price, of course but possible. Nobody is going to make an AirBNB, Netflix or Facebook on Glide, only a person without any knowledge of software would think of that. But please take into account the request of so many people who need a greater number of users per application. Glide is fantastic, but a huge change is being asked for regarding user limitations. My respect and cordial greetings.
Hello David, I am very pleased to see how we can exchange different points of view. I understand your position and totally respect what you say, no one can put a price on your product. In my particular case that happens to me and if I use your calculations what you say is very logical and you are right. It happens that this is not the USA, this is Latin America and if we ask a client for $250 in fees plus development services, we lose the project. Hopefully you understand the request of an entire community that is always asking the same thing. We are not saying that you enable registration to create the next Air Bnb or Facebook, that would be silly, but it will lead to more extensive plans for example 1000, 5000, 10000 even if you raise the price a little more. At least try to do the experience to see if people are interested and I would believe so, because everyone continually claims the same thing. You don’t think it’s a good start to make a small change. Remember that you also pay for white label, something that the community does not support, among other things. Glide is great, I really congratulate you on the project, it is brilliant and if you look at my profile I have a few apps that have not seen the light of day, they are experimental because I can’t find the right niche and the limits reduce the possibilities. I work with another low-code platform as well and I have no limits in anything since I work directly with mysql at 0 cost, but Glide has that subtle, delicate and efficient touch that makes it spectacular for many other options. I may be too ignorant for such an evaluation but the business model is extremely criticized by the community and even more so when it comes to people who intend to develop for clients. The model also considers how at the company level they can pay the costs, but remember, in very few companies there are people specialized in developing software solutions, so external people, like me, are interested in using Glide to market. I sincerely appreciate your response but I hope a change happens in the business model because it is a request from the entire community. Thank you!
I’m not speaking for Glide of course.
A few observations based on a discussion I had recently.
Website, apps, business services with +1 billion users:
- Consumer Apps: Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, Messenger, WeChat, TikTok.
- Websites: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Baidu, Tencent QQ.
- Business Software: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, Android
Wordpess that powers a lot of websites on the web doesn’t fit here, and Wordpress has been around a long time.
So what do we observe? To reach 1 billion users, the service is usually consumer, “free” in that the user doesn’t pay monetarily, or the business is Microsoft or Google which have been around about 45 and 25 years respectively and are exceptional in how they have shaped to world of tech.
Is Glide going to achieve this? We hope so. If it does, it will have required very special circumstances. But for now it doesn’t have the ingredients that have worked for companies in the recent past.
Remember that Glide is a business. I have absolutely no idea what the geographic breakdown of its revenue is, but we can guess: US-based business and entreprise customers. The US and to a second extent the EU are the world’s biggest markets for software companies. Glide will do what it takes to be a successful business first. Reaching 1 billion creators might be a nice byproduct. But I doubt it would aim to reach 1 billion creators and be an unprofitable business. In fact, its actions reflect revenue growth is a priority.
So what about smaller markets outside the US and the EU? Well, I’ll be politically incorrect, possibly wrong or at least my wording might be clumsy, but Glide doesn’t care. If it did, its business model wouldn’t be what it is. It’s customer satisfaction of those who have money first, and customer satisfaction of those that have less money second. It’s not necessarily Glide’s fault. It’s a grim way to see things but I think that’s how the world works unfortunately.