This pricing was entirely our invention, and did not come from outside.
The #1 thing that drives our costs is data updates. We have two options to make our business work:
- Charge per app user
- Charge for app use
#1 is just a proxy for #2, and was extremely unpopular when we tested it (e.g. pay $2/month for every user of your app).
We want Glide to work as a long-term business, so at the very least, our pricing model needs to reflect our costs. Today we have many apps that cost us hundreds of dollars per month to host due to data update volume, yet they are on a $30/month plan with unlimited updates. What would you do in this situation?
We will continue to refine the model (which updates are counted, how many are included, how they are priced at volume), but I am pretty confident that this is the right structure. Ideally, the pricing model correlates to the value for customers, and we can’t find a better correlation of value than data updates.
There is a real cost for running software that updates data. We cannot pretend this cost doesn’t exist! We apologize that our traditional pricing pretended that unlimited data updates could have a fixed cost.