The core pricing dilemma at hand is the tension between two kinds of customers:
The Business Customer
They have a specific problem to solve for 100-1,000 users. They are willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to solve it.
The NoCode Entrepreneur
They have a big idea for a new app, and they expect an unlimited number of users ā 10,000 to millions. They expect to spend as little as possible until their app takes off and can monetize (99.9% of these kind of apps fail to take off).
Optimal pricing for the first group prohibits the second group; optimal pricing for the second group captures no value from the first group. In fact, I would say a great business cannot be built for the second type because of the high failure rate, low willingness to pay, and in the success case, the platform is just reselling cloud resources on very small margins.
The billion software developers that we want to create is a reference to the billion spreadsheet users that exist today, not a billion entrepreneurs building marketplaces or subscription content apps. This is a third customer typeānot a business, not an entrepreneurāthese are empowered individuals solving real problems with Glide, and most of them can use our Free tier!
I think there is a different kind of customer too, the one that wants to make something valuable for its niche community of family, friends, club members, etcetera. So not with money (making money / reducing costs) in mind. With the billion in mind, I hope they wonāt be forgotten! The free version might be cool for them. And of course I do understand you need to make money.
I fall into the category of customers that @erwblo is referring to. This is not a speculative app (as you say), but is content meant for a particular group of users ā who will not be paying.
The problem is not the pricepoint, per se, but, yes, I did think I could make a content-sharing app at a reasonable price that could then enrich the lives of others. My main shock was, āwhen my user level hits that point, I need to a) come up with thousands of dollars per year or b) rewrite the app in something else (which will cost me thousands in labor.ā
Understand that with this type of app (and Iāve seen it even on the beta end ā Iām only 5 months into development ā you have users who sign up, use it for a few weeks and then drop off. But Glide gives us no way to track user activity. No ālast loginā date, etc. In fact, one of the things Iāve had to try to program into my app is an activity date, and update that date when they (the user) do anything. In that way I was hoping to be able to purge inactive users from time-to-time. That actually took up a big part of the development.
Iām not looking to get something for nothing, but there are tools out there that advertise on their first page, āno user limitā. The app Iām developing is for a group of people that currently has 30K+ members. No, they wonāt all download the app. My guess is perhaps 20% will download it, and only 10% will be regular users. But again, how to handle inactive usersā¦
I guess what youāre telling me is Iām not big enough for Glide to care about, so I should look elsewhere?
So, 3k monthly users fits into our $99/mo plan. If this is too expensive for you, then yes, according to our new pricing, Glide is not for you. Is that the case? What do you expect to pay?
Do all users need to sign in? If not, visitors are free and unlimited on all plans.
To get value from this particular app they need to be signed in.
Again, the point is not the 3K ā that is not too expensive. What is the unknown is then at what point do I need to re-write the app if I cannot take care of the inactive signed-in user issue? I donāt want to have to go up a tier every time my total user count exceeds (x), because by that point, many of those users may be inactive. Do you see the issue?
One active user is a person who actually signs into your app in a given month. I am talking about people using your app, not rows in your user table. If you have 10k users in your users table, and only 1k people sign in, you have 1k users that month.
Thank you for that clarification. That helps tremendously. I have been waiting for the new pricing guidelines for a while to determine steps forward. Your answer means I donāt need to worry about tracking user activity myself (well, except to be able to handle row purging for inactive usersā data)
Thereās nothing to sell to someone who merely copies an Instagram app! That is not a customer, and we have a Free tier for them.
Here is our original pitch from winter 2019, where we explain that the business opportunity for Glide is demonstrated by enterprises spending $7.1B on internal apps in 2021. We have not changed direction, but I admit itās confusing that our product is meant for everyone, but we do not view everyone as our paying customer.
I am sure that was to showcase the versatility of the tool. I believe with this pricing model, there is something for everyone and I can actually feel comfortable because somehow Glideās business model kinda makes sense and for me that tells me that they will be sustainable and will be around for sometime in the foreseeable future.
