Announcing changes to Free and Pro apps

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Good morning, Gliders!

Today we’re making some changes to free apps and we wanted to share them with our community first.

First off, some Pro features are becoming available for free apps in the next week or so:

We’re also introducing limits for free apps:

  • 500 items per app (rows from your spreadsheet used in your app)
  • 100MB of files or images uploaded per app
  • 10 address-based pins per map (you can display unlimited pins using coordinates)
  • Email Whitelist is only available in Pro apps

Apps that already go over these limits will remain free and unlimited in these respects.

Why are we making these changes?

We’re making these changes to create more clarity about the difference between Free and Pro apps—we want Pro apps to simply increase these limits, rather than having a hodgepodge of different features from free apps. We’ve also added hundreds of features to Glide over the last six months and we wanted our pricing to reflect its value.

We know that some of you will feel disappointed or like a promise has been broken, especially if you were counting on free apps using unlimited data. All I can say is we’re trying our best to make sure Glide is available for the long run with a sustainable free tier. If you have an urgent need to use Glide that’s impacted by these changes and you cannot afford it, please email me with an explanation.

We also plan to revisit our pricing, including making Glide more affordable internationally, in the coming year.

Thank you

We’re only getting started with Glide, and we have some really exciting new features coming for free and Pro apps which we’ll announce next Tuesday. I’m confident that you’ll be very happy with what we have in store, and where Glide is heading in the next year and beyond.

Thank you for your passion for Glide, and for making our community a special place.

David

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Thanks for sharing the update, @david. I am sure you’ll be inundated with questions! Here’s my first: I often change the images I use in my apps. Up to now, I didn’t worry about deleting old ones, but with a limit, that will be more of a concern. Is there a way to do that? Also, would storing images and other files in our associated Google Drive account a way to avoid going over the limit? Will you add that functionality at some point?

Thanks!

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Hello! No, we will not count items in your Google Drive—you’re already paying Google for those. We will only count images/files you upload via File Picker or Image Picker; images you drag-and-drop into your app; or images uploaded in Chat and Comments. We upload and host those for you. We’ll let you know when you get close to the limit.

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Fair enough, you are building a fantastic product so you need to find a business model that works as much for you as for us :wink: . Really appreciate you keeping the unlimited data for those of us who have been very early adopters.

One question: the 500 limit, does it apply to one sheet or several sheets? In my case, I have a main sheet but I then have queries that create a subset of this data in other adjacent sheets.

Thank you and can’t wait to hear the other announcements.

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The row limit is across all sheets that the app uses.

So let’s say you have three sheets with 200 rows each, and you have a tab for each sheet, then that counts as 600 rows.

However, if you have two sheets, A with 100 rows, and B with 800 rows, and only a tab for A, and there’s no relation from A to B, then that counts as 100 rows, even if you use sheet B in a Google Sheets formula in sheet A.

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Just to clarify: are images/files effectively deleted (i.e., not counted toward the 100-MB limit) when the link is deleted from our spreadsheet? Or do we need to do something in addition to ensure they don’t count toward the 100-MB app limit?

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We do not count files you’ve uploaded if you’re no longer using them in your app.

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Thank you for the clarification. I saw the row limit change today and was taken aback, but I understand. The only pro feature I disagree with is the Email Whitelist. As an educator, the majority of the apps I create have this feature due to student privacy concerns. Only teachers of my school (verified via school domain) should have access. Public with email wouldn’t meet my needs for any of the apps I’ve created. I’d have to upgrade every app that I’ve created to this point, then?

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Your existing apps with Email Whitelist are grandfathered in, but if you want Email Whitelist for new apps you’ll have to upgrade them.

Password authentication is free - any reason you can’t use that?

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I think a tier system of payment for pro would be nice. If all I want is unlimited data in my app but not all the other features itd be nice to only pay for that feature

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We’re planning organization features for this use case—how many teachers access your apps?

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The app I’m working on is an IT ticket tracker to determine complexity of issues and atm 4 users but once I’ve got all the features stable and go pro it will likely be a hundred or so.

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Thank you for the response. Password works for apps where user data isn’t being collected or authenticated or filtered. Many of my apps are gamified which encourage the users to interact with them. I guess the solution would be to make them public with email but reinforce the fact that they must use our domain?

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If it’s Public with Email then anybody can log in. I’m not sure what you mean by “reinforce the fact that they must use our domain”?

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Usually 50 but if I open it up to the students to track their progress, we’re looking at 650. At that point, though, I’d be over the 500 rows mark just for the user data.

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I’d have to notify them in person or via comment along with the link to the app. Certainly less than ideal.

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yesterday you said all apps would be honored with old limits

now you say only those passing the limits

please apply limits only to new apps. thanks

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Sorry for the confusion. The grandfathering of free apps works as described here. We will post more information and an FAQ this week.

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I appreciate why this needs to be done. I didn’t read what would be the pricing tiers. Is it still Free/$19/$199 per app per month?