With the arrival of the new pricing plans I have to reconsider my agency pricing structure. It’s honestly disappointing because I planned this all out and built a website, contracts and 2-3 test apps to showcase my work before starting to advertise my agency services. It took months of work and I feel like these new pricing plans will eat up most of my profits in the near future. I’m glad I only have of couple customers for now.
For now I’m using a grandfathered business plan and building all customer apps in this team, charging them trough a stripe portal in their apps.
Now that the legacy business plan will eventually be transferred over to the new business plan I got a couple of questions;
Any agencies feeling weird about this huge pricing change and lost trust in Glide?
Are you considering other builders such as softr or hiring actual developers?
Would it be better to get a deal with Enterprise plan to build multiple customer apps in the same agency team?
If you prefer to let the customer pay for their Glide subscription directly, how do you charge them for your work? (Glide’s revenue share and agency plans aren’t really great solutions)
I feel that with the new pricing plans around the number of users, it will be hard to justify the cost compared to any other tools they could find on the web. How do you guys with agencies will handle that?
Hi Mikael! May I ask why you consider Agency plan not a good solution for the Agency? It costs way less than a Business plan (even way less than a Legacy Business) but practically is a business plan.
Most agencies charge clients for their service (50-50 way with clear scope of work) and build their apps in client’s own team (client pays for Glide plan that suits them best), this way client have the whole ownership of the app and does not expose any sensitive data to third parties. I can not see how a small agency (I understand that you are planning to start as a one person agency? may be I misunderstood, sorry) can manage to maintain multiple apps at the same time, keep all clients happy and grow.
Depending on how you imagine ideally running your agency, it may be worth discussing the Enterprise plan. Just to understand what Glide can offer for you and what you can offer for your clients. Yet again Glide often says that they want developers to build apps in Client’s team and not under developer’s team… Not saying it can’t be done, it is just not how they are structuring the platform to function.
Price change was definitely an unexpected surprise… With the new pricing (hopefully we will see some adjustments soon ) Glide does not suit as many cases now as it used to… But may be that was the whole point and is the goal for Glide… Agencies will adjust accordingly. It is easier to find a new type of client than to change the whole business structure.
My 5c
I’m new to building apps for customers, only been doing it for 2-3 months now. I don’t know much about agency plans but it sounds like Glide wants agencies to use this plan to build the Saas softwares and get all the profits. It feels weird doing all the work and maintenance and getting only 20% share for a year or two.
What do you mean by charging 50/50? Do you mean agencies charge their customers let’s say 249$/month for their services as a seperate invoice from Glide’s 249$ plan?
The way I did it was to pay the monthly Glide subscription myself and charging the customer my desired margin on top of it using stripe recurring subscriptions. This way I get 100% of the margin I set for the whole time the customer keeps their app active rather than only get 12 to 24 months of revenue share.
I also charged them an upfront building fee between 4k to 20k depending on the complexity of the app. I signed a contract with them saying the app isn’t mine and they could get ownership by transferring the app to them.
I’m on the exact same boat. The whole personal vs business email users + 20 user limit has really thrown me off. I’m thinking to use JetAdmins solely based on pricing but I love Glide Apps way too much to let go. Spent so much time getting good only to be disappointed with their pricing strategy. I hope they consider fixing these plans or come up with a better agency pricing model.
By saying “Charging 50-50” I mean the agency signs the scope of work with the client and sends them the invoice for 50% of the app development cost. Then agency builds the app and, after confirming client’s satisfactory, agency sends the invoice for remaining 50%. And after payment is done, agency gives full rights of the app to the client.
Transferring duplicates of the app between teams may create lots of issues like webhooks, computed columns and other functions to be broken… That is one of the main reasons for Glide to recommend building the app in client’s team…
Forgot to mention that if anything happens to your Glide account, your credit card that Glide charges - all your client’s apps will suffer.
Another thing to think about is what if one of your clients unexpectedly and quickly will generate a huge amount of updates or users and your reach your limits for your plan?
You still can charge maintenance fee for your client’s if this type of revenue is preferred for you. But in my opinion, there are too many cons for not building client’s apps in their team…
Me too. I have been building 2 apps in last 3 months, with the goal to have clients. I am on Legacy Starter plan (25 USD). In this plan I can use Airtable, which is fantastic. New plan that allows Airtable is Team, and the price is 125 USD! From 25 USD to 125 USD! Not to mention only 20 users per plan…
My plan was to pay the Glide for all clients, and have my clients pay only to me. Why? Better control.
None of my clients (Croatia, Europe) will ever pay me more then 200 USD/ month. In a country with average monthly wage of 1.000 USD, 125 USD is lot
I see Jet Admin has customer facing app pricing, with the pricing for internal tools priced differently. This is what I have been asking for Glide to do as well. I hope they consider it.
) Glide does not suit as many cases now as it used to… But may be that was the whole point and is the goal for Glide… 
Agencies will adjust accordingly. It is easier to find a new type of client than to change the whole business structure.
