Best practice for deploying apps for clients

I am trying to work out the best way to hand apps over to clients after building them. My scenario: Build apps for clients to use in their businesses. There is no financial transacting taking place in the app. For example a restaurant invites customers to download the app. The customers sign up & become members. The venue uses the app to market the venue activities, meal/drinks specials & general community news. The app also doubles as the access control for Covid-19 Track & Trace requirements.

My questions are:

  1. Should the client register with Glide, pay for a Pro app & then add me to their Google Sheet back end & Glide account, or is there a Glide way of doing this?
  2. Is the Glide way of doing it using Glide Organizations?
  3. Is Glide Organizations meant to be used in this way, or is it only meant for using internal apps within your organization?

Thanks in advance for the help. Cheers Brad

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Hi @Brad_Legassick my approach is to use my own Google Sheet and my own Glide Pro subscription so the user gets just the app. I then charge a monthly subscription for use of the app. This way I keep control of the data. If the user needs some form of raw data export then I can provide that. Hope this helps.

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I’m also interested in hearing what others are doing for this.

Hi @V88 thanks for your input. I have scheduled a call with David Siegel from Glide to go over the Organizations. I hope he will be able to clarify how we can use Orgs. Cheers Brad

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Interested to hear what you end up doing and what David might recommend. I’ve thought about this for a while and I’m not sure the best approach to take (“host” all the apps and provide access as needed; set them up more as templates and allow apps to be copied by buyers; create an organization and deploy apps that way; something else…?).

Curious to hear how some others do this too. @Robert_Petitto?

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We recommend that the client create an Organization and upgrade it to a paid plan, then invite you to it.

This way, they control the billing and ultimately the app. They can also add their stakeholders to help with the project.

You can do this before or after you’ve built the app.

You are setting yourself up for disappointment if you have many apps for different clients under your My Apps section—as the name is meant to imply “My Apps” is intended for your personal apps. If you have many app subscriptions with different credit cards, you should really move these to separate orgs on a per client basis.

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Just to confirm… the client creates their own organization in Glide, then invites the app creator to join their organization, then the app creator can bring their app into the organization by copying it as a template?

Yes—except you can merely copy any app into an org from your dashboard—no need to use templates.

In fact, templates cannot currently be copied into orgs.

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Ah okay! That makes more sense! Thanks for the advice.

Any way to copy apps from Orgs back to dashboards?
There are times when we put a lot of effort to build/modify an app in an Org and want to use it as a template for another client or just for ourselves.

This introduces a lot of security concerns that we would have to think through (e.g. employees copying apps from work). I don’t think we will get to do this soon.

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Would it also make sense for the app creator to create Organizations and then invite the other individual to join their org? I’m thinking of ways to create ongoing support plans for clients. I can see clients having to pay Glide a monthly fee and their support guy a monthly fee being a bit of an obstacle. If I pay for all the Organizations and then charge a monthly fee that covers the Glide subscription plus something for ongoing support, the client would only have one bill to pay and the app creator doesn’t need to worry about getting booted from the Organization in the future.

I think your method gives the buyer more control, my explanation above gives the app creator more control. I’m not currently doing either method, just trying to figure out what might work best for me as the (hopeful) app creator.

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Just noticed this on Glide homepage, see ‘Solutions’ drop down “Digital Agencies”:

This looks very interesting but hasn’t been given any fanfare just yet.

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@david you have just seriously confused me. Can I get a quick call with somebody please to talk through my specific scenario?

Please email support@glideapps.com if you don’t feel comfortable asking about it here.

Although I am not sure what is ‘seriously’ confusing. Building an app for a client? Do what I suggested above — make a separate Org per client, with separate credit cards.

@david I think this strategy is flawed but I will try to explain via email

Hi @david thanks for the information. Is there an annual fee for the Org Pro Apps? All I see in the Org I have created is the monthly premium monthly amount of $29.

Cheers Brad

We don’t have annual pricing for Orgs yet, but we’re working on unifying the subscriptions used within Orgs and for your normal apps, so you will be able to do annual soon.

Hey V88_Google - You mentioned you are charging monthly, may I ask how you are accepting subscription payments?