Company Email Registration Pain Point for B2C Apps

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Hi Gliders!

While I understand the motivation behind email domain restrictions, it’s becoming a real pain point for my B2C app. Not all of my random ongoing clients has gmail. Sometimes customers want to register with their company email, which isn’t part of Maker…

Any thoughts on this?
Yan

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Glide can’t determine if someone creates an account using their enterprise email address for personal purposes. Generally, everyone should know that enterprise emails shouldn’t be used for personal accounts. However, for ISP customer domains, the situation is different. Glide provides an option where you can request to add specific domains to a whitelist for personal email usage.

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Glide is not meant for B2C apps. Its main purpose is to create internal tools for business.

You could go with the Business Plan and have your users sign in with any email they want.

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Well, the Maker plan is designed for

  1. Prototyping: a startup and product team wanting to whip up minimal viable applications quickly to test on a decent amount of people and where the nature of the email addresses doesn’t really matter (ie. the user will accept to use their personal email address, which most people have)

  2. Schools: the end user in mind here is students and teachers, and they are all expected to have a .edu or personal email address.

  3. Communities is general: I see this as an extension of schools. A club of some sort, a local community, where people won’t mind using their personal email address.

I don’t think the Maker plan is designed for

  1. A professional community: a portal for clients or partners
  2. A B2C application for the general public

If you are using the Maker for a B2C application for the general public, then according to me you are not using Glide and the Maker plan for its intended purpose.

I think the Maker plan and its 3 intended purposes make sense and fit within the Glide ethos. Prototyping, schools and communities in general are not purely businesses (arguable), but prototyping, schools and communities can loosely be considered businesses, to me it fits.

I also think the price point of Maker is ideal for these 3 purposes, it’s accessible.

Unrelated to the above or to Glide, I don’t understand what personal and professional email addresses have anything to do with anything. The notion of personal and professional emails does not exist on the web. And it probably never will. It’s simply a made-up concept.

So while I understand why Glide is doing this in the context of their business model, it actually makes no sense. An alternative could be to not offer the Maker plan at all. I do think that offering a Maker plan, even with one aspect that makes no sense, is better than not having the Maker plan at all.

And of course, it’s not very kind of me to criticize, because I’m not offering any ideas to help.

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This. 100% this.

I have a constructive alternative. What if Glide offered the ability to add in “professional” users in the Maker plan, and by extension, allowed unlimited “personal” users on their Business plan?

It doesn’t exactly abolish the unnatural complication of user types, but it solves the problem of mixing user types in the near term. At least until Glide moves to their next pricing structure (which I reeeaaaally hope will have a dead simple option without the need for a flow chart or a validator app to understand.)

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Actually I do have a suggestion. But it’s not really a suggestion because everyone knows about it, including Glide of course, they know what they’re doing: pricing based on usage.

I don’t know how that type of business model works and I’m sure there are intricacies and nuances all over the place, but it would have the advantage of being simple.