I would like to build a customer portal for customers to place orders to my business.
If I have a business plan, I’m limited to 40 customers logging in, per month? Why would Glide advertise customer portal building abilities, if you’re limited to 40 customers? I would not need custom software to manage only 40 customers. Am I missing something?
If I build this using the maker plan, people with work email cannot make orders/login to the app. So I’m a bit stuck on how to make customer facing apps.
Is this setup this way so that glide can charge more for a business having many internal users? This would seem fair to me, as the more internal users, the more valuable the service would be, and the higher the price glide could charge.
So to make more use cases possible, could glide not just limit the amount of the same domain names used? for example only 40 users with the same domain name per month? Instead of a flat 40 users per month regardless of domain name?
If someone has a workaround or a best practice, i would be grateful to hear it.
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I haven’t seen this, but I think it’s not a correct decision if they decide to do so. I think at least in the forum, they have been pretty clear that their focus is on “dark apps”, internal apps that solve problems for businesses.
I don’t think customer-facing apps are suited to Glide anymore, even on the Maker plan because you’re limited to personal users.
For me, for like 1-2 years, it’s pretty clear what direction Glide is going, and it’s totally fair business-wise.
Hello!
Thanks for the response!
The weird thing is, is that Glide has amazing functionality for building customer facing apps. It’s just that Glide is excluding that use case with their billing structure (which is well within their rights to do so). I’m just curious as to why they would do that.
It seems to me it would be great for everyone if they could figure out a way to bill fairly for a customer facing application. The people at Glide are pretty stinking smart, so I think they could figure that out.
As for glide advertising the customer portal building ability; I have a few examples of many more, linked below. So the point of , why advertise customer portals if there is a 40 client max, still stands.
Examples of Glide promoting customer portals:
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They would have numbers usage-wise that lead them to that pricing decision, I think they started going in that direction a while ago, I’m not sure if it’s related to investors or not so I won’t make an assumption on that front.
Glide started off that way though, there used to be many more customer-facing apps 4 years ago, but that’s when they are exploring the industry.
Yeah, I have to agree with this. Though one of your links is from Darren Alderman - a fellow Glide expert, and was created before the pricing change.
Interesting guess on the motive being the investors interests. I had not thought of that.
As for Glide originally catering more to customer / larger user base apps, that is obvious for me as well. Maybe I’m having a hard time adjusting, as I built my first app around 4 years ago, so I was not building with these strict user count restrictions. I have a fitness related app with 50 monthly clients (could easily grow with more dedicated effort to this business), so without the legacy business plan, I could not operate on a standard business plan. I’m hoping a solution for these use cases will come about, as I really like building with Glide, and I’m very concerned they will turn off my legacy account (with 3 months notice), and leave me with no Glide options.
I’m hoping Glide could simply limit the amount of users that have the same email domain (for business plans), which would limit the amount of users from the same company. I think this would get them what they want in terms of billing.
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