Hello All!,
I’m a new glider who’s making their first app for a client. Since the experts program is closed currently, i myself am on the explorer plan. Will be upgrading to the maker plan and then will be transferring my app to the client once they approve.
Glide is brilliant and its been a joy developing an app that solves a problem for somebody. My only concern lies in the fact that the row limits are too low(even for the business plan) with no option to enable unlimited rows(like unlimited updates). Like on the maker plan its 50K rows (when the maker plan is marketed for “unlimited users”!).
Now i get that glide is primarily for internal tool dev but if you are making an app that is more than just a nice looking data display app, then 50K rows bottleneck would arrive sooner than you expect. Let me explain what i mean via an example :-
E.g. - My Sales Agents App where you got an internal app with 50 sales agents(so only 50 users) and couple of managers (4 additional users) filling in data for each sales leads they are pursuing every day and updating on the progress of each lead. Each lead is a unique row and each progress update on each lead is also a unique row.
Even if each sales agent provides just 3 updates per day(3 rows per day), the 50K cap arrives in less than a year! Now factor in agents doing more sales(and henceforth more updates) and more agents being recruited(any growing company would have that), and suddenly the 50K cap would arrive very very early.
I understand that the route is maker>business>enterprise but the costs per month of enterprise(the highest tier) can be staggering for small businesses that need these solutions and then at that point the recurring monthly costs have risen 10x(50$ on maker to possibly 500$ or even more on enterprise).
Hence i have some basic questions for no-code app development veterans and experts :-
My 3 questions are :
Q1 : How does this situation compare to a ‘full stack full code development environment’ recurring cost? I understand that the initial development cost is very high for full stack full code dev so glide(or any no-code) wins there but once the development is done and client has been handed over the app, then does full stack full code developed apps also scale in recurring costs like they do in glide as usage grows ? Like if the app and the situation i described was developed on lets say react.js + Supabase (or any other full code dev stack) then, would the cost for having 100K rows incur 249$(cost of monthly subscription of business plan) ?
Q2 : How is the performace of glide apps at 100K + rows in terms of speed and crashes. Any body have that kind of usage and running smoothly ?
Q3 : And Finally, Is there a way glide experts like @NoCodeAndy @Darren_Murphy @ThinhDinh @nathanaelb have figured out a way to archive old data automatically so that a small business client doesn’t have to suddenly pay for enterprise level plans?