Glide Basic Users: Boosted or Booted?

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Hey All,

Went to contact support and found out that’s no longer an option for me, so hoping to find answers here. I have just spent the better part of a day reading countless posts on pricing updates, and am left with so many questions! I am on the paid “Basic User” yearly plan which is set to renew in August for $108.00. In the pricing FAQ I see “In the following months, we will be offering options to migrate to the new Team Plans. For now, you can keep your existing subscriptions. Stay tuned!” but in my dashboard I am being told that my app is no longer being supported? Questions:

  1. If I take no action am I going to be charged $108 in August for a plan that offers me no support and just hope that my app stays operational as it helplessly lingers inside My Apps?
  2. Last I was paying attention there was talk of giving special pricing consideration to existing users on the old plans. Is this still a thing? Jarring emails like the one I recently received bluntly stating “we are removing all grandfathering, boosts, & referral bonuses” make me fear that all love is lost around here :confused:

Posts like this :arrow_down: make me think I should leave my app alone, since it does have a few grandfathered features that might stay or be yanked away depending on different decrees I read around here:

Posts like THIS :arrow_down: are why I stuck around and poured blood sweat & tears for months into a community app that benefits hundreds but has no budget and generates zero profit:

And then contradictory posts like THIIIS :arrow_down: are why I’m fearful my app will soon be gone forever:

Basically for three years now I’ve seen Glide’s messaging slowly morph from “don’t worry we’ll take care of you” to “we’ve moved on, pay us more or leave” and while I understand from reading tons of posts that a lot of this attitude comes from big businesses that were taking advantage of Glide, is this also the messaging for the individual passion project developers?

I initially naively thought my app would be a “set it and forget it” development, minus the occasional check in for implementing new cool features. But then the goal posts kept moving and I ended up working very hard just to keep my little app up and running, and at some point scraping together the funds for the Basic Plan. If I am forced into these new team rates it’s game-over for me. Collateral damage, big lessons learned. But if there’s special consideration when migrating individual developers with one app (who believed it when they were told their plans were safe forever) maybe there’s hope?

Sorry if my thoughts are all over the map here…basically, what do I do? (or, not do?)

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BLUF: Rebuild your app on the new platform, be mindful of updates, and have a fun time developing.

If you have 20 min to spare, here’s the novel :laughing:

I went through a similar crisis last September when I was told in a month my price was changing from $35/m to $400 (based on that months usage), also on a community app with no revenue and ~2k users. When I built the app, there was no consideration for updates, because… it wasn’t talked about anywhere. Things like time stamps on opening a chat to mark them read or not, really racked up my usage and because of that I was told I was high on the list of being pushed to the new payment options, and did not have the choice to stay on old plan.

I immediately dropped all efforts to obtain or retain users, and now have maybe 30 users non of which very active. I even spent a few months learning flutter to rebuild on a coded platform.

Glide has however, really revamped in the last few months. Notifications are allowed now by apple which is huge (my janky notifications from google scripts to emails to texts just didn’t cut it.) And then there’s the change from old apps to new apps (pages). I understand your frustration that it’s not build and forget… but honestly, I don’t think that could ever be the case. Old tech cannot be supported forever. Glide has its drawbacks for sure… I hardly see people talk about update costs here, but I think that’s because Glide is positioning for users with fewer users and bigger budgets. 1 cent per update is enormous compared to Firestore which is .1 cents per 100,000 document writes. It’s 1 million more times more expensive to update a document in glide. (Firestore also costs reads, but that’s even cheaper). BUT, Glide isn’t just a database. And it enables apps to be created soooo much faster than coding them up.

I don’t think you can stick around with your current app… if you want to stay with Glide, and I think it’s likely a good idea to do so, I think you’ll need to rebuild your app on the new platform.

And as you rebuild… be really update conscious. On my main apps I mark the titles by how many updates it costs. You’ll need to leave out some features, and get savvy about others. Don’t use the increment action attached to others… instead make a column for num+1, and in the set column values action that’s probably also being used, set your num with the num+1 column. Dropping every message sent from 4 updates to 1 can drop your usage cost significantly.

All that said, it would be great if Glide could charge less for updates. I was told when discussing my price increase that our usage costs glide proportionally… and yeah, updates do cost glide proportionally… but at a factor of about a million less.

In the 12 apps in 12 weeks presentation earlier today, Manan talked about how they bill their clients with a consideration for how much money the app is saving the client. In some sense that doesn’t seem fair. But at the same time it’s sure not fun paying $400/m for a non rev app that we already invested our time in making. It’s tough to decide what’s right or fair.

Glide is looking to focus on the high rev customers that don’t mind a higher bill, and aren’t going to run up updates as fast as a chatty social app. Makes sense but it’s also disappointing for our community apps.

Overall, I’m happy to stick around. It’s such a great tool for making things and trying them out. If you have a few hundred users and it’s really helping people out, I think you can find a way to fund it especially after lowering your update counts. There’s no way any of us could have a community app for a few hundred bucks after all. Glide enabled us to build what we have. And for those who are trying out ideas to really scale… well, if any of us are exploding in growth, seems we should be able to get funding and rebuild natively at that point.

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Hey thanks for the reply! Glad to know I’m not alone in this “oh shit oh nooooooo” experience, and wondering if a similar email is heading my way (I mean, some communication about this would be nice)

I’m a bit reticent to rebuild as the first build took me two months, and 1. That was during Covid shutdown when I had ample time and 2. I’m not a developer, I don’t work in tech. I am quite good at figuring out tech, but these things still take me a good deal longer than the pros around here who work in this arena daily.

I would also appeal to Glide that my app absolutely must cost them very little to run. The monthly updates are incredibly low - the only reason I had to upgrade is because I passed the 500 row limit. I really only need 1000 rows tops, forever, and while for some reason I can no longer see any of my usage limits (another feature gone from classic apps?) I can’t imagine I’m even past 600 rows at this point. I was also grandfathered in with “collect real user email addresses” which has always been a necessary feature for me, and one I fear is farrrr out of budget if I had to pay for it. I don’t even see that listed on any of the plans so I’m fearful it’s buried in the enterprise level. As is when I look at the new team pricing the basics of my app (needing public user sign-in for hundreds) place me at $99 per month which is beyond out of the question.

Even if I find the time to wearily rebuild and strip away major features to squeeze my app into the free plan limits, the amount of user privacy I would be sacrificing would likely land me in a boatload of trouble. My app is basically a directory of names/numbers/emails/resumes and not enforcing some sort of public sign-in (for over 100 users) to monitor who is accessing such sensitive and personal information would be ethically unsound. I don’t see any way to protect people’s personal info under the free plan as the only way to make it widely accessible for free is to allow any random visitors to access it with no accountability :frowning:

I appreciate your enthusiasm for Glide, I had it as well! I definitely put in my time contributing to and benefitting from these forums. Where to go from here though - unless I get some support from Glide, I don’t see a path forward.

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I’m not an expert on the plan options but I think you could do the Starter plan at $25/m. Where do you think you’re short on that one? It has 100 signed in users but they have to sign in that month to count. If it’s a directory, they aren’t all signing in every month most likely, so I think you’d be ok with that plan. It’s still a lot of rebuild time… but if it’s something useful :man_shrugging:

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This one is available on any paid plan.

I agree with @MatthewS - based on what you’ve said, I think you’d fit comfortably within the limits of the Starter Plan ($25 per month).

Rebuilding might not be as daunting an exercise as you think. Check out the “Create App from Data” option.

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Thank you and good to know, regarding the email addresses. Unfortunately I DO need over 100 users to be able to access public sign-in each month. My app has over 300 users with the capacity for roughly 700 users (~700 if everyone used it I mean, something I stopped trying for when I became nervous about Glide’s changing narrative) and it needs to be fully accessible; not locking up after 100 sign-ins. At least half of those users are accessing it to make slight changes to their profile on a regular basis. Trust that I’ve examined the plans and thought deeply about what would be needed to keep going. That said, even the Starter Plan is out of reach financially, as it’s almost a 300% increase over the Basic Plan and still wouldn’t give me what I need. I was really counting on keeping Glide at the price I paid for it, which is what we were told would happen back in the beginning.

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