Glide Costing and Scalability - I NEED Help!

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Hi I’ve heard such great things about the Glide Community so I figured who else to reach out to? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: :

I’m using Glide to build out an MVP for an app that matches users based on lifestyle and other interests. This app will have “like”/“chat”/“notification” functionalities. I wanted to understand what the costs will be to keep this app running/whether this app can scale to a few thousand users.

I am currently running on the Legacy starter plan (calling it plan LS henceforth) but will eventually have to switch to the maker plan(calling it plan M henceforth). The way I understand it there are bound to be 4 main bottlenecks to creating this app

  1. File Size Limitation: On Legacy Starter (plan LS) the file size limit is 1GB (and 5GB on the maker plan), my app will be storing user images and I guess-timate that each user will have at least 10-12 MB worth of image data. At that rate i’ll only be able to have around 400 odd users before running out of storage.

So my question here is: What is the solution when I run out of storage? Is there an option to buy additional storage? Or maybe is there a way to store this data on an external DB(without consuming any updates)

  1. Limitations on Updates: Since this app will be using Glide table data I’m not worried about consuming too many updates there, however we will be sending notifications to our users about likes/chats. From what I understand each notification sent to a users device counts as an update and I only get 2500 updates on either plan LS or plan M. This is a severely limiting bottleneck and I estimate that I’ll only be able to have around 150 users because of running out of updates.

So my question here is: Can someone tell me what the workaround is to sending notifications without consuming an update each time? I know that I can buy an additional updates, but the pricing makes it prohibitively expensive to scale the app

  1. Limitations on the number of rows: Building out chat functionality would mean that each new message would occupy a new row on the Glide Table. The limit on the number of rows on glide tables is 25,000. This would effectively render my app dead in the water if I had a handful of chatty users. Max number of users estimated around 300.

So my question here is: Can someone tell me what the workaround is to building out a chat functionality which won’t eat up all of my rows? Additionally, does Glide let you “buy more rows?” I haven’t seen documentation for it anywhere.

Thanks a lot in advance!

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First, it seems to me you’ve done a thorough analysis of your situation.

Updates are Glide’s way of charging creators for the usage of 3rd party integrations. Imagine for instance your data lived in Google Sheets and using the 3rd party integration to send notifications were free: then your notifications feature would effectively be free. Glide circumvents this by charging updates if your data lives outside of Glide tables, or charges updates for using 3rd party integrations (presumably with a margin). The cost of the updates is in exchange for the convenience of having an integrated suite.

I’m not too sure about the cost of notifications, but let’s take SMS messages for example. The Send SMS action via Twilio costs 2 updates, the Trigger Webhook action costs 1 update. If you set up a webhook to a 3rd party tool to send SMS message and if that tool cost you less than the cost of 1 Glide update, then it would cost you less (monetarily) to set up the integration yourself than to use Glide’s out-of-the-box Twilio integration. I’m not 100% certain my analysis covers it all, but maybe you get the idea.

So a workaround for you, potentially, would be to set up your own integration. But then again it would depend on what each plan allows you to do. And the cost of the 3rd party integration. And losing the convenience of Glide’s out-of-the-box integration.

I don’t believe in building a chat function in a Glide app with current pricing. To me it doesn’t make sense and I think you’ve analyzed it well. As you correctly put it, a chat can easily eat into row quotas quickly, so a chat function will only be worthwhile if it is used sparingly, which defeats the point of having a chat in the first place. Also when one thinks of it, the value of a single message cannot be compared to the value of just about any other row in any other table in the application. Other rows presumably have a clearly defined purposed, but a chat might go as follows “Hey” “Yeah?” “I was thinking” “Yeah?” “Hold on” “Sure” “Okay yeah”, and so on. No value whatsoever, and yet those 6 messages cost the same as 6 items in a valuable table. Now, that might not be Glide’s problem, storing and processing data has a cost. But really the value of chat messages is too low compared to what they cost the creator.

Sorry for the long winded replies that basically say you don’t really have viable workarounds. Hopefully someone will chime to counterbalance this.

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Thank you Nathaneal for the candid answer.

We looked into the matter in detail and realised that Glide isn’t the right tool for our product as these bottlenecks would have required constant working around. We even had a chat with the Glide Sales team and they were upfront about the various different use cases of Glide. Social media tools and apps with chat functionality sadly isn’t one of them.

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