šŸ†• Glide Pages (Beta)

We also struggle with having to purchase a Pro licence whilst developing the app i.e. before we release it to our customer and can generate some revenue. I had suggested in the past that the pricing could maybe kick off at the point of first publishing the app.

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@V88 thatā€™s a difficult one and whilst I appreciate that frustration you would need to see it from Glideā€™s point of view as there are costs for them whilst you build it.

Take maps for instance. You could have a bunch of business listings in their thousands and making lots of API calls to Mapbox which are metered. Although they have an initial free tier it gets expensive after that is exhausted.

Then imagine 100s or 1000s of authors working on similar projects for a couple of months making api calls to Mapbox and it could get to point that when you start paying your annual fee, then Glide is breaking even or potentially losing.

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In this case the price should be based on active and unregistered users. I have clients with more than 500 registered users, but with only 70 to 80 active users per month.

If so, how would they measure this?

You pay for active users per month. You can have 500 registered users in your sheet but if only 70 logged in that month, then you only pay for the 70 according to what David said the other dayā€¦
I hope I am not misrepresenting what he said.

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Just a question, why canā€™t you purchase a licence and then develop?

The way I look at it, I donā€™t think you would take more than 4 weeks before your App/Glide page is ready or maybe you will that depends on the complexity of your App but if you are building this for a client that will pay then the initial cost of the App you can capitalise it as development costs and then Amortize it over the period of the contract with your client.
If you have a 2 year agreement with your client, then the initial cost of $40 while developing will not seem like a lot especially if you consider that you would be able to transfer that cost over to your client over this period.
I hope you wonā€™t let this prospect of initial costs deter you from creating your page and offering the solution to your client.

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+1

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If you are creating lots of ā€œproofs of conceptā€ (which we are) in order to gain new business then it can become quite irksome.

There are three rough ways we could make Glideā€™s business work:

  1. Charge you to build your own apps.
  2. Charge based on app usage.
  3. Ads

We definitely donā€™t want to do #3. #1 is independent of the value and cost of Glideā€“it works well at small scale and puts us out of business at large scale. #2 directly relates to our costs, and the value for the end-customer.

We want to make it absolutely free to create apps. You should not pay a dime. This is why we make app editors free, and have a very generous free tier. We even want to make it free for you to test apps before really committing, but this just takes more engineering work we havenā€™t done yet. We try to offer this today by piggy-backing free private app users on top of Glide team membership, but some of you find this unworkable, weā€™re learning.

It gets tricky when people build apps to sell to their own customers. Traditionally, what theyā€™re selling is the knowledge and time to build the software. Most experts/consultants charge a substantial build fee up front, plus a minimal ongoing maintenance fee.

This creates incompatible incentives between Glide and the expert/consultant, if you pitch your customer on just paying up-front, plus a small maintenance fee, because you are reselling the thing we give away for free (creating the app), and you are attempting to give away (for a small maintenance fee) the thing we charge for, the thing that drives our cost, and the thing your customer actually values (using the app).

Put another way, Glide is selling an app hosting service, and giving away a free app builder. Consultants who resell Glide treating it as merely a builder are misaligned with us. The hosting component may seem free to you, or negligible for small apps, but we have individual apps that use thousands of dollars per month in server resources so use has to be accounted for.

Weā€™re working on new pricing, and for a way for experts/consultants to also charge based on app useā€“you should definitely charge to build apps for people, but we cannot pretend that is the only cost/value of the service. You should also benefit when apps you build for customers are used more!

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I completely agree with you and I always push customers to upgrade there apps regardless of the use as I think glide needs to earn if the customer likes and use the system built for him on glide.

I can even agree that the usage should be accounted.

What I do not agree is that experts use glide only as a tool, I think each of the experts is contributing to glide by building to customers as mist people canā€™t build complex apps and then the use of glide would decrease.

Last, I believe that in order for the experts to continue promoting glide and show its amazingness we (all builders, not only experts) should be able to use all key components without the need to upgrade.
Iā€™m totally fine with a lower limitation of rows like you did for pages and understand the situation but believe a middle ground should be found as in the end of the day if building with glide will become be dependent on upgrade I believe there will be less people willing to do so.

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Yes, I totally agree that the use can be measured and glide obtains a profit related to that use since the more users, the more resources an App consumes.

Now the issue to be evaluated is that price per active user, since an application with 500 active users that is not private for a company, but is an application with a more commercial shopping cart will have to pay 1000 dollars per month if the price is similar to the current private Pro plan. Is it really profitable for this type of application when there are much cheaper options?

In my opinion everything will depend on the price. Hopefully they take into account all kinds of applications and do not focus on making it profitable only for large companies since it is a much smaller market.

Hello @david . I understand that Glide is focusing a little more on making applications more aimed at ā€œlargeā€ medium-sized companies and thus stop making losses with those applications that somehow use the service ā€œfreeā€ or ā€œpaying littleā€ but using much.

There are a lot of people who have made money from commercial applications which may mean a waste of money for Glide and understandably they want to reverse / change that and focus more on ā€œbigā€ mid-size companies.

But, do not you think that many will leave if they do not have options for those companies that need commercial applications and, (to call it somehow), ā€œmedium costā€?

And in the case of being applications where they totally depend on a shopping cart, where everything depends on whether the user buys or not, this can become a ā€œproblemā€ since many users will be active, but perhaps not all buy in the app.

That is, (assuming the prices are as in ā€œprivateā€ applications), a company with 500 active users will have to pay $ 2 for each active user making a total to pay $ 1,000 per month for their application and many will choose not to do this in Glide because if you have 500 active users, you will not have 500 users who make a purchase per month in the app, so having it would be unfeasible for many sectors.

I hope they take that ā€œin the middleā€ case into account, to call it that, and not just focus on business applications.

Sure you already have this in mind and have something prepared, but, I think it is a doubt / fear that many of us have.

Greetings!

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@V88 Isnā€™t the Personal version of Glide capable of creating proof of concept apps?

Why would you need the Pro version for something so speculative?

@david This all makes total sense and Iā€™m suspecting you might be moving towards a metered service.

Iā€™ve seen Glide experts quote $2500 to build an app in 3 weeks which is reasonable if they dedicate their hours to that. But if the end result is a Personal app never requiring an upgrade then the expert has derived a greater lifetime value from their customer who is using your product for free!

Thatā€™s not good, and depending on the scale and frequency of that model it is totally incompatible with your business.

I am not sure that I agree with this statement. One of the reasons most people turned to nocode as a solution was that you donā€™t have to pay such prices in the range of $2500 or whatever. At that price, you might as well go for a native App (Android & IOS)

It makes sense what David is saying, that pricing model is not compatible with their vision or intention of how glide should be used.

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hmm, letā€™s do the math.
$2500 for 3 weeks work.
If we assume an 8 hour day, thatā€™s 15 x 8 = 120 hours.
So roughly $20 per hour.
I canā€™t speak for other experts, but personally I wouldnā€™t go anywhere near anything at that rate.

Of course I get it that if youā€™re building a whole app for a customer, then youā€™re more likely to charge a fixed price as a project fee, which naturally translates into a lowered hourly rate. But my point is, I donā€™t think $2500 to build an app from scratch is in anyway an unreasonable price.

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As @Darren_Murphy says, I do not think that quoting an application at a cost of 20 USD an hour is irrational, when you are an expert or professional in what you do. And I do not think that the development of a native IOS / Android application can cost that, in Latin America some Apps not very complex just to test an MVP can cost up to 15,000 USD, almost 5 times more than what someone would charge for something similar done in Glide .

I think charging $2,500 to build someone a Glide app can be very reasonable. It could even be too cheap, depending on the app.

We intend for Glide to be a better way to make and maintain software, not just a cheaper way.

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@luther: Darren just did the math, and $2500 is very reasonable because itā€™s not ā€˜no-codeā€™ youā€™re paying for; itā€™s peopleā€™s time that you are paying for.

Iā€™m not keen on this ā€˜no-codeā€™ tag because ultimately you are using other peopleā€™s code and intellectual property to build stuff, and there is a massive codebase that has to be maintained and supported by many people - and they all need to be paid.

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Exactly. And an app that requires 120 hours to build is not going to be a simple app.

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Very true, when we use the phrase ā€œLow Codeā€ people think it is very easy and do not really value the work that is in the background.

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This is a very good point.
The other thing is that when you engage a professional to do a job for you - any job - you are not just paying for their time. You are paying for their experience, and their expertise. And they have this expertise because they have invested time - and in most cases, money - to learn and develop the skills they have. And this has value. So when I charge you X to get a job done, a small percentage of X is me recovering the investment Iā€™ve made to develop the skills I need to be able to do that job.

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