I am glad we are having this conversation because this illustrates exactly that platform creators and users will never agree on price.
I guess while price may be absolute or objective in its nature, value tends to be subjective. I believe the disparity between price and value will always raise a point of contention. I guess whether the price of $2500 is reasonable or not will depend on what you have been exposed to.
I think having been to places like Fiverr and Upwork and seen the prices there for Native Apps, the price of $2500 seems a bit much to me.
Again, if your customers are prepared to pay that much for a glide App then I can never argue with that but my take is that it will always result in the creator of the App asking for more storage space/ rows because maybe the customer realises that might have paid a âpremiumâ for the App.
My view of the price is by no means an indictment/negative view on Glide as a platform or the experts work in creating the App which by the way may be an MVP especially if itâs a customer facing or commercial App.
Let me however state this categorically that my views are by no means meant to offend anyone and they remain just my view on the subject of price and value.
@Luther You are valuing a native app over a web app and not the time it takes to make it. I am not convinced that a native app is ALWAYS better than a PWA anyways. There are a lot of politics and transaction fees with app stores that some businesses do not need or want to deal with. Also, the FIVERR app that you mentioned, what is the upkeep cost to maintain your backend and your database and repost changes to your app? Ultimately, it will cost you more. $2500 for a 120 hours of work to do anything is very cheap in my opinion.
Glide is on the right track. We just need to get the pricing model situated and understand how it will impact both public and private apps. The indecision makes me nervous as a business owner because I do not know how to advise my clients or base my pricing at the moment. And that is scary and doesnât make me feel comfortable with the product at this time.
Funnyâweâve had people write into our support âYou guys need to help me, I paid $5k for this app!â and weâre like âyou didnât pay that to us â we can give you the same support as everyone else.â
If youâre building an app for a specific customer, you should price it according to the value it provides them. Hereâs an example:
A medical devices company needs an app to track inventory. Their current solution is $30k/year but doesnât work on mobile and is a pain to use. They are deciding between spending $100k to build a new custom piece of software, or use Glide.
You should definitely charge this customer at least $2,500 if you can build the app to solve their problem. They are not choosing people on Fiverr to build this.
You should not imply that the build price is the total cost of the app in perpetuityâyou should explain what Glide is, what the benefits are, and what the ongoing costs of the platform are, independently of your price for building the app.
When the customer hears about Glide, they will not say âgee, weâll just build this ourselves and not pay you!â Real businesses worth your time do not act this wayâthey are busy building medical devices, and they want to pay you to solve their problems.
On the other hand, hereâs a customer you should avoid!
I have an idea for a new social media app. It combines Instagram with professional beauty advice. We plan to scale it to 100k users in the first year and raise money from investors. Weâd like you to build the first version for free, and weâll pay you $2,500 once we raise money.
This customer is likely very naive, their app will not succeed for reasons they do not understand, and they are likely to blame Glide or you for their app not fulfilling their wildest dreams. Avoid them!
You misunderstand my point unfortunately David. I am not saying Fiverr offer better value than Glide. I would not be here then if that was the case.
I am simply pointing out the difference between price and value and if you as an expert or App creator say your asking price is $2500 without even going through the project brief then I donât see how that business model is sustainable hence I say later on, the customer or user of the App will ask the creator for more storage space or more features which Glide is not yet able to offer but may in the future.
I guess it depends on which part of the world a person is in. Where I am located (South Africa) and with the dollar exchange rate at $1 = ~R15 then that $2500 means you wonât have many customers looking in your direction BUT again depending on the type of App whether it is for a large enterprise or medium or small enterprise.
Using the same logic then by some of the experts or creators of the Glide Apps, can we then say that Glide is under charging for their product if some are able to sell their time for $20 per hour for example?
This is only a questionâŚ
Second question, if you charge $20 per hour for example, what happens to the next client that you get in the same sector or industry? Do you charge the same rate or do you then treat it as a template that simply needs customizations and thereby you are able to charge less.
I think this is why there will always be a need for a product manager even for tech companies. If pricing decisions were just left to engineers to charge according to time spent.
Experts work with clients on an individual basis, so they have the ability to tailor their price to the customer. Glide is an automated service that does not use knowledge about each individual customer to maximize value, but has a much larger, global scale, larger than all experts combined.
Separately, yes, Glide is often under-priced. It is also often over-priced.
We have only changed our pricing once in the history of the company, because weâve been focused on providing value, not capturing it. You have the luxury of changing your price with each project!
You should raise your prices until your clients say âno,â not lower your prices as your costs decline. Separately, you should lower your costs to increase your margins.
Thank you for indulging and engaging with me on this issue.
I have learnt a few things already just from this thread, which I hope will stand me in good stead going forward.
Blockquote
Using the same logic then by some of the experts or creators of the Glide Apps, can we then say that Glide is under charging for their product if some are able to sell their time for $20 per hour for example?
@Luther Glide is the enabler. Like Microsoft Word is an enabler or a hammer is an enabler.
Doesnât mean I want to pay more for Microsoft Word because I am going to use it to draft a book that will sell a million copies; as opposed to a draft for my essay in college (that doesnt generate any money). Doesnât mean I want to pay more for a hammer that will help me build a million dollar house versus a dog shed. Glide enables us to provide a service and build a product for our client.
I just want to know what it costs and use it. To me itâs simple.
Yes, if you were building a house, Glide is the hammer, and you are the builder. But Glide is also the lumber and the land, (and the road to the house, and the repairmen who fix your house secretly in the night if thereâs a leak!), because our servers run your app globally. All of the data updates, storage, uploads, downloads, etc.âthat is Glide, and that is actually what carries a cost. People easily forget this part.
For example, if the servers running your app go down at 3am, literal alarm bells wake up flesh-and-blood humans who work for Glide, who go to their computers to fix the issue. You, as the builder, donât even know about this. Your customer doesnât know about this. This is a real cost of software.
The actual costs of an app mostly depend on:
What it does.
How often it does it.
So, unfortunately, itâs more like a hammer whose cost does depend on what it builds & how many people live in the house.
Admittedly, itâs very hard to see this until your app scales, or if many apps scale. We definitely see it!
I hear you @_eric and your point highlights what was said about disparity between what Glide wants to achieve and what the Glide app creator wants to achieve.
You as an App creator it sounds to me like you are less concerned if the client goes pro or not as long as you have made your share (by creating the App and charging for it) then what the client does afterwards is of less concern to you while on the other hand it seems to me Glide wants to have more developers or at the very least more people on the pro or enterprise package.
With more people being App creators, the higher the chance of having Glide App developers and the higher the chance of pulling more customers using glide hence the higher the chances of those users going pro.
I fully understand the difficulty of the position the Glide team and the experts find themselves in because there is no 1 size fits all solution especially if you are dealing with customers from different parts of the world. That is why I enjoy this conversation because I get to learn other peopleâs views about how to they price their offerings.
Blockquote You as an App creator it sounds to me like you are less concerned if the client goes pro or not as long as you have made your share (by creating the App and charging for it) then what the client does afterwards is of less concern to you
This is not what I am saying at all and this does not speak to my viewpoint the slightest. Any client that I have worked with has a PRO version of the app. I will not even accept a project if the client does not have a PRO license. I want Glide to succeed and to be priced fairly. The reason why I am focused on pricing is that I am also an advocate for my client and it is my responsibility to understand the COSTS for their project TODAY and as it SCALES. I am the clientâs advocate and representation for their project both on Glide and off Glide (on perhaps other platforms if Glide cannot accommodate - hopefully, it can, but there are those one-off scenarios).
You are implying that the buck stops with Glide. That is why I disagree with you when you say that $2500 for 120 hoursâ worth of work is not a fair price. Because my time to research, design, build a solution is of value.
@david : what about charging per data storage and traffic instead of per (active) user? That is what actually drives your costs.
Per user pricing does not get to the core of the problen, since there can be 1 heavy user uploading 1000 images or 1000 users uploading 1 image.
Free apps could be curbed in speed after reaching size (data) and a certain amount of page loads, clicks, operations, or up/download, âŚ
An appâs data storage and traffic just need to be made transparent to glideâs customer.
Check out integromatâs pricing for inspiration.
I could also imagine location based pricing based on the purchasing power in the respective country.
Lastly, I like the model of being charged 1-2% on top of stripe, if glide will be connected to it better.
@Francisco_Maldonado True words! The problem with these tags, âno codeâ, âlow codeâ and âblow codeâ is they are actually meaningless and indeed misleading. They are not terms I would use when speaking with clients. Peopleâs perceptions are often based on ignorance (and arrogance) to the true costs involved in building anything, low code or otherwise.
There are some who expect Glide to give them a free dinner whilst they build potentially lucrative apps for prospective clients, totally disregarding the points that David makes so eloquently on all the things that go in the background at Glide, the stuff we donât see. The stuff that involves real humans, with high skills, not an endless loop of automated zaps at $20pm.
@Luther your disagreement with my claim that $2500 is reasonable had me doubting myself until I quickly remembered that I have spent nearly 30 times that amount on building a custom PHP platform which I co-designed and project managed, unpaid because it was my project. So if my personal time, experience and expertise was factored in you could maybe double that!
Useful tip: I didnât post a gig on Fiverr; I hired a proper software company after some lengthy due diligence.
So I am hereby upgrading my choice of phrase from âreasonableâ to being âan absolute stealâ.
I hear you and have to stress once more that value & price while they may be used synonymously, they can sometimes have different meanings especially in different parts of the world.
Glide is a global player because it allows someone all the way in South Africa to work on the same platform as someone in North America for example and obviously it would be difficult to agree on the value that should be attached to a product (in this case an App).
The beauty of this whole discussion is that every creator of the App or expert can create and put an asking price on the App they created independently of anyone and whatever pricing model they use, they donât have to account to anyone.
My personal view is that I donât price my products based on the time I have spent creating it because time spent can be a misleading indicator. I can spend so many hours doing something that someone else could have done in less time if they were working more efficiently.
I always look to build relationships with my clients and my approach is:
Capitalise the development costs
Amortize costs over the useful life of the product
Look for clients in the similar industry or sector and propose the product at a premium (10%/20%) more than what I asked from the previous client.
Repeat steps 1-4
This for me is all about being sustainable and competitive so that even new entrants in the market find it difficult to compete which will then serve as a barrier for them to get throughâŚ
This is what works for me at the moment under the current pricing model used by Glide and if that changes then I would have to revisit my pricing model and adapt.
I understand lots of other people would have different ideas about it and I fully respect that.