I have beein going through the new pricing the last minutes. I am quite happy that I have the old plan. With the new plan, I would have to pay $500usd (we have 50 private and 60 public users each month) instead of $250usd per month. When we grow, we are more going towards $1000 usd/month instead of our current $250usd. A price point at which it would probably make sense to build our app in Bubble vs Glide (Not now but if we would have known beforehand. The lock-in and sudden change is giving us some trust issues here, even though for now we are safe! )
The new pricing seems to be made so that it’s still possible to learn Glide with the Free and Maker plans, while allowing Glide to rake in the bigger amount of money an enterprise (and stable SME) can pay for automation. It’s certainly logic from a business point of view for Glide.
There are also some positive points:
Public and private users don’t exist anymore (this was always strange)
On a Maker plan, you have unlimited accounts and through the webhook functonality you can have a lot of actions through Make/Zapier (through sending data back will be difficult without API). It’s thus possible to make a very busy app while paying very little on this specific plan.
These are the biggest downsides:
1 - The plans are less logic and have some sort of reverse economics of scale. Upgrading to a larger plan doesn’t always give you and advantage. From Maker to Team, you lose the unlimited amount of personal users and have to pay $4 per month per user. From Team to Business, you’ll double the user cost to 10usd/user.
2 - On average, expect to pay up to double (or more) for the same functionality as before (apart from some very specific cases such as a business only needing one app with limited functionality on the Maker account). That’s a very big change. Glide is now officially priced for enterprise users and less for indie makers like other tools (Bubble, Flutterflow)… It’s a pity, because Glide is unique. (Which is probably why they have the market power to change the price like this).
3 - Some applications that were possible before with Glide become impossibly expensive. I have a customer with an onboarding app. He onboards lots of people every month and needs Team Functionalitity (e.g. Docsautomator, API). These are people who login only once to give information. Nevertheless, the cost will be around $300 usd per month, just for this application. That’s too expensive for an SME. He might of course do this with other software but it’s a pity that he already invested in Glide, now to be confronted by new pricing.
4 - The Maker plan seems like the solution for applications with a lot of low-value users (e.g. low-value customers instead of employees). However practical limites (missing functionality, only 1gb of storage) makes it impractible. Updating to the Team’s plan doesn’t work because you will have to pay $4usd monthly for each low-value user.
Please correct me if I’m wrong on some points above. I am just trying to help (myself and) people here understand the change!
My real concern is the cost/user over 20 users, that feels like a very hard pricing structure to allow business to scale with you. We are launching an agency and we will be built on top of Glide, but it’s very hard to scale and sell to a business this new pricing structure.
This is just a thought for you but let’s say a business goes on a business plan with 95 users, their cost goes up to 849$/month billed yearly for 10188$. Over 5 years, that’s 50940$. Don’t you feel like this goes against the values and mission of No-Code? If I’m this said business, I’m not paying 50940$ for a No-Code app. Don’t get me wrong, I love Glide and all it stands for, but this does feel like it’s not hitting the right pricing spot.
The plans for Glide have changed a lot, and at first glance, they have become much more expensive. With the Maker plan, one can have unlimited users, which is very useful for applications where there may be many registered users to view only information. On the other hand, they have drastically reduced the updates. From what I read, it seems that if they are Glide tables, actions like adding, deleting, or updating are not considered updates. Can someone confirm if this is the case? On the other hand, the storage is very limited, only 1GB. If you have an application and want to create a CRM, for example, where users save PDFs, it runs out quickly. I don’t see anywhere to pay to expand storage. By the way, storage is the cheapest; I pay Google 3 dollars per month for 200GB. Plans should include the ability to expand storage. And if someone can confirm that updates in Glide tables don’t count. Thank you.
I think so to. The pricing now is with the idea that these 95 users are all internal users. If you have 95 employees, 859$/month is pretty okay (one employee will cost probably between 20k and 150k each month, depending on where you are living). But what if 90 of these users are (low-value) customers. Then the pricing is too steep.
We for example build a ticketing system with Glide. We have hundreds of users each month on this ticket app. It doesn’t make sense to pay 4$ for a one time user. (Luckily we keep our old pricing and the app is currently without login so the example doesn’t really apply but I think my point is clear)!
I have spend 2 weeks now on a custom Property Management App, the client agreed to pay $99 per month to Glide for hosting and now suddenly its nearly the TRIPLE!
Probably the best way to put it indeed! After a year of expanding scope for Glide due to added functionality (2023 was awesome!) the scope of Glide just narrowed. Not due to functionality, but due to pricing.
This is something you have to control, explain to your client that logins must be with a personal email to avoid unnecessary costs. Otherwise, for what you’re trying to do, another plan would be unfeasible; it could cost thousands of dollars and cannot be carried forward. I think it’s necessary to look for other alternatives; many people will find it unfeasible to sustain their projects under this context. The Maker plan has a drawback; the storage is very low, something that is extremely cheap to buy. For example, I pay 3 dollars on Google for 200GB. I don’t know why they don’t offer it that way, especially since they are integrated with Google from the beginning. The other downside is that the updates are very few. Consider that if those 1000 users change something in a day, you have to pay much more money to expand the updates. They say that if they are on Glide tables, they don’t count, but I’m not sure. So, creating a Maker application is for read-only, displaying information, and nothing else. Otherwise, it would be very expensive too. It’s really complicated and expensive to start a business with Glide today. Maybe after all these complaints, they will urgently change the plans and provide much more for the same money, at least.
This is indeed a case where you have lots of ‘low-value’ rather passive users. I think the use case of Glide has become now even more clearly to automate as much as possible for EMPLOYEES. Then, nearly every price is worth it.
(We build one app for a customer that saves that customer 1 FTE. If you save 70k/year, you won’t find it that bad that you have to pay 3k in software fees each year).
I get it and I understand the value Glide is bringing. However, Glide is not the only tool in the market, as much is it’s the one I want to work with and the one I prefer, cost will quickly become an issue when selling Glide to customer if the projet users requirements goes up.
I have an SMB and also currently launching a service Agency including Glide services, so I know both sides of the medals. As the SMB owner, I would not pay 10K$ per year, nor would I have the budget to hire a full time developper. That’s what made Glide so great, as a SMB, you could compete with larger corporation that had unlimited development budget.
I’m on legacy plan with the SMB, so I will be fine, but I’m not sure I would opt into the new plan as we can’t afford this new cost even with everything that it brings to the table.
Of all the changes, this is my only gripe. A “user” in Glide can have a variety of roles/types.
Is it an app admin? A manager? An employee? An outside vendor? A low-level user?
If every user was an employee of the organization, then paying per user makes perfect sense and I’m happy that Glide is allowing us to scale our user threshold.
However, if my 20 employees are managing 100 clients each, all of whom need to sign into the app periodically just to check on project status or submit a request, the app cost can escalate fairly quickly.
I think Business plan should offer a higher “included user” threshold (say 100 included users), but we’ll see how this plays out.
Fortunately, I came to realize that the updates were indeed very limited. They could consider the storage issue; even if we have to pay, it’s really necessary. This Maker plan with free updates and free users is more reasonable for developing small projects for our clients, but it should be expanded to 5GB or 10GB. Honestly, it would be appreciated if we could only expand the storage. I know they implemented this to prevent the construction of bad applications and experiences by limiting storage, but those of us who use them for good purposes really need it. Thank you.
I am in the exact same scenario and I sympathize a lot with this comment
I also have an SMB and agency. With the agency, we have customers with 1mio revenue and more. They won’t mind the new pricing (although the talks won’t be fun). But for the smaller companies (and it can take years to reach 1 mio in Belgium), the new pricing is to steep. But they also can’t pay for a developer. Glide was the perfect solution for them!
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