Help for a maker who runs a one person business with minimal resources

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1

I am a one person operation who has built several Classic apps in the past.

I’ve been away for several years and discover when I come back that the plans have changed a lot.

Has Glide gotten out of my price range, or am I not understanding how a small developer can use glide without having to make a huge upfront investment?

Thanks,

– Harry

2

I think it depends on how you are using the Apps that you build, and the features that you need.

Are you building these Apps mostly for yourself, or for others?
If for others, are they paying you to build the Apps, or to use them. or would they expect to pay?

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You can do a lot on the Free plan using Glide Tables as your data source.

For education, prototypes or hobby projects that need scale and where users will be using personal email addresses only to sign in, the Maker plan is nice.

For anything business related (internal business applications), you’ll probably be looking at the Team plan or above.

As Darren said, it really depends what you need. Between Free, Maker and Team+, many use cases are covered.

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4

Thanks for your reply, Daren

Re: Are you building these Apps mostly for yourself, or for others?

  • Mostly for myself or a small number of family and friends (<10).

Re: If for others, are they paying you to build the Apps, or to use them. or would they expect to pay?

  • With Lexington my Foot and Phone walking tour app, I would be very surprised if more than 2 simultaneous uses during daylight hours during months in New England when it is pleasant to be outdoor – say May - October. And, since it is available for free with a voluntary contribution to the Lexington Historical Society, I would be surprised if it is a big money maker for this non-profit organization.

The bottom line is that I am retired and like to volunteer my technical skills to still build programs that can help out my family and non-profit community organizations.

It’s very possible that I will be able to do all of this but without all of the new features using the free plan. I’ve already been using the free plan using Glide Tables working on bringing a simple application over to the new system

Regards,

– Harry

5

Thanks, Nathanael. Please see my response to Daren to understand what I am trying to do. I think I will go with the Free plan until such time as I start hitting the limits there…

Regartds,

– Harry

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Hi Harry :wave: I too build for friends, family and non-profits sometimes, and the current limit of 10 person users on the free is both generous from Glide and limiting for us builders.

A few ideas than might help:

  • Whatever old teams you still have in your account that were on a free plan, let’s call these Legacy Free, don’t delete them, even if you are not using them. Rename these old teams and possibly change their color so as to clearly identify them. Then, depending on your application, use them.

  • Here are the limits on the Legacy Plans. Practical for when you forget.

  • All plans have limited users, these are people who sign in to the application. Sign-in is needed if user-related data needs to be saved or if you want to offer a personalized experience to users. All plans, however, offer unlimited visitors, these are people who can access the app and visualize it without having to sign in. Since the free plan offers 25k rows in Glide Tables, as long as you don’t need a personalized experience, you can still build full-fledged apps with a ton of data.

  • Of course this is your call to make, but if you are retired and spend a decent amount of time on Glide and enjoy it, maybe you could see the fee for a Maker plan as a monthly subscription to a service, a club membership, or going out for a nice meal or to the movies once a month. Granted the Maker plan allows you to build one app only. And of course everyone has different circumstances. I’m simply pointing out that though free is naturally always nice, many have a small budget for hobbies and building apps on Glide could be one.

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Nathanael,

Thanks for your excellent advice.

I agree with you that Glide is very generous with its free accounts.

Yes, I could afford a Maker account, but my concern is about the “build one app only” limit of the Maker level. I haven’t read this carefully and I should, but does this mean that if I sign up for a Maker account that I can only build one app total, and then I would have to sign up for a second Maker account? With apps so easy to make, that seems like a contradiction. In the past I have built several apps and continue to improve them as I learn more things and come with new ideas for apps.

Do you have some advice about my concerns?

Thanks,

– Harry

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With the Free and Maker plans, you can build as many apps as you like, but you can only have one of them published at any one time.