How scalable is Glide

David - we are interested in creating an app and website directory that would connect freelancers to people who could hire them. A bit like UpWork, but a platform that would better support the freelancers. I could ultimately see it having community and support features as well. I can send you a PPT that goes a little deeper if you’d like. I’m not sure I want to share it publicly.

Let me know if that helps… Thanks!

Glide scales very well when it comes to number of users (I’m confident we can scale up with your app, even into hundreds of thousands of users), but when it comes to the amount of data in an app there are a bunch of bottlenecks, Google Sheets being one of them. So if your hundreds of thousands of users create content in the app, for example, Glide as it is now will not scale to that. We’ll get there eventually, but I can’t give you a timeline on that.

I’m curious where your userbase comes from, though. How do you plan to get hundreds of thousands of users?

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Mark - David mentioned that Google Sheet are just one data source on a deeper foundation. I was looking on your documentation and didn’t see a reference to alternatives. Is there someplace you guys could point me. Having been in the tech sector building communities for sometime, we all know that starting with the wrong tools can create major brain damage.

I really like what you guys have created. I just want to make sure it will work before applying resources to growing the app. We actually have several apps that are on the drawing board.

In terms of the uberbase, it is freelancers looking for work and companies interested in hiring them.

Thanks again - Tom

Right now there is no alternative to Google Sheets. We will probably at some point enable Glide apps that are not bound to an external data source, which would remove a big bottleneck.

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Mark,

How do we bypass the 25k rows limit on Pro?

Best regards,

Renato Asse

That limit is not enforced, but around that point Glide starts hitting bottlenecks and some aspects of your app’s performance might degrade. You should experiment to check whether you see any issues.

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Hi Mark, I have a potential client interested in using glide. They have 1800 customers - they want to enable their customers to upload 20 products each that is 36000 items. Should I be discouraging the use of glide in view of the limit of 25000? Good to know at the early stage so discussions don’t progress too far. Thanks

The main problem with that app will be load time, and sheet refresh time. In the app, should all products be visible to all users? Or does each user only see their own data?

Thanks Mark, yeah all products should be available to the users although could possibly filter or categorise them so the whole list is not displayed all at once - this maybe a solution?

No, that won’t help with loading time.

You’ll have to judge whether loading time is a dealbreaker in this case. You can make a test app on staging.heyglide.com and upgrade it to Pro to try it out. Use a credit card number that’s just a repetition of “42”.

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Cool thanks Mark, appreciate quick reply (as always :slight_smile: )

I’m following this topic. When my user have input a row, and then the function google sheets will do.
Right now, My user need to wait some min or turn off the app to get the result,
Idea solution

  • Should have a function for user pull up refresh.
  • Or get trigger if google sheet have change.

We do get a trigger when your sheet changes, but Google sends one trigger every 3 minutes maximum.

The only real solution is for you to tell us what your update function does, and for us to make it possible within Glide.

Would love to see the Glide team take a look at gundb as a possible external data-base.
It’s a JSON-based graph database so compatibility shouldn’t be a big issue>
It’s P2P and already uses Radix into IndexedDB … or any other local storage … for on device storage.
It’s “pubsub” for automatic P2P updates at the speed of web.

can I make server and domain from bluehost domain, hosting server, and local storeage? and and also make intergration from third party…?..

One of the scenarios is like this where delayed update causes not-so-great experience for my users.

  1. Screen A: User selects a payment plan (choice component) and taps “Purchase” (buy) button.

  2. Goes on the checkout page and makes a payment.

  3. Comes back to screen A where user should see “Payment done” label and the choice component shall become invisible. I wrote a script on insert in “App: Sales” sheet which updates certain fields. Then I use these field values and conditions. But it does take time for the update trigger to fire and show these changes on the screen.

I don’t know but may be an App is allowed a pull update check trigger then this can be fixed. I am thinking in the UI editor where I would expect this trigger but in my case after the checkout screen closes I expect this to happen.

Thanks.

How does the 25000 limit relate to user profiles. If you have 25000 users, will the user profile sheet then overwhelm the app?

If you have 25000 user rows then it will become a problem but they’re testing Glide Sheets in staging, which doesn’t use Google Sheets as a source so hopefully that bottleneck will be gone.

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How soon is that estimated to be available? I’m thinking of using Glide to make an enhanced viewer for a back-end system that already has 160K users.

Not sure, but as it’s already in staging, if they don’t see many problems then I expect it to be in production in the next weeks.

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