I am leaving k12 teaching and thinking of making Glide apps to sell to schools for various needs they have. I have a bit of experience with Glide over the years and recently logged back in as I ponder this career change. I am trying to get my head around the current pricing plans: Maker vs Business. I am making a chatbot that I want to install on school websites, and sell it over and over again. Parents and students will need to be able to login (unlimited users). I could manage the Row limits by clearing rows as the chat histories are not needing to be preserved. What pricing plan works for my goals?
Maker: unlimited user with personal email addresses.
Business: 30 users with business email addresses. Example:
User@myenterprise.com
If you need more users for the business plan, you can add more users for 5$/user after the 30 included users.
If this doesnât meet your needs, you might want to contact sales for an enterprise plan. But they start at high cost.
If I am making a public facing chatbot that allows students and parents to interact with the student handbook via RAG, for example, each user will count as a âunique userâ? Is there a way to design things so that it is not concerned with preserving/unique users but rather more concerned with Rows? If I get the business plan then its limited to just 30, but there are 5000 people in the school community and that wonât work. However, I need to be able to make API calls to do the RAG (or can Glide now do RAG?)
Do they need to sign in? Are there features that require a user to be signed in or a need to save data for each user? I ask because it sounds like it would more of a knowledge base with static data that can be queried. If so, I would think you wouldnât have to worry about user counts if there is no need for users to sign in.
that is correct Jeff. In the project I am thinking of building, it would just be query of knowledge base with static data. 3 questions: 1) I am using MindStudio to build the RAG feature (upload school student handbook as a pdf and query via RAG function). However, can Glide do that natively? 2) Since this app is just a static data query, will the Maker plan work for each copy I sell to schools (assuming I am not needing to make API calls). 3) How would build the Glide app so that it does not require user login, is that in the Appâs Settings somewhere?
Possibly. All depends on how itâs all set up. Glide has third party integrations and built in glide AI that can do a variety of AI things. Hard to say if it would work for you or not
I guess it all depends on how the AI is expected to work, and how it accesses the data. If itâs some sort of third party external service, you would need to use APIs to access it or use one of the built in integrations if it suites your needs. If itâs stored internally in glide tables, then maybe you could use the built in Glide AI. But again, it all depends. I donât really have a good answer. I havenât really dove into a lot of Glideâs AI functionality.
As for the Maker plan being suitable. All depends on usage. You also need to consider row counts for the app and update counts for all apps in the same team. All depends on how you plan to set it all up. You need to pay close attention to the specs for each plan and determine what works for you.
You would just make the app public with no sign in. Yes, that is in the app settings. You can use user specific columns for any values that would need to be temporarily stored for the duration of the userâs session.
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Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate your support. 
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Thereâs a Pinecone integration that supposedly does what you want, but I havenât tried it.
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Hi @Todd_Lichtenwalter ,
As @ThinhDinh mentioned, there is a Pinecone integration with Glide that allows you to use your Student Handbook as RAG source. It is easy to set up at the backend in Pinecone, however creating the layout/saving the data in Glide is not straightforward (Iâve spent a few days & have finally got an interim working solution - itâs not perfect, but fine for a pilot/MVP).
Here are links that helped me: https://www.glideapps.com/docs/automation/integrations/pinecone and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBsVMx9jVk (thanks @eltintero!) .
A few things to consider:
- Are the School handbooks public domain information? If not, you would need to get Users to sign in to access them.
- Iâm guessing each schoolâs handbook is different? If so, you would need to create a separate Pinecone Assistant for each one, and ensure that only relevant Users can chat with the correct handbook.
- Youâll need to watch your costs in Pinecone as theyâll add up quickly if you have a lot of Q&A.
- If the questions that will be asked of the handbook(s) are pretty standard across schools e.g. what is the schoolâs uniform policy, what are the hours, subjects, discipline process etc., then you might be better creating a standard set of questions and answers for each school up front: upload the handbook to ChatGPT and/or Claude and ask it to to help you create a set of Q&A from its content, then load the Q&A sets into a table. This way you avoid the Pinecone/MindStudio costs, and can use Glideâs own AI to ask Q&A of your âStudent Handbooksâ table.
- You can allow for scenarios where you donât have an answer to a Userâs questions - in that case, capture that question somewhere e.g. âUnanswered Questionsâ table, so that you can generate new answers offline, and add the new pairs into your Q&A table.
If you are not set on using Glide for other reasons, you would be better sticking to a platform thatâs specifically designed for AI Assistants/Agents such as MindStudio or Voiceflow, that have inbuilt RAG and can be integrated into schoolâs websites.
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So nice of you to provide so much valuable information. Thank you, mimof! have a great day!!
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Thatâs a lot of valuable info. Thank you!
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