I’ve been heavily testing the beta of GlideOS and I’m impressed with what it delivers.
But the pricing scheme is a real challenge. Not that it’s too expensive per se, but rather that it’s sort of impossible to know how much your project is going to cost to build–at any point in the process really, but particularly at the start. And once you’re sort of deep into an app, you’re unlikely to abandon it (c.f. the “sunk cost fallacy.”) so you keep adding credits in the smallest increment hoping that this will be the final refill. Until it’s not, and you find yourself thinking “gone already?!?”
I want to suggest to the Glide team that I think that frustration could be a liability for this success of this new endeavor. Especially when the model for glideOS is a business tool that someone in the company uses to build apps for the company team to use. Fine for me cause I’m the owner of our small business, but if you’re spending someone else’s money like this, for which it will be impossible to tell your boss the budget for the project until you’ve already blow through it all…that could backfire.
The lack of transparency on prompts = credits is also sometimes a little maddening when you pay for the Agent’s “mistakes.” I’ve shared with the team elsewhere that It would be useful to at least be able to track prompt-by-prompt how much you’re using in credits; a table in the billing section for example. Hopefully that is on the way.
But also, if I’m not mistaken they have already nudged up the cost of credits. I believe a week or so ago additional credits–once you’ve used your included credits–were .10 per credit. Now they are .12. I assume this was done to incentivize upgrading your plan over just refilling credits. I’m not sure what the happy medium is but I feel like a more generous set of credits in the plan or maybe adjusting how quickly they are expended when using your plan credits would be good so folks don’t feel like they are endlessly chasing a finished product with more and more $$$.