Public vs Private

This is probably a newbie question, but the difference between private and public users is still unclear to me.
Here is a hypothetical situation.
I have an airtable base with users:

  • Clients
  • Vendors
  • Employees
  • Managers
  • Admins

Now I want all of them to access the same data based on their role (potentially from different apps). All users must log in via email (so it’s a private app). In this situation, who counts as a private and who as a private user?
Since it’s an internal tool with a client and partner dashboard feature with potentially hundreds of users, the limited number of private users even in the business tier worries me.
But since the data from Airtable is already filtered, can I count all my users as public?
What’s really the difference between user types in terms of features?

Imagine private users as a whitelist. No one else, except those emails, will be able to log in.

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Like @eltintero mentioned, if the only way to sign into the app is for the user to be already be in a table of whitelisted user emails, then all of those users are considered private users.

If anybody in the world can sign into your app, then they are considered public users.

If you use the Roles feature in glide, then all of those users with a role will be considered a private user.

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What happens if I hit the private user limit? Am I able to purchase additional private user slots? Also, I guess the limit is per account base, not per app, right?

Once you hit the limit, I believe that additional private users will be prevented from signing in.

No, I don’t believe that’s an option at the moment, so you would need to upgrade to a higher tier team plan.

Yes, correct. User limits are team based. So if the same user logs into 6 different apps that are part of the same team, they are only counted as one user. One thing to note about this is that the count is reset each month, and only those users that actually use the app each month are counted. So you could have 100 users in your user profiles table, but if only 20 of them sign in, that’s all that gets counted. You get charged based on actual usage, not potential usage :wink:

Just one more point, in case you didn’t pick it up from earlier responses…

That’s not actually correct. Being required to sign in does not make one a private user. Public apps can also require sign in. Two things make app users private:

  • Either you restrict access to users in the User Profiles Table, in which case all users are private, or
  • You allow anyone to sign in, but apply roles to some users. In this case only those users with roles assigned are counted as private users.
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Thanks, @Darren_Murphy!
I’ll need to test this further before fully committing to Glide.

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