We are currently building Glide Apps for IoT integrations and have encountered an issue with the pricing model for updates on the Pro and Business plans. While the cost per update may seem small for user-generated actions, which is the typical use case in Glide, it becomes prohibitively expensive when working with automated IoT devices/APIs regularly sending updates.
For example, consider a sensor sending data every hour to a table in Glide to trigger alerts when certain conditions are met. With 24 updates per day and 30 days per month, this would generate 720 actions per month, costing $7.2 per month for a single sensor. This cost is not commercially feasible for IoT devices or any other automated services regularly inputting data.
As a result, we are currently limited to using webhooks and updating upon user request in Glide, which limits the potential power and usage of the platform. We have also considered using BigTables to store historic information, but filling this table based on updates would also be too expensive.
We are wondering how to proceed in this situation, both in the near future and long-term. Will the pricing model stay the same, or will Glide adapt as it becomes more powerful?
Additionally, if we connect to an external database like BigQuery or new databases that Glide plans to support in the future, will Glide count every update to that database as an “update” that counts towards our plan, or will it rather count the number of queries that are run on this database?
Thank you for your support and insights on this topic!