Saying Goodbye to Glide

General
1

First of all, this is intended to be constructive. I figured my experience might be useful to others, and maybe give Glide something to think about when it comes to retaining users like me.

I get that Glide is primarily aimed at organisations building internal tools. For that purpose it’s a solid platform. But it also has real potential for people trying to build and monetise public-facing apps.

I built a roster/pay calculator on Glide. The learning curve was pretty manageable – I came in with a strong spreadsheet background, some HTML/CSS, and only a touch of JavaScript. The platform is intuitive enough, and there’s plenty of material online to get started.

Key features of my app were:
• User profiles with their role, scale etc
• Users enter their rostered shifts by fortnight or within a monthly calendar
• They pick the pay fortnight they want
• The pay page calculates gross, deductions, net, and penalty breakdowns
• A subscription layer (via PayHere/Stripe) to unlock features (primarily, more than one fortnight of shifts)

Functionally, Glide handled all of that really well. Load times were good, and even with some table limitations I could get the layout looking how I wanted.

Where things got difficult was administration. Not having a true admin view – especially the ability to export all user-specific data – made troubleshooting far more painful than it needed to be.

My main blockers were:

  1. Price – $60/month isn’t ideal for a small/startup app.
  2. Row limits – never hit them, but had to design around them from day one.
  3. Custom domains – should really be available on every paid tier.
  4. No built-in testing branches or maintenance mode.

After mulling it over, I started looking at alternatives. Eventually I ended up doing it the hard way – rebuilding everything in React with Supabase on the back end and Vercel hosting. With a lot of help from AI, I got it done in about two months of evenings. The end result performs better, looks cleaner, and right now costs me nothing to host ~250 users. As the app grows, the hosting costs will grow with it, which feels far more reasonable.

My takeaway is this: if I hadn’t built the first version on Glide, I never would have attempted a full-stack build. Glide taught me the logic and helped me shape the idea, but the limitations eventually pushed me to outgrow it.

So genuinely — thanks for the start, and goodbye :slightly_smiling_face: