Updates Limited

Good morning! Starting from scratch in just one month, I managed to create a completely innovative application using the advanced features of Glide, integrating it with Open AI and Google Vision. From a feature and ease-of-use perspective, Glide is the best no-code tool for me. However, the maximum limit of monthly updates has hindered my application! Users have multiple interactions and filters that I had to manage in specific columns, leading to a high number of updates that no current plan will be able to support once launched for market use. Does anyone have any suggestions? I wouldnā€™t want to give up the ease of use and advanced features of Glide!

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If your appā€™s functionality depends on a high level of updates, then charge your customers a premium to access those features. Use the funds to manage your overhead.

Updates are not limited on paid plansā€“on Pro, you can pay when you need more. If your app is innovative and valuable to users, this will not be a problem for you.

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Iā€™ve learned a lot from your courses, Robert! Iā€™m very grateful to you! However, my audience is in Brazil, and the currency value is 1/5 of the dollar, so I canā€™t charge as much as I initially planned in costs! In each line of the spreadsheet, my students have at least 3 tasks, not counting additional features like a timer, repetition, study tracking ā€“ everything I built turned out great and functional. Currently, thereā€™s nothing on the market with OpenAIā€™s speech-to-text and image conversion features. However, the pricing plans wonā€™t be able to cover the costs the way it was developed! Itā€™s as if I had a Ferrari in the garage but no money to put fuel in it to drive!

Leading to a high number of updates that no current plan will be able to support
Exactly same issue with me Iā€™m in one of the earliest user of Glide and have a working app right now but this makes me to think twice before I upgrade due to the same sheet being edited 400 times a day not through Glide, but whenever the new syncing will be committed glide will count all the edits even though theyā€™re not done by Glide.

From an experienced developer to a beginner like me, everyone is facing the same issue! And Iā€™ve been following this discussion in other community threads before! I greatly admire Glideā€™s features and convenience, and thereā€™s no other codeless solution in the market with this quality! I understand the costs of updates, but Iā€™ve noticed that the Glide development community is encountering the same technical feasibility problem concerning the low monthly update limits for medium-sized apps!

As David pointed out, though, there are no limits on Pro plans and above. Just turn on ā€œpay as you goā€. If youā€™re unable to afford this plan, then youā€™ll need to sacrifice functionality until you have the funds to bring your so to market.

We are building Glide for business use, and weā€™re trying to move our business towards a mode price of $10k/year in the US. We have business customers with close to a million updates per month. Iā€™m sorry, but we cannot change our pricing to make Glide affordable for high scale use for entrepreneurs without revenue, or for school useā€”we will not be able to stay in business if we do that.

If you want us to evolve pricing in your direction, please tell us exactly how many updates you need and what you would pay for it. Right now, people just say ā€œI need a lot and I canā€™t pay a lotā€. We cannot act on this.

We have some ideas to not charge updates when using Glide Tables and Glide Big Tables. Would this change address your needs?

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One dilemma we face is that people want Glide to be affordable if they get 1,000/10,000/100,000 users. When we talk to these customers, guess how many users they have today? Zero! They often have not started building, or are building but not yet sharing their app.

Almost nobody actually gets thousands or tens of thousands of users. We cannot make Glide so cheap that when the nearly impossible happens, Glide is still considered cheap!

An active app with 10k users could cost us thousands of dollars per month to run. Do you think that price would be outrageous? You would have to pay more than what it costs us to host it. If this is inconceivable for you, then your use case is not right for Glide.

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Dear David, thereā€™s no way to generate revenue without launching the project in the market! Even though my appā€™s audience consists of students, it doesnā€™t mean I wonā€™t charge an appropriate value aligned with market standards. The initial purpose of my open request in this thread was an attempt to reduce these updates or find a way to expand upon what has been partially addressed: should I remove some features, switch to the Pro plan with variable updates, charge a higher fee from clients, and understand that Glide might not be suitable for new ventures, as you mentioned yourself! Feel free to explore my project at QuizLegis.com.

@Paulo_Roberto this is why new companies raise money from investors. You are asking us to invest in your company by lowering our prices until you have revenue? Iā€™m sorry but we are not interested in investing in quiz apps for students, at least without a more serious business plan that shows how we will likely make money! :wink:

Luckily, you only have to pay for updates that you actually use (over whatā€™s included). This means that your costs will not scale until you actually get traction.

If you are confident in the potential of your business, go convince someone to invest in your company, and then you have money to spend on services like Glide to grow your business, until youā€™re in a position to fund your operations with revenue from your own customers.

As Iā€™ve been saying since the beginning of my love for Glide and its tools, I believe that those seeking Glide are not companies with established customer bases, but developers looking for a simplified way to create and explore new markets using the fantastic tools and potential of Glide! My market is specific, and you wouldnā€™t understand how this market niche works in my country. Iā€™m not asking for investment in anything, just to build a dialogue with developers and Glide enthusiasts who want to continue building a useful and profitable product together.

Sure, but exploration by non-companies is not a business. Iā€™ve been saying since we created Glide that weā€™re going after a $10B/year internal apps market (itā€™s growing a lot!)

I suppose you are entitled to your own ideas about what our business goals are, but weā€™re building it according to our ideas.

Weā€™re designing a new Free plan for the people you mention thoughā€”the best of both worlds will be if we can create free or cheap plans for people who are not businesses, for prototyping and personal use; and then appropriately priced plans for businesses.

We think Glide should be 1000x more powerful and 1000x easier to use, but this will take time and resources to achieve. We get those resources from customers who value Glide enough to pay a premium for it.

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Alright! Thatā€™s what I need to hear about the type of customers that Glide is targeting! I donā€™t have anything yet besides the idea and the working concept app, but at least Iā€™ve expressed my opinion about the update limit! Iā€™m not asking for a free plan or a prototype; Iā€™m investing in my business with my own resources! The final reply on this topic is based on my experience and the feedback from other developers: assessing the costs and limits of these monthly updates! Thatā€™s all!

No problem ā€“ I enjoy having these discussions and one of my favorite parts about our community is you can a bit more of an inside look as we build our company!

Our mission is still to create a billion new software developers by inventing fundamentally easier and more powerful software development tools. Money is one of the key fuels that will help us reach our ambitious destination, so failing to capture value from businesses is one of the largest risks. How weā€™ll do that while also making Glide broadly available for non-businesses is a core problem weā€™re working on.

Sometimes these overlap, especially with ā€œentrepreneursā€ ā€“ these people think Glide will help them achieve fame and fortune on a shoestring budget. If we build our business model to support these fantasies, we will not achieve our mission.

PS: Our company is called ā€œGlideā€, not ā€œGlide Appsā€

That would be crazy!!! :star_struck:

Glide for sure is a leader in the field.

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Iā€™m going to try to optimize my app even further and remove or limit some features, but itā€™s certain that Iā€™ll need to test this alternative! I hope to succeed after the launch and pay more while continuing to contribute to Glide! :+1:

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At Least changes made directly in to the Google sheet should not be counted would make a lot of difference.

In my specific case, I donā€™t need to have the data in a Google Sheets spreadsheet or any other external database! The question is: if I input my data into Glide tables, would internal app operations like setting column values count as updates?

This is actually the most expensive thing for usā€“reloading from Google Sheets. I donā€™t know of any companies that give this away for free on the scale that we do. That will always count. Glide Tables are relatively cheap.

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