Ok, but this means that I am only a “developer” which is not scalable.
Just like you generate recurring revenues on the apps we build, I want to generate recurring revenues on mine (beyond Glide referral program).
Glide will give everyone a few months notice if and when some plans are discontinued. Some plans from 3-4 years ago are still honored, so if that is anything to go by, it seems you are in no rush to change your Starter plan anytime soon.
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One of our experts expects $1M in revenue next year, and they work this way.
Good to know, thank you!
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More info about this expert and his business please…
I believe that this is one of the most important issues that determines the amount of time spent by application developers. That’s why I support the motion.
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I agree, @Jarvis. The sudden change to the way users are defined makes it hard for many of us to provide much needed technical support to non-profits, educational institutions, and community advocates who have limited budgets. Yet, their work isn’t any less important. 
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I think I can answer this one.
This expert builds Glide apps in return for money. Their clients always have their own teams and pay Glide directly for the plans they use. Seems fairly straightforward to me. As for “more info about this expert”, I believe this woudn’t be nice to disclose the name without the expert’s consent 
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Glide didn’t seem to give sufficient notice that the pricing was gonna change in the last 3 weeks. 
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@kingzy The point @nathanaelb was making is that Glide will give advanced notice if your existing plans that you are currently subscribed to are changed. Not necessarily for any new plans you may subscribe to in the future.
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That’s exactly right.
Clients own their Glide teams, and Experts get access.
Security is one of the biggest reasons for that setup. Data sources can be shared and connected between Glide apps that reside in the same team.
If you’re an Expert trying to “resell” Glide by building multiple client apps in a single team? You’re doing it wrong. It’s not good for you and it’s not good for your clients.
As @tuzin laid out, it’s a straightforward arrangement:
- The Expert (or their client) creates a Glide team
- The Expert has Owner permissions on the team
- The client has Owner permissions on the team
- Client pays Glide for the cost of the team’s plan
- If the Expert is in our Experts program, they’ll get a share of the payment
- Client pays the Expert for the project build
- The Expert can also charge the client for ongoing maintenance/services
- The Expert is removed from the team when the work is done
This is a standard setup used for virtually every SaaS platform.
The exception is when a platform offers a reseller program, which Glide does not.
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So here is the rub, I believe the expectation was (before that last few weeks) that you (the Glide Expert and SME) was encouraged to build a B2B App (not B2C) with Glide and every customer should have their own Business or Enterprise (or whatever is appropriate) account (BUT not shared). This is important for Glide, Client and Expert’s overall customer satisfaction.
In this world you (the Glide Expert and SME) receives payment from the Business Customer for your App (and Subject Matter IP that went into crafting the App) and then pay Glide for hosting the App as well as customer support. You (Glide Expert) are responsible for interacting with the customer and Glide to support the App you built and host on Glide (and whatever other platforms you use like AirTable, etc).
Now it seems that Glide will use the Experts/Expert Program as sales people to find them Glide customers and the Experts will get paid for the first engagement as a ‘consultant’ and Glide will take any additional revenue if said customer expands their use internally by hiring their own developers or consulting with other developers. The Experts will get continued revenue from the Glide customer to the extent that the Glide customer hires them as consultants on other projects or the project they initiated is active. If the customer decides to move the App to a different Team (maybe internal developers, maybe hire another consultant to expand the App); revenue/referral income stops.
Not sure If this is correct - but coming from a 30 year sales career; it certainly seems the Expert program is now officially a sale referral program for one-off engagements and NOT a place to invest in creating IP specific to a Subject Matter Expertise using an excellent tool and hosting service which is Glide.
Considering how many future entrepreneurs have been active on this platform - most probably feel a bit unsure of using Glide as a DEV/HOSTING platform since the new model appears to mean they are, basically, in a sense reselling a solution like MS Office 365 but with all their IP exposed to their customers/clients (who can then give it to other Glide Experts, developers or even build their own practice using the IP).
I do not know if that was the intent (e.g. If you are an Entrepreneur - go somewhere else to Build/Host but Glide is not that platform); but it appears to be the message from many Glide Certified Experts and Glide employees.
However, if the message is that Glide Hosting should be more controlled (e.g. people have been taking advantage of the previous pricing/dev/hosting system risking Glide’s reputation, their Customer’s data and Glide’s long-term growth in the market) to ensure Extremely High Glide Customer Satisfaction; I think that message has been lost.
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Correct!
Also correct, though more accurately the Expert would be removed from the team, rather than the app being removed from the team.
The Glide Experts program is a solutions partner program. Always has been.
The model is nearly identical to other agency/consultant partner programs.
I’m most familiar with website and ecomm builds from my agency days, so I’ll use that as an example:
- Client comes to an agency in need of a new website or online store
- Agency does their pitch and proposal, includes a line about the platform they use
- Client agrees to the scope, signs off on the statement of work
- Agency starts the build process
a. They stand up a new dev/staging environment
b. Their IP includes a mix of dev frameworks, templates, and methodologies - Agency reviews the project with the client for final approval
- Client signs off
- Agency starts the hand-off process, transferring ownership of the site/shop
- Agency begins the post-launch support and ongoing maintenance retainer
This is the standard agency build + deployment process typical of nearly every platform, ranging from the likes of Salesforce down to website hosting providers.
The client owns the instance. The partner comes in to support.
Our setup is the same for Glide Experts.
Can you build a software product and try to license that out using the Glide Experts program model? Sort of. We’ve seen it done. But it’s not the ideal setup.
If you want to launch a micro-SaaS and license it out, you’ll need to work within the constraints of the Glide platform. Otherwise it’s not what we’re building Glide for.
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@NoCodeAndy This would be like telling those who sell hosting not to deploy too many virtual machines on a server, that they are doing it wrong because different clients from different companies shouldn’t share the same server. The Team plan is the server, and the virtual machines are our clients’ applications. This is not wrong; we take care of regulating, expanding, limiting, and paying for excess usage. If you want to convince the public, who may not understand much about plans that only benefit Glide, that’s not right either. It’s more than clear that developers pay for the use of a tool, and within the contractual limits, we respect any bad practices that could harm Glide. But if one purchases a Team plan and develops an application for different clients, we are not harming anyone at all. We are transparent with the client to whom we sell consultancy, development, and very professional and respectable fieldwork in all cases. In no case is it wrong. You are spending so much time avoiding the use that doesn’t benefit you, not what is wrong, that you can’t see beyond your own needs. Personally, it doesn’t affect me at all, neither the certification nor anything else. The idea is to work and charge for my work as I always have, using any tool that adds value to me and my client, and the benefit to the tool provider company, in this case, Glide, is already well considered in the monthly payment for our usage. I hope you understand, but I need to express what I see every day. It’s not our job to create or disclose the software tools used to provide solutions to our clients. We are not paid to advertise. And I could bring many more examples of uses and similar cases for this issue that has been discussed for many days and doesn’t see the light, just diverting the attention of a few who don’t understand how technologies work in other aspects. Thank you. @MattLB I add to your post 
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As a Glide Expert only focused on supporting/developing 1-off app builds (with the hope for future engagements), I have NEVER paid for a team folder on behalf of my client. I enjoy the fact that I don’t manage their billing, don’t own their data, etc.
However, I know of other Glide Experts that certainly run their businesses as you mention above, and there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s how you decide to operate.
I see both sides.
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Thank you. @Robert_Petitto Honestly, I’m quite frustrated when they try to divert the topic by saying that using it in that way is not right. I gave you a comparison that happens daily with the topic of servers, virtual machines, and hosting, practices of all major service providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and many more. They employ the same usage, and it’s not wrong. For years, we’ve been creating solutions for companies, always delivering turnkey projects. We take responsibility as an intermediary layer to provide the best for our client and maintain an excellent relationship with our tool provider.
So, why not make a definitive adjustment to Team or Business plans and create a good ecosystem for everyone, flexible and with costs they consider necessary to be successful in the future? No one is interested in Glide having issues; quite the opposite, it’s an excellent tool that doesn’t focus on the needs of its users, both end companies and developers providing solutions based on its ecosystem. There’s an endless issue with those plans that isn’t well explained. I, for example, understand it from all perspectives and see many benefits everywhere. For instance, they created the Make plan, which is exceptionally well done. I don’t know what’s going on with Team and Business plans that they can’t figure out.
Anyway, there’s much to discuss, but the truth is I need to explain to regular people what, in my opinion, the industry comparisons are.
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Team plans aren’t servers, and apps aren’t virtual machines. 
You’re comparing Glide to Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
They’re completely different things.
That’s a fair point!
To do that, you should have a team plan for each client, and set those plans up so you’re handling the billing. Then you can roll the costs of Glide and your services (and whatever else) into one client invoice.
Again, fair point, and I agree - there’s a lot to discuss. 
What I’m trying to call out is the disconnect between how Glide is being built, what the intentions are, and what I’m seeing in the forum.
Glide’s Team and Business plans aren’t virtual servers, and shouldn’t be compared to virtual servers or IaaS providers. They’re different platforms doing different things.
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When you are an AWS consultant, you do not pay for AWS for your customer (unless maybe your customer is really tiny and not using many features).
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@NoCodeAndy I understand what you’re saying; I’m not comparing, I’m simply stating that we apply the model used by large companies when acquiring space and serving different clients. Anyway, there’s much to talk about, and it’s not the main context. As developers, we pay for a tool, in this case, Glide, and we use a Team or Business plan for various clients to achieve greater benefits or to create projects that wouldn’t be possible individually on such a plan.
Just because we use a Team plan with different clients doesn’t mean we’ll create something that harms either you or our clients. For us, responsibility for the entire project environment is crucial, in all aspects. For 25 years, we’ve been creating solutions for our clients from every point of view, and we’re very strict about everything related to their security, among other aspects.
When we discovered Glide, it seemed like a good tool for specific uses, especially due to its rapid implementation, something that can’t be achieved with other technologies. It works very well for some cases, but not so much for others, especially in business applications. Therefore, I respect your point of view since I’ve mentioned more than once that it’s excellent for certain use cases.
I just hope that you can fine-tune the plans to be beneficial for everyone and not have to limit the plans so much to avoid bad practices. We’ll continue to use the tool, maybe not exactly how you’d like, but doing things very well, as we’ve done for years.
Do you have any idea when you’ll have new announcements for the Team and Business plans? Additionally, something that concerns us is that the company doesn’t communicate its plans for the future, something we need to know because many agencies or independents depend on that. We don’t want to find ourselves in the current situation where many don’t know how to solve cost differences with their clients to consider them in future developments.
Sorry for the long text; I don’t agree with some of the policies implemented for us in the community, but we respect them. Thank you.
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No worries! I appreciate the candour. It’s what the forum is for.
Completely understood.
We’ve learned a lot from this whole experience re: how we communicate changes, and in particular, how we communicate with Experts. @Brett’s doing some great work on the Experts program to address that.
Look out for more announcements in the coming weeks.
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