Using Row Owners for Multi-Family Data Separation on Free Plan

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1

Hi everyone,

I’m building a small multi-family app where each household should only be able to access their own data, while multiple members of the same family can share that information.

I understand that Glide Row Owners work based on user identifiers like emails, not custom IDs. Is there a way on the Free plan to have multiple users from the same family share access through Row Owners, or is filtering by family/group the only option?

I’m trying to set up proper data separation from the beginning and would appreciate any advice or best practices. Thank you!

2

You can use roles as row owners to achieve what you want.

However, unless you have a legacy free plan, your App cannot be published.

3

I believe I do, but I’m not completely sure. I’m still fairly new to Glide, but I built and published an app back in 2025 on the Free plan. Recently, I unpublished that app and published the one I’m currently building, and it worked. So I believe I can still do what you’re referring to, right?

4

Yes, it sounds like it.

So to implement what you’ve asked, you need to do the following:

  • Create a Role column (text type) in your Users table, and ensure that column is configured as the Role column in your User Profiles.
  • Assign each user a Role that corresponds to the family they belong to. This can be any text value: the family name, a family ID, as long as each member of the same family gets the same value.
  • In any table where you need the data to be protected, add an “Owner” column (text type), apply Row Owners to that column, and fill it with the Role value of the family that each row belongs to.

One thing to note: Glide does not permit you to assign or modify a Role column in the Users table via the UI. Normally this is done with server side workflows or the Glide API. But as you’re on a free plan, you won’t have access to either of those. Therefore your only option for assigning roles to users will be to do it manually via the Data Editor.

5

Thank you very much for your help! I was able to get it working successfully. One issue I had was that I hadn’t properly configured the User Profiles table and enabled the Role column on the front end because the app is still brand new and I’m still working on the table structure first. Once I did that, I was able to use the Family ID directly as the Row Owner, and it worked exactly as you described.

I really appreciate you taking the time to explain the process. This solution is much cleaner than relying on filters and gives me the proper data separation I was looking for while keeping the app lean. Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction!