Let me think aloud at bit: I would like to see all features on the free plan plus a generous data allowance.
My reasoning:
The more is on the free plan, the wider the word about Glide can spread. The easier it is to just do another app with Glide. The bigger the investment into the platform. The harder to switch. The higher the urge to tell others about it to justify one‘s own growing investment. The higher the probability to do a business app with it - and pay.
I‘m experiencing this with Notion and Craft. The lure of the generous free plan😁
But where to draw the line? Personal vs business app? That sounds about right. If apps earn money you want to get a piece of the pie.
If they don‘t, you want to be paid with great reviews, word of mouth, enthusiasm, feedback, data.
The distinction would be easy if apps would always make their money thru you. But they don‘t. So, how to distinguish between business and personal apps?
I think several criteria need to be balanced:
- team size: business apps are developed by a team, personal apps just by 1 person
- user base: business apps are developed for many users, personal apps for just a few
- integrations: businesses are using other services like Asana or Salesforce, but people outside of businesses are still interested in services in general
- data volume: business apps tend to require/produce more data than personal apps
- app size: business apps tend to have a larger number of screeens for all the different use cases of their many users
So, here‘s my take: Make everything free for personal apps forever. And define personal apps as…
- only 1 team member/dev
- max. 11 (number of players in a soccer team😁 who could all be the developers friends)
- max. 3 user roles
- only 1 integration with predefined services like Asana where you make it easy to call them
- other REST calls should be possible, but maybe rate limited (above a certain rate charge for them like OpenAI does for the GPT API; even a single dev might want to pay for that if it amounts to 3 or 7 dollars a month)
- limit data to eg 5 GB or 50000 rows. But be generous😉
- limit the number of screens to maybe 10
Plus:
- no custom domain
- always Glide branded
In any case: don‘t limit any feature to a paid plan! A feature used on a personal app (or business app experiment) might be what later leads to a plan upgrade.
I believe in the generous free plan to make it most easy to attract a lot of people - which increases the likelihood of a conversion into a paying customer.
Anyway, I am so glad I have came across Glide! An exciting tool striking a great balance between power and ease of use.