Understood, that makes a lot of sense, that’s really generous of Glide, thanks for the clarification. In that case, I assume personal apps fall into a certain number of categories, among which:
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Keeping on ongoing list of things. Eg. Recipes, workouts, activities, points and scores, investments, etc. Here, individuals probably run out of rows more than anything. Needed: more rows.
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Creating an app for a small community of friends or family. Here even more than above, the limits are probably reached quickly: storage for images, row count, and especially row count if comments/chat is implemented. Needed: image storage management, more rows, excluding row count from comments collection.
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One-time calculator or generator apps for oneself. Eg. Tip calculators, ChatGPT generators where the results are not meant to be saved, etc. The Free plan is great for these. More components would be nice.
In general, more components would be welcome. From most to least needed for the Free plan:
- Image gallery component
- Icon component, or ability to add an icon in the text or headline components.
- Alert text component, or ability to close a hint text component by hitting an x.
- Tabs component
- Accordion component
- More display options (especially chips) for the in-app filter on collections
- Counter component
- Countdown component
- A few more design options for the progress component (rainbow, radial)
- Timeline component or collection
- Translation / Language picker component
- Login component
- Menu component
- Data components: filter and search
(It would be nice if the colors in the components panel were consistent across screen types.)
@DJP
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Hola!
To be honest, I still don’t understand why the excellent and useful Web Embed component is not part of the free plan features.
Does this component incur any cost/fee to Glide when used? I don’t think so.
It’s a great hook to bring new developers (medium/advanced) to Glide and try things out of the ordinary.
Feliz día @DJP
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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.
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After using Glide for three years, I have changed in experimenting projects elsewhere.
Main reason was the strip out of functions . I understand Glide’s business-only focus for more ROI for investors.
But I personally regret that for volunteers/organisations (sports clubs) it has become an overpriced platform with limited features
@ThinhDinh, given your response what is the best practice here? I’m needing to set up images for over 400 profiles:
- i don’t want to drag and drop each image in the Data Editor
- if not GSheets, where should I be storing images for Glide purposes?
- is there a way to set up some kind of lookup table where I can direct GSheets or Glide to pull the correct image URL by name/title?
An idea: use the multiple images column and file picker component to upload multiple pictures at once, perhaps 20 batches of 20 images for instance. Then you would have to break up the arrays of images and put each element on its own row. I’ve never done it but it might work.
If the profiles your mention are already in the the Users table, then you might have an issue with the order of the images in the array, because the order in which they are uploaded determines their order in the array in the Glide table.
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Smart idea.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Can you talk us through your data structure?
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No worries. I think after seeing a few of Petito’s Cloudinary videos I am getting the drift of what I need. My primary goals was to avoid dropping and dragging images for EVERY profile, but it looks like this is what I’m going to be resigned to and I guess there are worse things, lol.
Appreciate everyone’s time and input!
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