Glide's New Pricing: Pros and Cons for No-Code Devs and Business Owners

Today, Glide released its new pricing. And if you're a no-code dev, enthusiast, or business owner, you've got to read this to understand the pros and cons of the new pricing structure for Glide .

Remember, Glide isn't a platform you should use to build your public-facing, mobile MVP anymore. It WAS that platform for a couple years, but now it's not. Glide ONLY targets businesses and is trying to get into the enterprise game.

The FREE version is quite limited:

• 1 app
• 10 users
• Glide tables as the ONLY data source (no longer google sheets)

Basically, consider this a free TRIAL. HUGE caveat: Now Glide will discriminate between "personal" emails and "business" email accounts. Which means that these 10 users CAN'T be a @ yourdomain(.)com email. Users (you) need to use a gmail, hotmail, etc. Glide calls these "personal" users. (I know, it's confusing.)

Then comes the MAKER plan.

49/mo billed yearly.

You can use both Glide Tables AND google sheets. However, ALERT, you only get 1 published app. And it only comes with 500 updates/mo, which is EXTREMELY low.

IMO, this is also useless for a business application.

The only advantage of the maker plan is that you have unlimited personal users. So, you can have a directory app, for example, that's quite static and doesn't have a lot of updates... Just make sure your uncle George logs in with his AOL email and not with his work email!!

Now we get serious and let's look at the Team plan. 100 bucks a month (paid yearly, Glide just re-launched yearly billing after 1+ years of monthly plans only)

• Unlimited apps
• 5k updates

The updates count is important. I'm pissed because 5k updates/mo is nothing, however, the shining light is that Glide Table updates don't count.

So, builders, beware... Use Glide Tables (and GBT) as much as possible.

Rely as little as possible on GSheets and Airtable.

On the team plan, we also get basic API functionality.

Row limit: 25k per app

Now, super important... you only get 20 users for your team apps.

Additional users are billed at 5/mo.

The good? 70% of Glide apps we've made have less than 20 users/mo.

The bad? 30% of Glide apps we've made have MORE than 20 users/mo.

Now, remember, Glide only charges you for ACTIVE users. Which means that if you use this as a client portal, and you provide a service in 2-3 weeks, you can have 19 clients this month, 19 NEW clients next month, etc. For SMB's, this wont be an issue. For teams of 50+, this is an expense that needs to be considered.

SMB's pay 6/mo for Gsuite, 8/mo for slack, 8/mo for Monday (all per seat)... will they pay an additional 5/mo/user for Glide? Glide thinks so... we'll see.

Personally, I think that only businesses who REALLY use Glide, and build 2-3+ apps in Glide will feel confortable here. Otherwise they'll churn or go back to that ugly spreadsheet.

Finally, we get to the Business plan. 250/mo. The bad?

• limited at 20 users
• additional users at 8/mo/user (OUCH!)
• update count is still SUPER low IMO.

The good? A lot

• SQL data sources
• Up to 100k records per app
• Call API
• CSS
• Offline add row
• Barcode scanner

Up until now, just a handful of clients have gone over their updates count limit (it was 25k, now it's 5k and 10k) I expect a lot of heavy users will spend a LOT more on updates (price per update increased 100%! from .01 to .02/update)

An app with 20 users and 25k updates per month, for example:

I make this point again, Glide Tables updates don't count against your quota. Which is great if a client decides to move their data to GT. But if they want to keep their data in Airtable, GSheets, or a SQL db, the bill will be ??.

TLDR: You're a business and getting started? You need the Team (99/mo) plan. Make sure to build everything in Glide Tables.

You're a power user, and want all the features, integrations, and data sources: Business (249/mo).

Now, what do I think about @glideapps new pricing?

I don't care.

And don't get me wrong. But I've never cared about how much Glide, or Bubble, of Weblow cost. If you're concerned about Glide's pricing, don't use it. If it's too expensive for you, it's not for you.

I just had a call with a lead, and we spent an hour talking about Bubble's workload units pricing, and the lead is super concerned about Bubble's cost. At the end of the call, I told him that probably Bubble's not for him. If spending a few hundred USD/mo on software will hurt your bottom line, you have other priorities.

Will this new pricing price out Glide in the rest of the world? YES

Will this new pricing will make Glide (and us at LowCode) lose projects? ABSOLUTELY

And that's fine.

At LowCode, I'd rather work with a business that's not so tight on their software budget. That means they value software more, they value us as their implementation partner more, and we can provide more value.

Finally.. what are we doing at LowCode Agency related to this new pricing structure?

1. Helping the client pick their best platform. There will be cases when, because of number of users, data volume or number of updates, Glide will not be a good fit. If it's Glide...
2. Providing a lot of value when we're building an app, and leveraging our knowledge (we're the best Glide agency out there) to build the best app for their business, considering all technicalities, integrations, etc.
3. We'll build an app that's scalable and will cost the least amount of money (for example, we might build an integration via make instead of relying in a Glide plugin, in some cases).
4. Making our clients use Glide more. We're giving our clients access, for free, to our growing suite of templates (glideapps.com/templates/authors/lowcode-2) and personalizing these for their business. That means they get a lot more out of Glide.

Thoughts? Questions? Comments?