Hi all, I’m James–the new CEO at Adalo. I wanted to take a quick moment to introduce myself and point to the note I put on our blog outling the priorities for Adalo and where we are headed. That blog is here.
I’d be happy to welcome any comments or views, but I’d be delighted with actual constructive conversations. As such, I’d be indebted to anyone booking time with me directly for a 15 or 30 min chat on my calendly here to talk through their experience with Adalo.
My goal at this early juncture of stewarding what is a brilliant company with an amazing community of makers is to hear from as many of you as I can.
A final point is that we are going to be investing into Adalo, but that elbow grease and staffing may take time to bear fruit. We have things in the works, and I don’t want to get ahead of myself in promising delivery, but I hope that in a few weeks you will all begin to see noticeable improvements.
For those that have been avid Adalo makers, thank you for your trust in Adalo. I hope to prove myself and our team worthy of that trust.
I just saw on Twitter that Adalo is being sold, and apparently not in terms that give us much confidence about the health of the company.
I’d like know some more about the future of the company and how we, as Makers, can be reassured that it won’t shut down in a near future, and that we can keep investing in developing in Adalo.
Hey Afonso–firstly, I would say the company is on great footing, and you don’t need to worry about its future–we are going to be investing heavily into product performance and customer support. The Twitter comments are unfortunate, but I would say they don’t represent the full picture. The metrics of the company are positive.
Secondly, I’d be happy to jump on a call and chat through my thought process and what you would like to see, as I’m a believer in demand driving development. I’d love to hear what is hindering your apps from being more successful?
I’m really excited to see where you’ll take Adalo. I actually wrote you an email recently where I shared my experiences and feedback to help make Adalo even better. Would love to chat sometime and discuss further.
Hi James. Congrats on the new post. I believe Adalo has a big future, but I would like to bring something to your attention. I have been working professionally in IT since the early 90’s as a developer, web developer and now on the business side. I am attempting to build an app/site on Adalo that I hope will someday become a very profitable business. I have spend a lot of time reviewing/using low code platforms and I believe Adalo has cracked the low code problem. However, I also believe Adalo should do a lot more for prospective new customers… especially ones coming in through the free Adalo tier. Currently Adalo advertises that each App on the free tier can use 200 records per App. If that were the case then I could just about build my MVP so that I could start selling to customers. But currently, Adalo actually limits to 50 records per App (and a record could be just a reference/lookup type Collection with just one ‘Name’ field).
So I am constantly having to manually delete and recreate data which is cumbersome in the extreme. Even at 200 records per App I would still need to do that but just not as much. Amongst your low code competitors out there, this is, I believe, the lowest allocation of data for providers who offer a free tier. I can’t see how limiting potential customers in this way makes commercial sense. If Adalo was worried about users creating loads of new Apps on the free tier, then why not limit the records allowed in the free tier to say 500 PER ACCOUNT? That would be equivalent to the scenario above in terms of server load for Adalo to support while users build Apps that they eventually start paying for so it makes no difference to Adalo if you limit to about that number of records for an account as a whole.
Also, when I posed this question on the Adalo forum, a forum Admin ‘unlisted’ my question. So instead of allowing other forum members to comment, and instead of Adalo addressing the issue openly and honestly, my question was effectively ‘censored’ by Adalo. (I believe it is an Adalo employee who unlisted my question). I have messaged the forum Admin and have been ignored. I also raised a support request which has also been ignored. (If it’s Adalo’s policy not to reply to free tier support requests, then Adalo should be up front an honest about that, otherwise peoples time is wasted).
As you know, any tech start up lives and dies by the way it treats and nurtures new customers and potential future customers. At the moment, my experience is that Adalo is restricting new customers rather than providing a platform where they can get ahead and build great Apps. If you can fix that account record restriction issue I think Adalo will gain many more customers. How many customers has Adalo already lost by people viewing the Adalo pricing page, seeing the record restriction, and thinking … “I can’t build my MVP on this platform… the data limit is far too low” … and then moved on to another platform which doesn’t have that kind of restriction?
The reason I am saying all this is because I think you have such a great platform, and I’m just giving you my ‘two pennies worth’ to convey where I think a small difference could help Adalo progress significantly.
Hugh–thank you for your reply! Your point on 200 records was a point raised to me by a forum champion today on a call, and a point well made.
I also apologize about your comment being deleted–that’s definitely not the intention of Adalo.
Would you have any time to talk over the next week or two? I’d love to hear more about your app, and your mindset of proving it out in the wild. Our plans are something that needs a big review.
I would like to extend my sincere congratulations on your appointment as the new CEO of Adalo. It’s an exciting time for the company, and your leadership brings with it new opportunities for growth and innovation.
I have full confidence that your vision, experience, and dedication will take Adalo to even greater heights.
Wishing you all the best as you embark on this new and exciting chapter.
Thank you for both this post and the blog article. While I know I’m just one developer and my feedback alone may not have a huge impact, I wanted to share my experience with Adalo and why I ultimately churned and chose to rebuild my app using FlutterFlow.
A bit of background: I’ve been a VP of Product at a Fortune 50 company for the past 15+ years, but I’m also a product enthusiast who finally decided to chase a passion project and build my first app (an MVP). I currently pay for the professional plan and am just waiting for the last of my users to migrate to FlutterFlow before I officially cancel my subscription.
Adalo was FANTASTIC for its simplicity – if you can design in PowerPoint, you can build a real, functioning app. But as my app gained traction and I wanted to test and explore new ideas, Adalo began to show limitations with my current app and became a non-starter for the new apps I wanted to build and test.
Scalability / Speed: I won’t dwell on this point, as I know you’re already addressing it. For reference, I was seeing 3-5 second delays on button clicks with a collection size of around 11k rows and 500 MAUs.
Community / Support: I appreciate your effort to be more proactive in supporting builders. However, my experience with the forum has been frustrating. I like the concept of Adalo Experts, but there’s a need to balance “community” with “sales.” To be blunt, it was really frustrating when I’d ask a best-practice question or seek help, only to be sold something. I now realize the “Experts” aren’t employed by Adalo, but having “Adalo Expert” in their title is misleading. In several cases, they treated the forum as a sales channel. That’s not how you build a supportive community.
Pricing Model: This is the primary reason I moved to FlutterFlow. Your pricing model, frankly, doesn’t work. As a product person, I understand the desire to price based on value, but using app interactions to measure value is flawed. For example, I wanted to create a marketplace app using a swipeable stack UX, similar to Tinder but for sneakers. With just 1,000 users, 15 swipes per person PER MONTH would already exhaust my allotment of app interactions. Users typically swipe far more than that, especially in apps like dating platforms, so this model simply doesn’t support the type of app I wanted to build.
Miscellaneous Issues:
Copy-pasting is still cumbersome. If I write a custom function or action, I shouldn’t have to retype it every time I want to reuse it.
I’d like to label actions so I can easily identify them. “Update user” doesn’t tell me much, and I have to scroll down to see what fields are being changed.
Most developers aim to monetize their apps, but it feels like your roadmap is focused on the wrong things. We need better tools for in-app purchases, subscriptions, and more ad provider options beyond Google.
Please improve your adherence to Google and Apple Store policies. My app was removed for not meeting a target API version for Google, which shouldn’t happen since you handle the build process for us.
I’m grateful for the ease of use and the initial support Adalo provided, as my app and ambitions grew, the limitations became too significant to overlook. I hope my feedback can be seen as constructive, as I truly believe in the potential of your platform. Addressing these issues, particularly around scalability, community dynamics, and pricing, would go a long way in retaining developers like myself who are looking to build and grow meaningful apps.
Another issue I think is relevant for anyone trying to incorporate a chat feature into their products is the reverse-scroll + lazy loading topic, where it loads the 20 oldest messages instead of the most recent ones.
Thank you for your honest words as the CEO of Adalo - congratulations on that by the way.
You mentioned Adalo working towards connecting enterprise grade databases - that is great news and I can’t wait to see the updates on this!
I personally think Adalo is a really good app builder with a lot of potential, it’s been standing still for far too long and I’m delighted to see that performance and client happiness is at the forefront of your plans
I’ll also add that it would be great to see more of a presence on social media from Adalo (I’m sure this has been mentioned already) the last post on X from Adalo was 30/07/24
Would be great for sharing updates as you gradually improve Adalo - something which I am very excited about!
Glad to hear about the intention to improve the performance of the applications, this is undoubtedly the weak point of adalo at the moment.
The elephant in the room cannot be ignored, many of us have seen the discussion on Twitter and worry about the apps we have built, it seems the company is unstable and could close.
We would love to hear about the sale and what happened behind the scenes, we are invested in this story.
If I was to be asked what was holding me back from wanting to continue building an app with Adalo, scaleability and performance are obvious concerns but the cost of app actions/amount of app actions used is also a concern - especially if you want to build a mobile app with the potential to make profit!
