Hi all, after an extensive round of calls spanning September through November speaking to more than 260 Adalo Makers, and countless feedback emails, you as a community have made it clear Adalo needs to deliver on app speed, scalability, and stability. As such, I wanted to provide a transparent update to everyone on where we are going in the immediate term, and the steps we’re going to take to get there. These steps are:
- Delivering Adalo 3.0 infrastructure - the foundation for 3x the app speed and performance
- By necessity, sunsetting old infrastructure and Free plans
- Providing limitless scalability through infrastructure selection, including dedicated servers
- Enabling your apps to integrate with everything, including legacy tech with no APIs
- Eliminating app actions, and making our offerings more menu-based; i.e. ‘choose what you want’
1: Delivering Adalo 3.0 infrastructure Too many times I have been told that Adalo is ‘MVP software only’, accompanied by horror stories regarding the spinning wheel of death. As soon as our new team stepped into Adalo, we began overhauling the infrastructure. Why? Because while the current infrastructure may have been a good plan at the start, Adalo’s scale of users is now far beyond the point of this structure being sustainable.
To put things into perspective, we are currently managing over 2,000,000 databases. Every app (including all of your test apps) automatically creates its own databases. Adalo has to host each of these databases, and although providing CPU, RAM and memory for these apps is manageable, the administration required by that many apps is well beyond the capabilities, and even suitability, of the existing infrastructure. An apt analogy here is if you and 100 friends were to try and all cook dinner in a single kitchen, even if it were a giant kitchen, eventually you’ll find that everyone gets bottlenecked around the availability of one appliance. We’re well past that bottleneck scale on our database usage, and it ties directly to app latency.
Building a thriving business is about more than just creating a scalable mobile app; it’s about crafting something extraordinary. Adalo needs to be more than just your launchpad—it has to be your gateway to limitless possibilities, propelling your apps to new heights and beyond. To achieve that, we’re building a more powerful engine.
Our stated intent for 2024 was to replace the old Adalo engine with a Ferrari V12 engine and deliver at least a 3x performance increase to your apps (“Adalo 3.0”). The first step required us to separate our paid accounts from free infrastructure, so that paid users receive a premium experience. Or in other words, if you are a paying Maker, you will have stability and increased performance from your Adalo database. I’m delighted to report that this V12 engine is ready to go, and at the time of writing the first of our paying customers are being migrated to this new infrastructure, which will not only be significantly faster, but it will also provide us the ability to do further enhancements in the short-term:
- Database optimizations (adding a further 100-200% speed increase for your apps),
- Hosting regions of US, Ireland and Japan (with more geographic specificity available via our dedicated infrastructure - more on that below),
- Caching (no more reloading tables if you hit the back button without changing any data), and
- The best monitoring dashboards available, letting us get ahead of any issues.
The migration to new infrastructure will also provide the immediate stability we need to work on the above list.
2: To enable this, the existing infrastructure will need to be deleted so that we can focus our team and capital on the new engine. Unfortunately, those currently on Free plans will not have their databases migrated, and be required to put their plan into Maintenance Mode or their databases and associated records will be deleted. A number of emails will be sent to Free plan users regarding this choice. The new Free plan will only become available once we have positioned Google Sheets to become your new default database, which will become an engineering priority in 2025. In the meantime, we will offer a four-month free trial plan to ensure that our database hosting doesn’t become a blocker again.
This isn’t an easy decision to make, but it is required to stop Adalo being a database hosting farm, and let it be the dream launchpad our Makers came here for. To not do this would mean continuing lacklustre performance. Again, further information will be in the email that those on the Free plan should have already received.
A request I have to our paying accounts: please delete any test apps you have that you are not using. This will make our migration process much faster.
3: We have been inundated by companies with interest in dedicated infrastructure, or being able to have Adalo deployed within a corporate cloud, on-premise, or a hybrid method for compliance reasons. While these plans will be shown in our new offerings to follow shortly, anyone can request them now by contacting me directly. This gives you the levers to scale infinitely–right up until the point that you wish to run a truly independent business with your own DevOps team. At this point you may even want to export your code from Adalo. For Adalo to be your launchpad, we see our role as helping you to graduate to true independence, and hence code export is something we’ll deliver beyond 2024.
4: Apps need data to power them. We’re bringing the tools to let you connect anything. We have been mentioning DreamFactory a lot in forum posts and calls, and we’re thrilled at the no-code combination that DreamFactory and Adalo bring to you all. DreamFactory helps you to instantly build the plumbing between any data source (even 1960’s IBM mainframes sitting in the basement of Fortune 500 companies) and connect them all together, then Adalo can be the canvas where you orchestrate it all together. Starter documentation is already here.
If you have enterprise clients, or work in a corporation yourself with legacy technology that is a nightmare, you now have the perfect no-code tool to extend that technology’s lifetime and unlock productivity. These are eight figure problems to solve. Paired with dedicated infrastructure or on-premise deployments, Adalo enables real digital transformation. Picture piping 10 discombobulated services into one beautiful app:
Image source: signalpattern’s 2019 website
5: New plans. We will be killing off App Actions, and taking the feedback from the community onboard to rework our plans. You will not have to go to a top-tier plan just to get a specific feature. No paying customer will be forced onto a new plan–all existing plans will be grandfathered (but we will still kill App Actions on the old plan–it actually slows performance because of all the logging of each action taken). The new plans will be very simple, and based on a core subscription with add-ons–i.e. if you want the Collections API, instead of needing the Team Plan, you can add that for a much smaller change as a single feature to your core subscription. Other add-ons at this stage will be the DreamFactory capability, the Xano integration, and then adding additional published apps, additional storage, and additional editors. For those wishing to take dedicated infrastructure and deploy apps in a compliance and security-first environment, Private Spaces will be available.
There is a lot more we’re doing and bringing to Adalo–working with experts to craft app templates, revisiting how components are sold, and reworking our ecosystem incentives to make it very rewarding for those around Adalo to help others–but those updates will need to wait. Beyond these five points I’ve outlined, our team will be freed up to look at features again, and Deep Linking will be the first feature we implement. Our Canny roadmap will become our actual roadmap, and will remain the place to vote on what you would like to see released.
Oh behalf of the whole Adalo team, thank you to everyone who has spoken to us on calls and given feedback since mid-September. A special thanks goes out to Victor Kizmichev, Dilon Perera, Nathan ‘The Adalo Guy’ Cox, Fred Mitschele and Mr. Flawless. You’ve all helped to shape what these next steps look like, and I hope to continue to enjoy your frank feedback 
James Crennan
CEO
Adalo - Your Gateway to a Limitless Future
. Truthfully speaking, I also use FlutterFlow, and it’s very powerful, but it’s not a “Low Code” or “No Code” Platform, It actually requires A LOT of understanding and API knowledge - and there’s a constant bug squashing process which takes time to sort everything out. Adalo has nailed so many things such as this, you can easily pull your hair out when trying the same in FlutterFlow. The drag and drop is simply incredbile in Adalo.
