I’ve been researching Adalo for a while and I have some questions if I may…
I read somewhere that once you publish your app in the App Store, you can stop your subscription. My question is, if making an app and publishing it in the App Store is my ultimate goal for signing up for Adalo, why would I keep my subscription after I publish my app?
I’d like to use Airtable as my backend, this isn’t possible with the free plan right?
Is there a limit on the number of records when I link my app to Airtable? Is there any performance issues (My base has 4 tables and about 8000 records)?
Hey Motlaq, welcome to Adalo.
I’m a maker, just like yourself, so perhaps one of the community leaders will chip in, but to get you going here’s my thoughts on your first question (you’ll have to wait for someone else to answer questions 2 and 3):
Regarding canceling your subscription; you’re right, you could theoretically create your app, publish your app and then cancel your subscription. However you would no longer have access to update the app. I’m assuming you have no background in software development?? In software development a ‘thing’ is never finished (as much as we’d love it to be the case), it’s never complete, it’s a constant cycle or iteriatitve development…there are always updates, tweaks, fixes etc… But, in essence you’re correct.
I understand you still need access so that you update the app. but can’t I cancel, or say, freeze my subscription in the period between publishing the app and updating it. To be clear, I think the pro plan is fine with me and I can see myself publishing the app and keep the subscription but I read somewhere else about this point and thought ‘what if I don’t update the app so often? If I can cancel it and the app functions well, maybe I can only subscribe when I need to do something with app’
P.S.: My app basically serves a very small niche and most of the power lies in the data itself so it won’t need to be updated in short periods.
Then I guess you could cancel your subscription. However, I’m not sure there’s a ‘freeze’ option available at present, but perhaps one of the Adalo guys will be able to confirm/deny.
You might find that the monthly subscription is so small, comparitively, that it’s not a big deal.
To put the monthly cost into context, I used to work for one of the biggest banks in the world where I’d build and run teams to deliver ‘digital products’, I priced up what it would cost to deliver the app I’m now building with Adalo at $4.7m…for the first 18 months, and that wasn’t even counting a 24/7 devops team to monitor and support the systems and api’s…!
So $50 a month is so small it barely even registers…
@msmurfitt is correct, once you cancel the subscription for your plan, you cannot update the UI for example or change the styles of an image, etc… you can read more about it here.
That is correct, you cannot use Airtable (or any other data source that is not .csv) because pulling data from external collections (google sheets, airtable, xano, etc…) needs to use external collections(paid plan feature) and/or custom actions (basically pulling data but with an API)
I’m pretty sure @AddyEdwin is an expert in this topic (using Airtable), you can read more here.
Regarding point 2 - you can use Airtable’s free plan, but you’ll need to use Adalo’s paid plan
Limit on records - Adalo will be able to display 100 records at a time from Airtable. Anything after that, you’ll need to add a “page” component like the pagination component by Complab.
Regarding performance, it’s not the best, and takes a lot of time to load records from Airtable. Adalo’s team is going to work on speeding this up, as mentioned in their performance page (see the point about speeding up external collections, and then at the very bottom the point about speeding up lists and custom lists). I personally think this will come out in August, but the development team can say that best.
