Realities
Adalo is great, Adalo needs to be on a path to profit. Adalo is normally held up and championed by its user base. Adalo is a US based company with costs based in the US, we should not expect a cheap price based on our local prices.
Adalo, you are getting way ahead of yourselves in terms of value offering and what you seek to charge your users.
The product is not refined enough. You’ve fixed a couple of big issues and performance is improved but there are still very basic issues to fix, functionality to add (outside of unstable 3rd party components) and levels of customer support to achieve before you can consider Adalo as a finished product charging premium rates.
My suggestion on pricing:
At the heart of this debacle is that Adalo is cheap for agency / multiple app type makers. To be able to make unlimited apps for $50 is fantastic, but obviously fantastically unsustainable.
Charge $52 / month on annual subscription
Grandfather all Apps created prior to July 2022. And freeze the performance of those apps 1 year from now, set throttle points to reflect how they should performing on that day, they do not benefit from future performance upgrades, server location choice, new Adalo components etc… If makers want improved performance they can bring their apps individually onto the new plan. No more “free” apps to be created on such accounts.
1st app post July 2022 is free, then $25 dollars per built (Andoird or IOS and custom domain) app thereafter. Use an Adalo watermark, adverts or restrict server calls to prevent misuse. i.e. running a fully fledge PWA instead of committing builds.
Included in the $25 per month app fee:
- 1m read actions
- 250k write / update actions
- 250k API calls
- 250k Adalo API calls
- 100GB storage
- Overage rates for each (I don’t know AWS pricing, but just implement a cost +%20 model for overage)
- Split the usage as above and make it available in a collection within each app, so that we can display it to our customers in a custom admin portal that we can build, we can charge a small markup and bill them accordingly.
- If on an annual contract, allow monthly roll over of unused elements.
(Those figures above are off the top of my head, Adalo please get a focus group of makers and think about what is good value, gives you a fair profit and supports scaling our apps)
Extra revenue
$ Sort out in app purchases / subscriptions and take 1% commission.
$ Increase the per app charge and base subscription modestly, if it is warranted by inflation or platform improvements.
$ Option for front end functionality only, let us run on our own servers with no data going through Adalo. If an App is ready for this then they have the $$ to pay.
$25 per extra seat, but only when seats mean something - support for multiple seats editing simultaneously, lock a screen if it is in edit elsewhere.
On Actions
Fix Adalo so that we don’t need excess Actions to perform simple tasks, we use visibility too much. We use countdown timers in lists too much. Too many hacks and workarounds to overcome Adalo shortcomings.
Support
1 day reply time to support tickets means little if the bug is automatically low priority, which it nearly always is, you need some resources focused on fixing the little issues, they matter to us and hold up our apps from launch, or break apps with no explanation / timeline for fix (Shadows in Android!) The list of bugs I have reported is long, the time waiting for those to be fixed is longer.
Fix some simple things
Text editing
Give us global variables
Sort collections A-Z in the editor.
Restrict multiple simultaneous logins on our apps
Protect screens from access without credentials via copy and paste in webapps / pwa.
Test your updates more thoroughly.
What has happened
You didn’t make a robust enough plan in terms of pricing from the outset, that cost should not be born by the makers who have been with you since the early days, waiting for basic functionality and improvements that whole time. We makers have invested time (more than a year in my case) in your system. I will happily pay a fair increase to my existing rate, but I will not accept such a sea change in structure for apps already in production. We have built businesses based on your structure, don’t pull the rug at the 11th hour.
Rollback
Put this to bed ASAP, you have lit a fire of distrust amongst your users, this forum is followed by potential customers of yours and ours, your investors and future investors. At the root of this is an error in your business plan going back to inception. Your PR exercise of blog posts and forum posts has backfired, don’t let this fire smoulder any longer. Make an apology for pushing something out that wasn’t quite ready, then go back to the drawing board with all this feedback, invite some makers into the fold and get something that works for the majority, you can’t please all, but it seems like you are set to please very few.
That’s my 2 pence.
Thanks for listening✌️