As I mentioned before. I would pay more happily if performance would be on the high-end level and if the subscription module was finally ready. How I am supposed to gain profit without a working payment model?
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@pushingpandas Did you reach out to Jesse for the IAP subscriptions beta as I had mentioned? Thatās the solution, my friend.
Youāre right. Thatās a huge part of the problem. Itās only clear after repeated attempts to build anything past that. This product is frequently overpromising and under delivering to a user base with low technical skill in app development, which canāt see this as quickly.
For example, your email verification tutorial posted above is totally not a secure implementation, but you didnāt know that till now, I didnāt know that untill this past year, maybe largely because adalo actually suggests doing it that way.
People are trying to build their companies and future lives on this product that actually does dangerous things, including suggesting insecure and easily circumventable approaches, ignores best practices, and directly answering community questions about stripe component compliance, saying that it is compliant when that is barely relevant because the app you build itself must be compliant and never will be on current stack but that is not disclosed.
In that last case the app distributor would be responsible for the hefty fines, not adalo, but also no one has been educated about the risks of using the tools they are being given.
So I feel the whole thing is dangerous at this point.
And even though people may not explicitly know these things they are catching on to the fact that things are off.
And in terms of stress I canāt help but notice I enjoy building in most platforms but lately, 15 minutes into using adalo I am almost always feeling grumpy.
The list of things i would guess adalo needs to do to succeed and probably to stay alive is almost certainly something like:
- make it to their next round which would be due any time now by my guess
- start teaching users to do things responsibly (though they may genuinely lack the dev leadership here, just a hunch, canāt tell for sure)
- make a product that does what they say or otherwise say what it can actually do
- massive increase in editor and server reliability
*that prev probably requires a massive devops overhaul and Iād almost bet would be easier for a new product than adalo as they are now.
Just some guesses.
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In addition to everything you mentioned, there is a huge communication gap between the Adalo team and the Adalo users community. Thereās no helpline to call, no direct email addresses. I have yet to hear about my the last ticket I submitted a week ago and now everyone is facing another bug and I just donāt feel like filling up another form and then wait weeks for a solid reply.
But there is absolutely no communication from Adalo. Why canāt they arrange a podcast or something to listen to the feedback? Other startups do it all the time.
Your points are valid @Mitch-Pragmaflow 100%
I did know amigo. Iāve been in the website design niche since 2001ā¦ I wasnāt trying to build an enterprise-grade security implementation, just simple email verification. There are definitely ways to make this better, but thatās one of the joys of learning, finding new and better ways to do things. I get excited when I figure out a better solution to a problem that Iāve previously faced.
Now, you said it yourself, the majority of users are low technical skill, so most wonāt know where to look for a verification code that was sent through parameters within the console.
That being said, I can definitely make a better tutorial now with my increased knowledge of the subject. Leveling up has its perks. Iām sure youāve looked back at some of your old code and thought āWhat the hell was I thinking?ā 
Yes definitely, and itās not about that.
To me, itās about responsibility is all. Itās not much more complicated to generate the 2fa on the server side, so why knowingly teach otherwise?
I did know amigo
my bad, I was giving benefit of doubt here.
Iām picking this point but itās really this point x 1000 little other things.
Anyways, the dominating point in the thread is performance / reliability over and over so it speaks for itself.
If you asked me where I experience performance issues Iād say constantly, like every time I use the editor and I wouldnāt have the time to report all of the examples.
So the community is speaking and they want a reliable product. I agree. Last week I had a tested live app that regressed in itās functionality without any changes happening to it or the backend.
Whatās a dev to do with that? Move on mostly, I believe at this point.
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I sent a message through adaloās ārequest an expertā last week to connect with Pragmaflow and didnāt hear back. I know things get lost in inboxes - was really looking to work with pragmaflow on getting my app to something professionally functional.
If you guys are swamped, I get it. But also, with the way adalo has been lately, starting to wonder if my request never made it to anyone at Pragmaflowā¦
Can you dm me your request and email, Iāll have a look.
I hope Adalo reads these comments there are SO many issues with Adalo still that if you increase the pricing before fixing them you will easily lose customers.
Most have been mentioned here, but one I havenāt seen much (although it has been mentioned a few times) is customer service. In infuriates me to no end when I submit a support ticket and basically get told to reach out to the community here in the forums for a solution. While I love the community here, they have helped me through MANY issues, itās not the communities job to support your product. You (Adalo) should have a support team for issues and solutions if you want to retain customers. You have a lot of people here who are not just hobbyist, we are trying to use your service to enhance our business, or build a business of our own creating applications for others to enhance their business, donāt make us search though the forums or rely on the community to get your product to work correctly.
Make your service fully functional before you charge more for it. I have an app I built with Adalo for my business that we use quite a bit, however I cannot even pull an excel report from a collection, (pretty standard feature) because Iām told we used commas or apostrophes in the text field which apparently messes up the export feature. Because Iām one of the few having this issue, it gets put on the back burner even though I have the highest account Adalo has, with a ādedicated CS repā Iām told there is nothing they can do. So now this key piece of reporting used for my business is a completely manual process just because no one has complained enough to get it fixed.
Another key feature that would be great for Adalo to improve on before charging us more would be the design aspect of both apps and websites. Way too often you have to put these buttons inside of an invisible rectangle just to get it to stay where itās supposed to be in the app or when designing websites nothing is ever where it is in the builder. Far too much time is spent trying to get a button to show up on the app where it shows it is in the builder.
Last but not least on my little rant here may be the largest issue of them all, but give us a way to charge recurring subscriptions. I donāt mean a beta component, give us something that is live and works! The core to monetizing so many apps is this feature and it is absent from Adalo. It should also be easy just like the IAP app is now, there should be a simple way to check if a user is subscribed so that gated content can be unlocked.
That is all for my rant here. Iāll try to end this positively, if Adalo is fair about their increases, and they fix these major issues that the community is complaining about then they will continue to succeed, if they do not then it will fail. Maybe they will continue to get new users based off of the idea of being able to create your own app, however once those new users see the struggles they will not be able to retain users. I was in the App Academy recently and watched one of the courses from Nir Eyal about building an app that āhooksā the user, Adalo leadership should watch that video, especially the retention part. You will eventually run out of new users, build your service around those of us who will stay.
Thanks!
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Unless the launch of this topic has the objective of doing a survey in order to take the temperature of what users would be willing to pay in addition to the current prices.
I think that Adalo should not have announced any increase in price without coupling this with a noticeable improvement in performance.
I have several apps that have been pending for months that just arenāt releasing due to poor performance in Europe.
I think Adalo is a tool with fabulous ideas, I am also developing several solutions to help newcomers, but letās not put the cart before the horseā¦
the risk is too great given the number of competitors on the marketā¦
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Iāve got 3 apps with shared database. I was about to publish my apps this month but thankfully Iāve read this announcement and issues about slow performance firsthand.
The lack on details on how much they will charge and implement is giving me anxiety.
As start-upāpreneur, I wanted to have pricing which is certain and non variable.
Something that I can compute to balance my expenses, risks and capital. more like rental bill vs. water/power bill. So, everything that is uncertain is scary to me.
If pricing will be based on metering actions. then it will somehow forced us to cut and limit app experience just to save us from users doing unnecessary actions.
Worst problem here is that we canāt control users on how much actions they will do, especially actions that donāt equate to earning for us.
We cant charge our users same way to compensate. so the big pressure is on us.
Now if that happens. I expect user experience will be affected. so if the experience is not good,
app is not good. if app is not good then more chance that app will fail.
I wish Adalo will come up with start up friendly pricing structure.
My suggestion is to cap the number of actions we put on the app.
Charge the number of actions we can apply. Not the number of actions users do.
So that app owners stay in control without maybe abusing Adalo.
These lines are why I sign up.
Meet Adalo.
Building apps doesnāt have to be scary, slow, & expensive.
Turn Your Startup Idea
Into Reality Without Coding!
Join Our Community of No-Code App Creators. 
Hoping not to sign out.
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Hey Everyone!
Thanks again for the feedback about the elements weāre introducing for pricing. I appreciate your candor & have been learning a lot in my one-on-one conversations with a lot of you.
First and foremost, we hear you about the importance of performance & stability on our platform. To that point (and Iām sure a lot of you have heard the news already butā¦) weāve rolled out quite a few performance improvements over the last couple of weeks! Read more about what weāve improved here (plus some sweet videos). We currently have more in the works as well.
Next, there was some great feedback on having variable vs. fixed cost for pricing that was very helpful for us. And we agree; we think youāre right. Our pricing should work similarly to how other SaaS companies operate ā in a way that allows you all to predict your costs. So with that, we believe our plans should have a fixed amount of actions for the different tiers without charging on a strictly āper actionā basis. With that being said, we do not want to degrade your end-usersā experience (if you were to go over your planās limit for that month). So weāre going to have to include some Ć la carte add-ons for some additional flexibility to avoid causing disruption.
In terms of communication, we really have been trying our best here to bring you all along for the ride and listen to your feedback along the way. After this post, we definitely realized that what you all really needed to hear next were the details for the plans. And with that I just posted a new thread that has the plans & the specific details.
These new plans are NOT live today. I wanted to share the details as soon as I could.
And please keep in mind, any makers on either the Pro or Business plan will be able to remain on those plans for the next 12 months. Your monthly bill with Adalo will stay the same during that time, unless you choose to move to one of the new plans.
As I mentioned previously, I have been having really wonderful calls with a lot of you about these pricing changes. I have opened more slots on my calendar to speak with more of you about the upcoming changes ā if you havenāt already, please book some time.
Iām going to close out this conversation now.
Thanks, yāall!
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