Pricing impact (I hope my sums are wrong)

looking in to the impact of this new pricing:

A typical user in my app has 2010 actions per month, so on the Business plan that’s only 497 Users! (1000000 divided by 2010 = 497), each additional 15,000 costs $8 (15,000 divided by 2010 = 7.46), so each additional users is going to cost just about $1 per month.

so 100,000 active users is going to cost $99,503 per month !!! $1.2 Million per year, therefore users will have a min usage charge of $12 just to cover Adalo costs!

Basically Adalo has priced its self out of the market, and will lose all its customers… cant see it it being here in 18 months now, any rightminded business will look for a stable business partner, Adalo now isn’t one, loosing its customers means it will not survive.

so if my calculations are correct, then there are only two or three words that come to mind ! someone please tell me this is incorrect and I am in a bad dream!

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@Fred

I feel your pain. Interesting to see your expected count of actions. I haven’t launched, but early indications show 4000 mapu (monthly actions per user… we need an acronym at this stage)
Can you share any details of your app?

https://forum.adalo.com/t/revised-pricing-plans-pt-3/30151/6

I was about to subscribe. but I really needed to wait the pricing to finalize. Now that it’s there… I’m still hoping that they’ll revise the actions part. That’s the only reason I’m still checking this forum.

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They moved forward with pricing for new users already. This ship has sailed.

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Hi @Fred!

On the business plan, you will pay $10 for an additional 200,000 actions so it is a much lower cost per action if your app will end up utilizing that many actions per month.

Unfortunately Adalo shot himself in the foot and in ours with this matter of actions.
I was already going to the paid plan just to implement an API and launch my APP.

It seems like I wasted months with Adalo, with the limitation of actions I can’t launch my APP

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Just a little PSA… firebase, which is the backend to a competitor (one far more powerful and a lot less buggy), gives you around 90k-100k read/write/delete actions for free per month (with additional actions several points less than a penny per) and up to 50k MAU. I won’t pump the competitor’s name but I’m sure you’ll figure it out.

A bonus to the above, all of the extra premium/paid components for Adalo come free, plus several dozen more on top of what’s available with Adalo. And the platform just changed their pricing plan, where they gave MORE features to the free plan, removing them from the pro plan. Really, you only pay to publish and access to unlimited APIs (comes with two in the free plan).

The learning curve is a little different but if you read the docs and hang out in their very vibrant and active community, it’s a quick learn. I’ve already turned out an app in just four days. It’s a simple app but a good test of the platform.

So, ya know, if you’re seeing the obvious warning flags with Adalo’s trajectory, try something else. You might find you’re pleasantly surprised.

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One of the details I had read was that if you make the same query twice and the data doesnt change, they don’t charge you for the query. . . .

I’ll add to that as well.

If a button has multiple actions depending on certain conditions, it only counts as one action. Estimating which action to take is not an action.

That is one option I am considering, though not a fan of noSQL databases, as prefer relational DBs, although I appreciate that cloud providers prefer them as much easier to scale, and do make your App very loosely coupled from the DB which is great for mobile apps.

I did cost out what Microsoft Azure would be for 100,000 users (a platform i know very well, as a .net developers for many years):

Provisioned dedicated SQL Server $3300pcm, plus would need to develop an API, this would need to be secured via API Gateway ($200pcm), so $3500pcm in total for backend hosting costs,… Azure isn’t cheap compared to its competitors, but seems a lot cheap than Adalo now.

I will perform a full impact assessment and compare to other platforms.

Ok, thank you for this information, i will recalculated with those figures, but still think its going to be crazy expensive compared to other platforms.

This ship will sink faster than the Titanic. 30.000 Actions is a joke especially since NORMAL INTERACTIONS on adalo need WORKAROUNDS with ACTION by ACTION by ACTION which sums up. This is a circus full of monkeys. The App is crashing all the time. Push Notifications are not reliable working, Android I count 60% of breaks of notification simply not getting sent out to the devices. The Speed - god lord, it’s still like the servers are on mars.

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I am sharing a spreadsheet I put together
If you edit only the orange cells then you can get an idea of costs based on Users x MAPU monthly actions per user, allowing for the overage rates that are given in the thread …$10 for an additional 200,000 actions

spreadsheet.xlsx

So I think my App would hopefully see 10k users and average 4k MAPU
Old scenario $50 per month
New scenario $2,200 p/m

How can anybody do business in an environment where costs jump 4300%?

Imagine AWS drop an email to Adalo HQ. “Hey guys… your server plan goes up at the end of the month by 4300%.”

Adalo would find another supplier, and avoid doing business with AWS in the future. They would be crazy not to.

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OK, after recalculation, for 100k users, the monthly Adalo change would be $10,250pcm… To create a robust high volume solution in Azure would be $3500pcm (that is enterprise level stuff with geo redundancy), 100k active users (1m downloads) in firebase will costs about $575pcm, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amplify is similar costs to Firebase.

For an app with 2010 actions per user, per month, with 100k of active users, the operational cost appears to be $0.10 per user per month, that’s not good for anyone who is providing the app as a service for free to their users, for commercial apps (well, need to look at the business model and see what impact to the profit margins).

so $10,250pcm versus less than $1000 in other platforms… hummm…

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Excellent work on the spreadsheet, very useful (maybe Adalo should check it out and see if their math still makes sense).

I reviewed Firebase plans again, and was mistaken. You get collectively 90k read/write/delete actions per day, not per month, for free. If you top that allotment, it charges the following per each additional block of 100k actions:

Read: $0.06/block
Write: $0.18/block
Delete: $0.02/block

So, essentially, where Adalo is charging business users $10/200k extra actions, Firebase will give you 300k actions collectively of the above for $0.26. Plus a GiB free storage in the firestore with each additional GiB coming in at $0.18/month.

I ran my firestore numbers (granted there are other functions in Firebase that charge, but still pennies on the dollar) as I wanted to get a base estimate of monthly collective actions (read, write, delete), and I went on the liberal side with my estimates for the first six months following public release.

My total per month would be approximately $21.71, bringing my six month total to $130.26.

And unless my math is wrong, to get the same number of actions in Adalo after deducting the 1mil with the business plan, at 200k/$10, the six month total from Adalo would be $6900. That doesn’t include the $250/month just to use their service (and my Firebase calculation doesn’t include the monthly fee to use the other service).

And these are just straight fee calculations. This doesn’t take into account that Adalo is counting much more as an action than Firebase does, which would suggest that one would either use far more actions in Adalo per month versus Firebase with the same estimated active users per day, or someone using Adalo would have to reduce their daily user count and/or limit daily action use per user.

Just for kicks, I added my estimated monthly egress, and plugged in some Google Vision extras, and my file storage amount. This brought my grand monthly total to just under $25. Including my developer account, that’s $95/month.

Adalo would be more than ten times that amount just for their monthly use fee plus actions, that doesn’t take into account the need to pay extra to get premium components needed to adequately design an Adalo app (where there exists a robust free library of components for Flutter) plus all of the external calls, automated workflows, and external database infrastructure to counter balance the lack of performance from Adalo.

Honestly, you may as well hire a developer if you’re going to pay Adalo prices.

I’m guessing Adalo is banking on people not figuring out there are MUCH cheaper and more robust services out there, or they are hoping to attract people who don’t want to take the time to learn Flutter and Firebase/Firestore. With the advent of low code editors for Flutter, and an intuitive UI for Firebase, plus if you’ve spent ANY time at all in command line, working with flutter systems and Firebase is a breeze.

I get that Adalo’s interface definitely provides an easier to build and deploy setup, with an open canvas (not having to work in rows and columns, for example), and their relational database structure is a no brainer for most, the limited time I’ve spent away from Adalo has made me realize how rudimentary Adalo’s system truly is.

Now, if you consider Firestore’s document reference fields as a similar concept to Adalo’s many to many or many to one, etc, relationships, grasping the use of reference fields is really very straight forward.

Besides all of that, when I came into Adalo, I was pursuing an app that would initially deploy as a PWA concept for a limited run of approx 400 users to test. But a core functionality of the app required a barcode (not QR) scanner deployable in PWA with the ability to query separate strings of data from the barcode and plug those strings into their respective places. Aside from the fact that there is no barcode scanner available for PWA in Adalo (which means I would have had to pay someone to make it for me or learn to build components myself), when experimenting with the QR scanner that does exist - though the camera faces the wrong direction :roll_eyes:, I only ever saw a way to pull one long string of data and plug it into a single field.

The week I’ve spent with Flutter, I’ve already deployed a test barcode scanner function plus a dynamically-generated barcode displaying separate pieces of information, each being stored in different fields - best part, I didn’t have to pay extra for it, and deployment took less than a day.

I’ll close up with this last bit - the service I’m using also allows for downloading your app as a web package to host wherever you want (Firebase offers a solution though, convenient), and setting your elements to display correctly for larger screens is a simple wrap. No need to buy an extra component or wait for Adalo to fix that aspect where it works. (Currently, web app capability for Mac is in beta and a Windows version will be opening up soon).

At this point, I’m just using the free version of Adalo to quickly conceptualize design and layout, as low to no backend demos to potential clients - once sold, I build out the real version elsewhere.

So, really, I should be thanking Adalo. If they hadn’t screwed their customers in a most climatic way, I wouldn’t have discovered a much better option both for feature capability and scalability.

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@preptogether
I found myself on the same Firebase $ calculator today. It really is pocket change in comparison to Adalo’s new pricing! Thanks for writing what I see as a balanced piece.

Agreed, Adalo is not beaten in ease of use of the editor. But that is not important if you are left with a slow app, clunky workarounds and a huge bill at the end of the month.

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If Adalo fixes actions so that they’re more efficient and my costs are reasonable, if they are fixing things (something was fixed recently and I was pleasantly surprised) so that I don’t have to babysit the actions, then I’ll seriously consider staying.

My actions are already ballooning now that my app is live in production, I’m already estimated at 100k actions this month. The next few months are going to tell me a lot about how realistic it is to stay on Adalo.

Things working as they should & being fixed, a stable environment for my customers, and reasonable costs are what it boils down to.

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@Umar reminder:

the Adalo forum is for helping other makers with Adalo. If you want to take about other topics not related to Adalo, you can go into PMs or the flutter flow forum.

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this may be a dumb question but can buying another database such as nosql or xano database for your app help with slowness of the app and paying for actions like this issue?

To reduce any further conflict with Adalo and the leaders on this community, I’ve opened a Reddit for anyone who would like to continue the pricing plan discourse, discuss other No/low code platforms, share ideas/tips/etc. Open to all, Adalo’ers and FF’ers alike.

:grimacing::grimacing::grimacing::grimacing::grimacing::grimacing::grimacing:

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