In 10 years, people will say Adalo was expensive when it started.
The city of london prints money out of thin air. I donāt think they are price sensitive.
Not a realistic use case. - either way. lucky you
āJust use some empathy.ā
ā¦ They already are. They offer an incredible free plan. This free tier is a great point of entry for their sales funnel and anything they give away more will probably greatly affect their revenue as I imagine the bulk of their paid customers are on the second tier down in the funnel and may be convinced to go back up to free if Adalo were to open the free tier up more.
Granted, sometimes a super generous free tier strategy works, especially for large B2B companies like Shopify app store, or Amazon offering $100k in credits, but thatās because their product is more geared towards an end-all-be-all solution that marks up millions in potential LTV. Adaloās product is more on the smaller LTV spectrum due to realistically catering towards MVPs or simpler apps.
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āNot trying to get something for free, hereā
ā¦Yes you are. Think about it.
At the end of the day, thereās nothing more affordable and capable than Adalo in todayās market. If youāre building an app meant to make money, go make it and offset the cheap $50/m. If youāre building a utility app not meant to make money, compare this price to custom development and any decision maker would easily see the value of $50/m. Iāve worked on in-house apps that cost salaries, worked on 3rd party dev apps that are crappy and cost 5-6 figures, and also worked on SaaS apps like Mighty Networks that cost $25k a year. Weāre honestly lucky.
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What you said is valuable, but I donāt want this to get into a back and forth. Letās end the conversation on pricing here. Iāll likely delete any follow ups. If anybody else has any questions around costs, feel free to DM me. Letās keep the rest of the discussion around the marketplace.
Oh, Geez (face palm)
let me finish the sentenceā¦ use some empathy when thinking about plan structure.
It may do a lot of things positive, including freeing up space / making things run faster for people like you.
I want to pay for a product if I am getting value from. Try before you buy.
i.e. test with customers - at least until I know if I can charge for it / get ads etc.
less risk.
am speaking with Adalo. NOT YOU Unfortunately, they donāt communicate by email or DM
Save yourself some time. I have half of your IQ & twice your age
Alright Iām not deleting your comment because of your line āhalf your IQ and twice your ageā. That made me laugh. Letās end this particular discussion here.
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Hi Jesse,
I need to Uninstall a component that I downloaded from the Old Marketplace but itās not available. In the Old Marketplace we can click the Install button to Uninstall a component but with the New Marketplace itās not available. Like to know when will be the Uninstall function available.
Thank you!
I donāt know the solution to that. You may want to submit a ticket.
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I know you said conversation over, but I wanted to offer my support here: Adalo is a deal. Anyone who says otherwise doesnāt grasp the immensity of the power a tool like this can give you, and/or doesnāt have to purchase any other software for their business. I spend more right now just on our CRM software. Add up CRM software, bidding/estimating software, zapier/integromat, justcall(phone system), Google Workspace, Adobe, and a couple other small SAS vendors of ours, and Adalo is a drop in the bucket. Yet, itās poised to allow me to build a single, comprehensive management solution for our business, 100% custom, thatās adapted to OUR processes rather than us having to adapt to a software. Itās incredible. Just ask someone who works in Taxes how much their firm pays for tax prep software - craaaaazy.
The reason I wanted to pipe up, is because I wanted to firmly express my opinion that PRICE is not a current problem with Adalo - Polish, Core Functionality, Stability, and Performance are the problems. Iād pay double or triple, maybe even some much higher multiple more, just to be able to build & perfect my single app for use managing my business, IF (and thatās a HUGE IF) the platform were polished, more robust, and performance wasnāt an issue. If my business was to actually make apps for other people, the price of Adalo would be laughably small even in its current form (although at this point I would NOT want to be using Adalo to make apps for clients, yikes).
I am experiencing a disturbing number of platform/editor bugs as I build. Itās extremely frustrating. I do worry that performance may become a real, big issue once my app is deployed to all the employees and we switch operations 100% over to it (coming in about 6 weeks bites nails). And yet, Iām STILL very much more than happy to pay the current price for what Iām currently getting, assuming that it at least technically works at launch. Please donāt worry about price - take my money and chuck it at the Dev team!
Now to get back to topic - Iām thrilled with the marketplace - The potential is HUUUGE. I just hope the components that are cleared into the marketplace are thoroughly vetted for debugging and making sure they donāt break performance even moreā¦ I had purchased a few components from some of the 3rd parties, and 100% of them either didnāt work, didnāt work as intended, caused massive performance problems, or had some other weird buggy issues that made them not worth including. I hope components stay one-time-purchases - itās perfectly good and fair that way - and it would suck to have to start tacking on monthly or annual fees to have access to feature or component subsets.
One last thing; I think the criticism of the āHypeā over the marketplace launch is fair. It was feeling like it was going to be a huge day, but nothing really changed on the front-end. Most of the components were already available through the 3rd parties, I guess now we just donāt need to wait for them to install them after we buy? Iām sure that performance upgrades, editor bug fixes, time/logic function upgrades, etc. were never actually teased, but with all the hype, my brain couldnāt help but fill in the missing gaps with false hope for such things, which was then crushed. Iām left thinking āthatās great and all, but what about the completely broken layout/pixel snapping problem in the editor that creates hours of extra work, broken layouts, and infinite hair pulling? When might that get fixed?ā
Better to under-promise and over-deliver when dealing with an already active and participating user base. Weāre not going anywhere, you donāt have to tease us to keep us around. Save the hype and teases for the marketing/conversion stuff on Adalo.com. Here on the forum we want facts, support, and timelines when someone from Adalo speaks up, not fluff. Well, thatās me speaking for myself anyway, but I suspect itās likely a fair and common sentiment.
Thanks for all you do, and thanks for being here. It is sincerely appreciated. Iāll be keeping an eye on the marketplace and am looking forward to getting some sweet new components for my app!
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Nicely said, 100% agree.
Viva la revolution!
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Pricing aside.
Demos on a lot of the premium components appear to be mere animated GIFs. Have I missed something?
*Update - developer has answered my question and will get live demos working at some point soon.
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Create a component that 5000 users install pocket 75K yourself if that is so easy.
You buy components , extensions to create something which will create value and most likely financial one. So basically you want to create wealth by using someone elseās tool but not to pay him 15 USD once! I call this greedy.
15 USD does not buy you a good lunch in western world
Well done guys. A market place is a very good direction. Not sure about fixed one time pricing.
I think for 1 time payments will only succeed if Adalo was in a position to introduce the component to a mass market (like app stores, booking.com when you list your hotel etc) which I doubt is the case.
A fixed cost(lower) + a subscription fee can motivate developers more. (I assume)
subscription fee? For something like a button with gradients? ā¦ LOL
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Anyone with common sense would know the real purpose of the marketplace isnāt buttons with gradients but much more complicated components , like any app/plugin store. You might have fart app but then you also have an app allowing you to edit videos.
The ONLY way it would even kind of make sense to pay a subscription fee for a component would be either if the component provided some kind of ongoing service (like payment processing, or outside data storage), or if it was so complicated that it would need ongoing support/updates. More like a āpluginā than a ācomponentā.
Even then, its sketchy. Components arenāt SaaS. Theyāre parts of a machine. These apps get built and sold to customers. Why would someone use a component that they had to continue paying for in perpetuity? Every month their profit gets chipped away at. Imagine a car manufacturer paying their brake pad suppliers $1 per month for every brake pad that went into a finished car, lolā¦ I know that might be a specious analogy, but still, I donāt like the idea of recurring fees for componentsā¦
Iāve already made my rant about the new marketplace in my own post but I wanted to follow up with a few points made here.
1. The marketplace is a great idea so that all 3rd party components are in one place, this we can all agree on.
2. The price point at $50/month is a good price point, but I really donāt like the comparison of Adalo to Shopify @jessehaywood. If youāre comparing Shopifyās pricing to Adaloās pricing, that scares me a bit into thinking Adalo is going to switch up the prices and charge per app and then per add-on per app.
By thinking about it in this same regard, Iām a Wordpress developer. 1 hosting plan with all the bells and whistles runs $45/month and it can easily host 10+ business websites. And yes, I can purchase 3rd party plugins/themes separately for one-time purchases. Shopifyās āper websiteā plan is ridiculously expensive in comparison to Wordpress. Shopify is more expensive with limited customization options. Wordpress is less expensive and 100% flexible.
3. The biggest problem with the new marketplace was how the marketplace was promoted. Adalo made it seem like we were ALL going to get some cool new toys to play around with. The price points of the new components are not terrible, itās the principle of the matter that is the concern here.
āGamer DLCā as @Briggsy stated, is what yāall did here. Simple explanation: The video game creator adds new add-ons that the user can purchase to use in-game, even though the player has already purchased the game. Like a new map to explore, a new weapon, or a new hat for your character. This puts lower-income users at a disadvantage.
This appears to be a greedy move as Adalo has added individual upsells inside a platform where its users already pay monthly. Especially because of how boldly Adalo brags about getting their funding. I donāt care about your funding at all. Keep in mind that it makes absolutely no difference to us users how much money yāall have to invest if your biggest promotion of the year is āNew Upsells by 3rd party developersā.
What Adalo COULD have done is purchase 2 or 3 components outright from one of the 3rd party developers (like a one-time payment for their work) and tossed those few components in for free. This would have completely eliminated a lot of the way that this release was viewed.
Because now, it seems like most suggestions either get handed to a 3rd party developer or brushed under the rug. Some of the most basic features are either inexistent or now require purchasing.
Examples: Web app URLs to individual screens, gradients in all color areas, and/or logic in visibility settings, nested arrays of API collections.
4. Bugs, always with the bugs. Sometimes things work, then out of nowhere, things stop working. āChange Inputā actions have completely stopped working for me on several apps. Visibility settings donāt always load properly. Lists have been abnormally slow to load. The app editor is slow and glitchy for apps with 50+ screens (Note: Iām working with a 2022 iMac with 128GB ram). The app editor doesnāt always load (endless spinner). The editor has issues with aligning components.
5. Lack of communication. Adalo is not clear about whatās to come next, what theyāre working on, and when we can expect changes. We desperately desire transparency. We donāt know when performance issues will be fixed. We donāt know when new components will be available (free ones). We donāt know what is being developed. The roadmap is vague, has 4 tasks in progress, and it has no deadlines/estimated completed dates. Adalo doesnāt respond to feature requests in the roadmap either.
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Notice I said Iām taking my Adalo staff hat off. My statements there have nothing to do with the future of pricing. Iām not a part of those conversations internally. Shopify is what I know, so Shopify is what I compared it to.
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As stated earlier, Iāll take the blame for that. I manage our social along with a bunch of other stuff. Adalo hasnāt done a great job historically on communication publicly. So, I donāt have much to go on for what works and what doesnāt work. We are trying new stuff. We had a little too much fun with this one and now we know that yāall want straightforward communication. Iām torn a little there because from a metrics standpoint, this past month was our most engaged month on social and it created a lot of buzz. So from a social standpoint it was a hit, but what Iām seeing is that the product didnāt meet expectation that we set in our communication. Iāll take that and move forward with those learnings.
I disagree with the gamer DLC statement and the sentiment around greed. Thatās not what we did, nor is greed the motivation. I donāt think comparing gaming to Adalo is a fair comparison. Gaming (for majority of people) is entertainment. Adalo is a tool. Those are two completely different economies.
Yes these are upsells, but we are a business. We have investors and employees. We absolutely want to find new ways to make more money. Why wouldnāt we? Thatās how we are able to do more stuff, make cool things, and hire more people. Plus, these upsells are creating ways for other people to build businesses and feed their families. I envision our marketplace becoming the primary way some people make a living. That aināt greed. I also donāt see how we brag about funding. Maybe because itās still on the homepage banner? I think thatās really the only place. Iād take it down if I could. But I canāt.
This is our first promotion of the year, not our biggest. Itās only been two and a half months into 2022. Weāve got GPS coming, Adalo App Academy, and many other things. I think versioning is in the works, and some other cool stuff. Iām hoping the community updates and town halls showcase these things better.
Your point on purchasing components is great. I like that. I guess it could have been done, but Iām just the messenger. I didnāt have a seat at the table, so I canāt speak much into the decisions behind the marketplace.
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I canāt speak much into bugs. Iām not a developer. Bugs confuse me. I donāt understand how implementing new code, after itās been rigorously tested in QA, still creates bugs. That process is beyond me, so I canāt say much there. We acknowledge performance. Iām going to hopefully get answers and then share them in the town hall. I donāt know the interworking of that. What I know is that Guislan (VP of Engineering) was hired and his primary job is to improve that. Iām planning on speaking with him to see his plans. But right now, Iām ignorant.
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This has been acknowledged and is being addressed. Iām extremely proud of the work Iāve done here. I take it personally. We post on social more. We have a changelog, and I share those same updates here. Iām doing a monthly community update and monthly townhalls. I stood before our leadership team and poured out my heart to them in regard to communication. They have responded and have given me freedom here. Yes, communication has been poor in the past, but that has changed. Before I was here I would say yes you are right. But now there is not a lack of communication.
That was a lot of stuff. I tried to respond to all the things I could. I may have missed some.
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App Academy. Do we really need that? There is a stunning amount of great videos on youtube and even on udemy. I guess the App Academy will cost extra bucks? You should use the available workforce to push new features to adalo and the performance imho. I know what you will say now that these are different teams e.g. But maybe hire more developer instead of āteacherā. GPS is great but whats with the inapp subscriptions? What is will simple functionality like background actions which are not depending on button clicks or page switches. With them we could make complex flows, like glide (your biggest competitior in the field).
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I think the academy will be great. Documentation and video tutorials need to be more detailed and updated. They need to hire @Victor to do IMO! Heāll always be the unofficial academy in my eyes
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