Scaling an Appsheet app for around 400 business and 1000 users.

[Tsach]

Hey community 

I have an app that i have created for my business (around 8 users ) .
I have been contacted by a distributor , which would like to buy my app and use it among 400 diffrenet customers , and each will have 1-5 users. 

What are my options to scale it for them ?
assuming they will not be able to pay the per user pricing ,since the users will not use other Appsheet apps , and I need to display each business with hes own data , and cant expose hem to other business data. 

[1minManager]

The licence cost your sort of stuck with.

But in regards the data, simply create a table of which logged in users belong to company 1 or company 2.  Then use slices or security filters to only show data created by these login email addresses.

Simon, 1minManager.com

[Joseph_Seddik]

I'd say slices are not secure enough to use among different businesses, it is necessary I'm afraid to use security filters, or withstand the pain of maintaining a separate copy of the app for each business.

[Tsach]

If you maintain 400 different copies of the app . How do you handle updates ? 

[Joseph_Seddik]

You don't have to. If you've got 400 different businesses, then use security filters (Core Plan). Also from a practical point of view, you'd also need to use a database not sheets (Enterprise Plan).

If you absolutely want to stick to free plan, then maintaining different apps is the only secure option.

[Joseph_Seddik]

And by the way, you cannot even have one app even if you decide to use slices. You have only a maximum of 10 users to remain in a free plan.

[Tsach]

So better develope the app in another platform when talking about this amount of users from my understanding.  

No chance they can pay this prices for such a simple app . 

Any other ideas which would not cost thousands if dollars monthly ? 

[Joseph_Seddik]

I highly doubt you could reliably serve 1000 users for free on any platform. 

[Tsach]

Who said free ?
Of course payment is needed , but if you do the calculation $10 ( core plan ) X 1000 X 12 months is $120,000 annualy . and that is witout servers to store the data , or any development cost.
It seems Appsheet is good for small business , but when you want to expand you are kind of stuck and need to develope all from scratch . 

[Joseph_Seddik]

My desire is to help you win the deal and deliver on it. So I vividly recommend that you start with making a detailed market research, rather than linking loose points and filling gaps with assumptions. You might also benefit from consulting a Solution Architect, not a developer. Just an advice. All the best!

[MultiTech]

This is a common issue people can run into, and the solution is not very straight-forward.

• It really depends on what the people need to be doing inside the app, because this will determine the type of license that is required here in AppSheet.

A very common solution for this problem is the following:

• Get X number of core ($10/month/user) license for the admins
• Get Y number of starter ($5/month/user) licenses for the users that need to log in
• Get Z number of public apps ($50/month/app) licenses for the apps that need hundreds of random users

Getting the specific details of a record to the individual in the public app is tricky, but possible.  But it does carry with it the inherent issue of being non-secure - meaning technically speaking, all the data (everyone's) is inside the app... we're just only SHOWING certain data, leaving all the rest in an inaccessible area of the app.

Technically speaking... if someone knew how to hack the URL of the app, and you were allowing users to use the app in a web browser, and the happened to know (or somehow luckily guess) the ID of the record they wanted to see... then they could see that record.  (But that's a lot of ifs and maybes.... very very unlikely that this scenario will happen.  It COULD... but very unlikely.  [You could make it even harder to guess the IDs, by concatenating to unique IDs together... no chance of guessing that!])

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If you think about things on an individual company basis... each of the 400 companies might be charged individually, which means you can offset all the costs through them.  And to them, it's not that bad because it's directly based on their individual user numbers and requirements.

• But in the larger scheme of things, yes your AppSheet bill will be large - but it's paid for by your users.

[Joseph_Seddik]

Excellent my friend !

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@MultiTech wrote:

Get X number of core ($10/month/user) license

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Also taking into account that from now on, Google Workspace subscribers will not even have to pay subscription for AppSheet Core license. 

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[Suvrutt_Gurjar]

You may find this tip by @MultiTech also very relevant

How to use Security Filters to allow multiple comp... - Google Cloud Community

Also I 100% agree with @Joseph_Seddik  on his input of using security filters or different apps. Slices are not secure enough. 

[Rifad]

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@Suvrutt_Gurjar wrote:

Slices are not secure enough. 

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@Suvrutt_Gurjar do we have any documentation explaining this ?

[Suvrutt_Gurjar]

@Rifad : Please take a look at the below para in the documentation article referred  and watch video therein. In fact the slices are not at all secure if you want to prevent reaching certain data  to certain users' devices.  That is only achieved by security filters.

Scale using security filters - AppSheet Help

The security filters prevent the filtered out rows from reaching the app user's device. With slices all the table data reaches the users device.

Besides if you search the community you will get multiple cautions by all the community experts highlighting this point. 

Here are a few posts where experts explain

By @AleksiAlkio 

Security filter vs slice filter - Google Cloud Community

Security Filter Expression VS Slice - Google Cloud Community

By @Steve 

Solved: Does default unsliced ref views load data? - Google Cloud Community

[Rifad]

I do understand the difference between both, but I'm curious about how users are able to access the data from a slice with a condition, similar to a Security filter.

Let's assume we have a table view with a slice condition: useremail() = MyLoginEmail.

Both the slice and the security filter display the same data in the user view, and it gets downloaded to the app. However, I wonder if there's any way a user could access other users' rows, perhaps by using the "inspect element" feature in the browser?

I appreciate any insights or explanations on this matter.

[Suvrutt_Gurjar]

Please read below highlighted part mentioned in the article referred.

Require sign-in: The Essentials - AppSheet Help

[1minManager]

For the record, I only mentioned Slices as the licence cost would be less.  Obvs their not as good as security filters...

[cossa]

Need Public Apps?

Publicly accessible applications that don't contain sensitive data and don't require user sign-in can be created with an AppSheet Publisher Pro subscription. These apps include the feature sets of the AppSheet Core Plan, but do not include user sign-in options or the use of security filters. Publisher Pro apps can be used by an unlimited number of users for $50/mo/app. !

[SkrOYC]

I'd say that asking the AppSheet Sales team for help could be your best bet right now. I expect them to give you a better solution based on how big the impact of new users into the platform would be, and at that point you also need to just offset the cost through your customers, which is obvious.
And if there are customers that don't want to pay, they shouldn't be your customer in the first place.

There are better solutions out there, absolutely. I can see how cheap and reliable would be an app using Supabase + FlutterFlow for example, but you would need to learn all of that in a rush, and I don't think that it will be fast enough.

You could also use Glide, but the same issue is presented.

AppSheet is great for what it was made, small-medium bussiness trying to upgrade internal processes. For the rest (like massive usage stuff) I'd look somewhere else

[Tsach]

Yeah first thing I did of course is to contact them .

Took ages until I managed to reach someone there,  we had a meeting which I explained hem , and then ages till he got back to me with the answer they can't do much . 

I think it's not a good pricing model . 

Their answer said that the customers can develope other appsheet apps in this subscription.  But this segment has no interest in that . 

I'm developing appsheet apps for 2 years for my businesses,  and probably need to leave to another platform or pay someone to devlope this app in another platform .

Thanks for the suggestions,  will check it out .

[SkrOYC]

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@Tsach wrote:

probably need to leave to another platform or pay someone to devlope this app in another platform .

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IMO, yes

[dbaum]

Consider Bubble. Heavier lift than AppSheet for implementing UI, actions, and some data structures, but also highly flexible and still no-code. Their pricing (all per-app, not per-user) is the best I've seen for apps that require at least many tens of thousands of rows.

[SkrOYC]

I tried Bubble and didn't like it too much, plus FlutterFlow gives you the code that's generated so technically you are the owner of the app instead of it being behind a black curtain, and you don't have any user limits since that's handled by the service you choose (like Supabase).

In general, the no-code community considers Bubble and FlutterFlow on the same tier

[dbaum]

All good points.

To be clear, my suggestion to try Bubble was directed to @Tsach. I know @SkrOYC is already perhaps the AppSheet community contributor who's most knowledgeable about other no-code platforms.

In case you meant otherwise, my understanding is that Bubble doesn't have any user limits.

[SkrOYC]

Yeah, sorry about the confusion about the users. Well, it has other limits. In this case, I'd suggest to try both and see which one is the best fit.
In any case, both have no comparison with AppSheet in ease of use, but at the same time both are way more powerful and scalable than AppSheet

[MultiTech]

Pinging @Arthur_Rallu