Appsheet alternatives?

tcanelli
Participant V

Waiting on a renewal quote currently but some of the pricing points now that Google has taken over seem astronomical. Wondering if anyone that requires database integration has run into this issue and if youโ€™ve found an similar product at a lesser price point. As a government entity limited to grant dollars for this we may be forced into not renewing which would be a shame.

Any leads would be appreciated. Thanks

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31 REPLIES 31

LeventK
Participant V

Hello @tcanelli,
In terms of no-code app development platform, the nearest competitor might be the Betty Blocks:


However, the prices are not even comparable with AppSheet:

And as said in their own website, this price can dramatically change depending on the complexity of your app:

Another competitor - though itโ€™s a Low-Code platform rather then a No-Code - is OutSystems
OutSystems is really a Low-Code platform and to build complex apps you need to have a full command of DAX, SQL Query and a bit Ajax/JavaScript. The very disadvantage of the platform is the number of users. Especially for public apps, the platinum licence fee was around $25K per annum when we have contacted the company in 2018. The easiness of building a mobile app with respect to AppSheet is (truly my idea) 3 out of 10. The number 1 advantage of OutSystems is they have their own oAuth Server integrated with OpenID and therefore you donโ€™t need to mess with any 3rd pary oAuth client i.e. Amazon Cognito etc. You can manage your users from your dashboard directly, users can free to choose a username/pwd combination, or use email or even use social media account. Users can reset their passwords and you can temporarily ban users from accessing your app for example. Thereโ€™s always a sandbox environment that you can continue updating or changing the app without interrupting the current versions running unless you explicitly mark your new version as production. Itโ€™s a good plafform, pricey and not so easy to manage actually.

You may also want to check this article:

Bahbus
Participant V

I have demoโ€™d a few of some of the competitors (the ones that will let you), but they were all severely lacking in one way or another. One could build a beautiful UX, but lacked numerous data type support. Another was great with data, but to build a UX was both cumbersome and unintuitive, as well as severely limited by comparison. So, itโ€™s kind of a crap shoot depending on the exact features needed.

Yes, itโ€™s a pity that database integration is offered only in the higher price ranges. Please keep us posted on however it works out for you. It will help many others in the same boat.

aucforum
Participant V

I do not have an alternative, however I did make this feature request some weeks ago that you all might want to support, if relevant:

I point it out because it seems crazy that every unique user needs to spend $5 to $10 USD a month just to use one app that only creates a few rows of data a month or a week. They are not nor ever likely to become developers. Moreover, it would probably create more revenue for us and Appsheet if it were priced for the masses and not aimed mainly at large businesses and government departments.

It is difficult to get pricing right across the entire range of possible use cases, app usage, etc. It is something we have struggled to do for years. We want to keep the pricing simple and easy-to-grok. Yet, we learned that it is difficult to price the product the same way for both internal business productivity (build as many apps as you want for members of your team) and also for external use cases (a single app with a lot of users, each of whom rarely use it). We realized over time that there were far fewer customers with external use cases using AppSheet, whereas many business customers (small or large) had compelling internal productivity use cases. So the pricing changes made at the start of 2019 (more than a year ago now) re-focused us on these cases.

If you do have a compelling use case for a singleton app with a large number of occasional-use users, talk to us (sales@appsheet.com and please cc praveen@appsheet.com) and letโ€™s see what we can do. Our principle has always been to try to enable app adoption, because that is our mission. It hasnโ€™t changed since Google acquired us.

What I am proposing above does not conflict with that strategy, but creates a new market for Appsheet.

Praveen I hope Ginny is talking to you then. I plead my case to her last week.

Hi Colin, the Publisher plan might be appropriate for a truly public app. Have you taken a look at that? Perhaps that works for you?

I do not think it does. See:

"Choose the public Publisher Pro plan if:

You do not need to restrict app access to particular people.
AND... Your app uses absolutely no confidential data.
AND... You do not need to customize the behavior of the app based on the specific user.

The Publisher Pro plan is appropriate for apps used at a public event, a public survey, a city guide, or a restaurant menu. The goal is usually for the apps to be used by as many people as possible without restricting access to any specific subset of users."

I want an inexpensive way for users of the app without (as I mentioned above) "every unique user needs to spend $5 to $10 USD a month just to use one app that only creates a few rows of data a month or a week. " (I will continue on your other post.)

solomon_iseh
Participant II

Its truly quite expensiveโ€ฆ difficult to sell to SMEs

tcanelli
Participant V

I just think itโ€™s bad business to raise cost more than 100% on a customer with no warning. And this was a major concern of mine the second the news hit about the Google acquisition. Itโ€™s a shame we may be forced to leave Appsheet.

In 10th June 2019 AppSheet changed their Subscrition Plan. Until there, you were able to use Database with PRO Plan. Switching from PRO Plan to Business Plan would have been a price increase of about 1.000 percent (one thousand percent) for us. Itโ€™s clear that a small business is not able to pay this. So we left Database and continued with PRO Plan.

@tcanelli What happend now? I didnโ€™t notice a price change

We have been paying annually and our renewal is due next month. I only found about these price changes when I asked for a renewal quote. Even our sales person admitted new customers were being notified of the changes but she recognized we were not notified of this drastic change.

How much per user was the price increase?

@tcanelli I believe you are engaged with @ginny on our team. You are using AppSheet for emergency management and for occasional use if Iโ€™m not mistaken. Please feel free to include me in your discussions.

The price changes are more than year old, and donโ€™t really have anything to do with Google, so I donโ€™t want to blame our new company colleagues. As I mentioned just now in a different reply, we have tried to find a pricing that is simple, consistent, and that is fair in most commonly occurring usage scenarios. And then for scenarios where it isnโ€™t a fair/reasonable fit, we try to treat them as special cases if possible.

Praveen,

I get that your prices changed last June but this was obviously after we had received last yearโ€™s quote because we were not given any heads up of the changes and for us the change in price is quite drastic.

LeventK
Participant V

@praveen
The most challenging thing with AppSheetโ€™s secure apps is the user auth. When you build an app for business use (complex or simple doesnโ€™t matter) you expect your app users to have a cloud associated account. I should admit that we are running in 21st century and mainly 70% of users have this but itโ€™s still a bottle neck. Most of the time we either advise our users to create a google account / a cloud registration with Dropbox etc. or we create these accounts and give it to the clients. Right at the moment, I swear I have more than 50 google accounts which I have created just for clients use.

What I would like to ask is; might it be relatively easy for you now (regarding the Google acquisition) to create an additional secure plan (i.e. Platinum etc.) where licence could be a bit more expensive i.e. $12.5 or $15 per user BUT the developer have the ability to integrate 3rd party oAuth providers like Okta, AWS Cognito etc.? Basically it can be Pro plan features + Domain auth.

What do you think?

Do you mean the AppSheet developer uses their own third party authentication of which they can make their own third party accounts for end users that are for the AppSheet application being developed?

I understand. Will look into whether this is feasible. Most business use cases want SSO with their existing auth provider.

Thanks @praveen, your wise input and understanding is much appreciated.

Same. My issue is that we ramp up for major events. So weโ€™ll have periods with very few users. The annual business arrangement is sold in blocks of 100 usersโ€ฆ (From what I understand) So if I need to flex up to say 150 users for 60 daysโ€ฆ Itโ€™s going to cost us $20,000 just in users, forget the โ€œadd ons.โ€ When the pro plan is flex, and can go up and down month by monthโ€ฆ So it would only cost $3,000 for 60 days. So here I am committing the big bucks, but have less flexibility with users than the pro planโ€ฆ Makes me feel gross.

Hi Grant, that is the sort of thing we should be able to correspondingly flex a bit on our side. The goal is for the pricing to reflect a fraction of the actual value you are generating from the AppSheet platform. In fact, that is why the pricing is per active app user rather than other measures (like price per app, or per app creator, etc). We assume that the value you derive is related to the number of users who are app-enabled and actively use apps. I know this is an approximation, but that is the principle underlying the pricing approach.

I agree. I think my preference would be to โ€œseparateโ€ the per user rate from the enterprise packages. Treat the users more transaction based, on a per/d or something. I would pay more per user for flexible transaction based pricing. And, I would probably be willing to pay more for the blanket access to the platform as well. But then I wouldnโ€™t feel like I didnโ€™t understand why I was paying for 100 users that arenโ€™t being leveragedโ€ฆ and then having to soak another $10K+ on another annual block for 1 month of overagesโ€ฆ (I havenโ€™t gotten there yet, but I was just as shocked as @tcanelli when I realized that the user blocks didnโ€™t flex the way they do on pro.)

Yes, this is what I would like to see, is more market segmentation offering a range of options. It might take a leap of faith, however I think it will grow the market for Appsheet. I feel we want to see Appsheet becoming/continue being a viable business for we all have invested a considerable amount of career time into it.

is there some way we can model these options?

(I think a collaborative tool, like ermโ€ฆ Appsheet! That might do it!)

I think my issue was less about the users/blocks of users and more about the database integration cost. I could understand the spike in price if we were using more than just a simple sql db connection, but out of the list of integrations that all we use.

Hopefully pricing plans can remain flexible or some of these concerns are considered for the next iteration of price changes.

It would be very upsetting if we had to abandon all our hard work due to cost.

Tammi,

Did you get your pricing issues resolved? Weโ€™re you able to stay wi5 AppSheet?

Yes, thankfully! We are good for at least one more year

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Great to hear!

I realize this is an older topic, but just received my own dose of sticker shock after finally having received some actual numbers from Sales.

My use case - up to 150 users that would need authentication, one single application that requires sign in, the application allows for data submission to a database housed in Google Cloud SQL, users might view their data on a regular basis or not but they only submit data on either a monthly basis or yearly basis.

I can certainly go the full stack option of development but honestly have a learning curve ahead of me still, although I would have the option to modify an existing Google Apps Script web app to connect to the DB. But under either of the alternatives even if I hosted the application with AWS or Firebase my anticipated costs would be about 10% of what it would be with Appsheet.

@praveen is an alternative subscription actually being considered internally that would closer match a reasonable cost as it relates to potential external users?

Hi @Markus_Malessa, yes Iโ€™m flagging @Santiago to follow up with you. Or you can send me email (pravse@google.com) and Iโ€™ll respond including him. There is planning around external user pricing at some point in the near future, but I donโ€™t know if it will apply to your situation or not.

In general, you shouldnโ€™t compare hosting costs for code vs your cost of using AppSheet. Itโ€™s sort of the difference between renting lumber and nails vs renting an apartment. With AppSheet, you are saving the time and skill expense of writing code (building the apartment from the raw materials), which honestly is incredibly expensive. But perhaps if you have a simple app to build and you are a skilled dev, it appears tempting to go that route. I understand that our pricing model matches some situations better than others. Letโ€™s talk and see if we can help you in your situation.

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