Platform Limits

hru
Participant V

I have just read a document about Platform limits, I really don’t remember reading it before:

Question:

  1. How as an App creator, I can track this EVENT usage?

  2. Is the monthly limits also applicable to the App creator? for example deleting rows, what would happen if the app creator tries to delete rows but events per user license per month quota reached the monthly limits?

  3. For add/update/delete performed by the app, is it count towards each row or for each cell?

Thanks for explanation on this.

Here is the reference.

28 83 5,434
83 REPLIES 83

I have raised these questions internally. The documentation doesn’t explain these good enough.

MultiTech
Participant V

Bro I hit 2,000 edits a day easy when I’m working on a project.

  • Between actual data entry, ref updates, action looping, etc…

Sleight exaggeration, lol

Where did you read “Edits”? I am reading “usage” which to me translates into how many times an end user performed a function that activated an automation, workflow, api and add/update/delete operations.

I am concerned about how these will affect pricing for us small businesses!

Usage events are any automation events, workflow rules, api calls, and user operations (e.g. add/update/delete) performed by the app.

I understand this to mean they are limiting the add/update/delete actions only invoked and performed by the system.

Uh oh, i don’t like where this is going.

EDIT: I knew i didn’t like it

What exactly does that “number of pages in a document” refer to? 5 in any context seems extremely limiting. I have grave concerns about these new limits and the way that these limits are being discovered.

I was just in the process of making an app for generating documents of around 10 pages of length, i guess i’ll just have to dump that project 3X_4_a_4a1239de1f866c4032ac19b1196ff1691e5955e8.gif

Exactly the type of thing I am concerned about. Some of us may have existing workflows that are about to get converted over to automation. We have any number of reports that are of variable length, are we supposed to now somehow cap them at 5 pages?

I also just waited 20 days to get a non-answer to a support email, can I expect the same when addressing these new limits that break my apps?

Former Community Member
Not applicable

This specific limit is for the new document processing feature not for generating documents.

AppSheet doesnt even support proper pagination yet, how do they expect to limit our document pages…?

Regardless, if these changes go through as planned, a large chunk of the community-driven solutions to many outstanding platform limitations will become impractical or downright misleading of the platforms capabilities. Does AS intend on pruning these posts out?

When I saw the limitation on documents based on # of pages, I too died a little. Who counts documents in pages? Why do you care what’s the document? It should be size like any other sane person. 20MB that’s it.

Guess AppSheet got orders from Google to start printing that green or they’ll be sold like a common peasant.

Rifad
Participant V

Already we have soo many limitations in AppSheet. Adding new ones ! Truly a really great Business Model!

MultiTech
Participant V

My point in case

  • In one day I had 299 edits myself.

    • For one app alone


Looks like this user will be over his limit for the month

- Question then becomes… what happens to this user?

My understanding that the chart per-user drilldown: app interactions per day is including count of sync. I am not seeing that sync is part of EVENTS per user license, and I hope it is not.

Where did you get this information?

I have one app that user only to click 1 time perday. On several days, the chart showing more figure. There is nothing else but one big button to press, other than that is only sync.

Exactly! Regardless of how they are referred to, “edits” (by the way, by edits I thought you were originally referring to development changes?) or some other metric, what happens when the limit is exceeded? I presume some additional charge?

For sure, this is the worst event I see with Appsheet for the last 4 years with them.
Just “unfortunate”

Such kind of limiation will just reduce the capability of appsheet as business application builder for sure. This would affect all the appsheet creator, who many need to dump the production app as well as giving up the ongoing project.

I understand outage such as email deliverying services would happen due to high demands at one time due to high number of documentation, the platformer need to avoid such downtime by restricting something for the users. But 5 page only PDF should not be a way to constrain.

2000 update or total event is basically nothing (even 8000 for business subscriptions)

For the last years and years, the community comes up with the much of innovative idea and solutions together, the representing tips and tricks are inducted by @Steve and @Aleksi and other highly sprited community member, such as “Looping actions”
For instance, the looping action technique is great and unprecedented solutions, but one action will involves bunch of data changes. I m afraid this limiation may spoil such efforts and contribution made by them.

For app user, it appear just one action, assuming one data event, but it may result in tons of action. Users interact in this way jsut for a little. But App will be blocked? What a nonsense.

Pricing is going up, but the more of restrictions are imposed to us.

Enocomically not correct neither.

I m at a loss in this morning , as I dont have any words in my mind in terms of how to report to our end user and clients…

We are on highest tier plan, but no beneit is gained by staying with highest tier, as we still are able to print just 5 pages total document only, no remedy by upgrading plan neither.

At last, we did not see this through official announcement, which is unfair

I assumed BOT will live forever, based on previous advice from the team, but it was mis-lead.

Assumption (im on ex business plan)

  1. I have relatively large, but not rediculously large table, like 8000 row.

  2. I set up action, set of rows. Targeting one column for all rows in this table.

  3. Fire.

  4. Done.

  5. I run out the quote.

  6. End of story.

Upon contacting to news of aquisition, we assumed the infrastracture of Apps will be upgraded, resulting in just benefit to app creator and users.
But sadly, it was not a right prediction. Things are getting worse to us… .
Good to see Appsheet keeps growing and more of new functionaliies and features, but unfortunatley, more of restriction and limitation is imposed on us as well at the same time.

We run our app on Google Cloud Platform, Cloud SQL (my SQL instance) as well as Azure SQL. To do that, we set up firewall for acccess to such instances, adding 45 (correctly) IP (appsheet servers) which is bit troublesome, killing my time. But saying to myself, this is essential process, as we are able to enjoy the enhansement of backend service behind the app, thanks to higher number of servers concurrent works… But now … Sorry, i lose my words just because of a shock.

0rz…

I hear you brother, that was me all day yesterday: at a complete loss for words.

Mind just… every which-way; going from one thing to another, over and over. ugh.

Many of my clients already end the contract due to the existing limitations of Appsheet in terms of UI and frequent bugs and very slow performance. AppSheet have to look yourself how much Improvement you have to make before imposing these kinds of Limitations to the platform.

Assumption (im on ex business plan)

  1. I have relatively large, but not rediculously large table, like 8000 row.
  2. I set up action, set of rows. Targeting one column for all rows in this table.
  3. Fire.
  4. Done.
  5. I run out the quote.
  6. End of story.

This is exactly what I’m worried about as well.

I wanted to know when they made these changes, so I did some investigation to see when this webpage (https://help.appsheet.com/en/articles/5132404-platform-limits) was last updated, and got an “unusual activity” warning from google.

I just wanted to know when the website was changed so I could see if there was a corresponding tweet, LinkedIn post from an engineer or something… anything that would correspond - but got smacked by the big G when I asked.

Hi Matt!

We’ll be posting a more detailed response in the next few hours but just to clarify in your specific question. Syncing the app is not counted towards usage events. “Usage events are any automation events, workflow rules, api calls, and user operations (e.g. add/update/delete) performed by the app”

I think it’s fair to say that there are limits and quotas when it comes to developing applications on AppSheet as a PaaS.
And it is up to the partner to provide a valuable solution to the customer within those limits.

However, all of this is possible only if the right information is provided.
With the limits we know today, we are unlikely to be able to implement the right integration.

I hope to see a lot of best practices using AppSheet, so please provide more information.

Hi all, very concerned reading through this as I know it is going to severely impact our apps. Just wanted to clarify on the file type limitations highlighted also, am I correct in saying they no longer plan on allowing excel file content creation?

3X_4_0_40e006fd15bef7aeff139a2760a177a0d8bbe371.png

A large majority of our workflows are issuing out XLSX Content. This is a huge limitation to our current app processes that would be missed by our users.

I understand appsheet intend to migrate our workflows into bots for us, not sure how they plan on duplicating our processes when they have pulled it from use? Do we have to re-arrange all our app reporting processes that have been in place for months

We are missing HTML file type from this list as well. But generally I m not sure what does this list of file type mean.

raketa
Participant V

Hey!
I would also like to express my opinion on this issue.
Our history:

  1. We spent a long time solving problems with the limitations on automation of processes that are associated with AppSheet applications, in the end we came to an external solution (we installed specialized software on our server - something like a workflow designer).
  2. As time went on and there was a hope (Automation preview) that we can transfer most of the processes inside the AppSheet. We made plans (new data architecture, migration to Enterprise Standard from Core plan, etc.).
  3. After this news (platform limits), we made simple calculations and came to the conclusion that some of the processes would have to be left out of the AppSheet at all. This is sad because invested a lot of man-hours in the construction of various kinds of process architectures and connections between them. Now you have to redo it from the very beginning (designing and finding ways to implement it to bypass the new limits).

Hopefully the AppSheet team can reconsider this question as it is strategically important for application creators and their customers.

In general, I believe that the need for automation will only grow every month around the world (AppSheet and Google probably know this)))). And AppSheet is one of the rare examples of an economical solution to the issue of automation for the real sector of the economy (small and medium-sized businesses of any industry).

Below is an example of one of the workflows (this is one of the complex examples with iterating over objects, dividing / merging / transforming data inside these objects, etc.). And that’s just the beginning).

3X_7_3_73a9f071731c1c581479deb7bdb6b653efe8bd2b.jpeg

This is the biggest concern I have with limitations. There are still so many bugs/inefficiencies that have simply been ignored and force us to implement a workaround that results in several more actions/workflows.

The biggest one for me that comes to mind is the absence of an action for “update a row in another table with values from this row”. Of all the apps I have built, I have needed this at least in a few places. But where a single action would suffice, I have create a series of a half-dozen or more to perform the same function.

I know there are other similar functions like adding multiple rows to a table or ability to multi-select a list and then add multiple rows based on the selections.

All of these “extra” actions will quickly add up to count towards the limit.

Didn’t you hear??? You can use the “Create a row in another table with values from this row” to update records.

Works the same way the API works: you feed it an ID that already exists, along with what value you want each editable column to be - if the row already exists, the record is updated, otherwise it’s created.

Wasn’t there a blog post about this? A feature Friday? An office hours that they told us about 3 weeks in advance? Surely there was a post here in the community?

HUH???

“insert your french word of choice here”

Not formally. I have had my head down developing the past couple months! I have been trying to stay up on the formal announcements not so much side posts.

It’s been tested and actually works? How long has it existed?

I did see some mention of it in a post but the person said it didn’t work. That columns in the target table that didn’t change were over-written. So I thought he was trying something unexpected.

Yes, this is what I’ve found as well. You have to set every editable column inside the action with a value - even if it’s the same value - otherwise it’s overwritten with a blank.

  • This is true even if the field would otherwise be required and a blank would cause issues… the system takes what you said to do (which is nothing for said column) and does that.

Don’t worry, no one has; I was being facetious.

Tested is a relative term, lol; I discovered it a week or so ago just by chance. I then investigated further and found that it works essentially the same way the API does.

Yes, this is what I’ve found as well. You have to set every editable column inside the action with a value - even if it’s the same value - otherwise it’s overwritten with a blank.

  • This is true even if the field would otherwise be required and a blank would cause issues… the system takes what you said to do (which is nothing for said column) and does that.

Don’t worry, no one has; I was being facetious.

Tested is a relative term, lol; I discovered it a week or so ago just by chance. I then investigated further and found that it works essentially the same way the API does.

Greatly appreciate the info, had no idea this was a thing.

Me too, I’m shocked. A 5 page limit??? That would affect all my top 10 clients. You know, the ones paying appsheet 20-30 licenses each!!!

Rifad
Participant V

3X_c_a_cace5fd0697445c0469705be15d13d1d65336674.gif

Top Labels in this Space