Has Tadabase stopped developing? Last release notes on 31st of March 2023

No more updates since 31st of March 2023

https://docs.tadabase.io/categories/release-notes

Also I do not see any movement on my bug-fixes in the support portal.

I have a question in the chat in the builder which was not answered for 2 days.

Is all fine? Should I be worried?

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I agree, as you mentioned it I started noticing it actually.

@Peter same here. No movement on multiple tickets going back to January. I have one with a massive bug ā€œBeing Processedā€ since April 23rd. Extremely slow (or non-existent) responses to some of our chats. Combined with doubling the prices and reducing the included features makes me very nervous.

I posted this right after the price increase: Pricing Increase Discussion

The founder said they are ā€œnot profitable on roughly 80% of our customersā€. Based on that response they are still allowing non-revenue producing accounts to strangle the platform and eat up their overhead while we have to pay for them in the form of higher prices and reduced features.

Our cost on an app that is still in development is ridiculously expensive compared with Glide and Softr. I ran out of included tables because we have a ton of user selectable fields and this is costing us an extra $150 a month. And scaling this is an issue too. Glide just introduced Big Tables with up to 10 million rows per table.

Weā€™ve paused development and are taking a hard look at Glide at the moment. I still love this software but I am extremely concerned.

@beaugast
Ok, so it appears that I am not the only one who is worried. Apparently the developing notes have stopped and I agree that the ticket resolving process are being slower then a few months ago.
I still want to build great stuff in TB since itā€™s a great platform.

I always love seeing feedback and open discussions and would love to answer all concerns.

Pricing:
We discussed this in the past. We strive to offer tremendous value to you, your business, and all stakeholders. I have spoken to many of our partners, earning millions of revenue annually by utilizing Tadabase. If you feel the price youā€™re being charged is not producing the value, let us know; we take your success personally, and I would be happy to do whatever we can.

Support:
If we donā€™t answer your support ticket promptly, thatā€™s certainly not okay, and Iā€™ll look at whatā€™s happening. But your ticket not being answered is in no way an indication weā€™re ā€œin trouble.ā€ We may be backed up, or the priority we assigned to your ticket is not on our immediate to-do list.

Release notes:
This one is interesting. Weā€™re very transparent with whatā€™s being built. There are nine ā€œTuesdays with Tadabaseā€ since the last release note where we outline whatā€™s happening behind the scenes. In those nine updates, weā€™ve outlined the following:

  • Huge improvements to caching
  • Mighty new Dynamic Field
  • Weā€™ve increased the speed on some apps by 4000%
  • New operators in the API
  • API bug fixes
  • Bugs in URL parameters and other search filtering bugs
  • Dozens of new templates in the Dynamic Field
  • Several new pipes
  • CIDR IP blocking
  • Entire new Users and Pages API
  • Status API endpoints
  • HUGE FEATURE TO FILTER BY CONNECTED VALUES - this one is truly powerful.
  • Additional Javascript features
  • Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel updaters (update an Excel sheet and pull dynamic values. Or use a Word Template to generate a legal document and download that doc)

In addition, weā€™re about to release massive new AI capabilities to make your building experience 100x faster. Imagine ā€œWrite me code to do xyzā€, or ā€œBuild me a pipe to save a contact to HubSpotā€ - more on this in this weeks ā€œTuesdays with Tadabase.ā€

There are dozens of other features more tailored explicitly to enterprise customers. We roll those out selectively and slowly since many can cause more confusion and complicate the product.

Weā€™re moving quicker than ever, and Iā€™m surprised to see that multiple of our customers are not feeling this same excitement. We should be more on top of updating the release notes, but we are 100% consistent with the Tuesdays With Tadabase, which adds more context, so we havenā€™t prioritized it. I will ensure we continue to update those release notes as well. The Tuesdays with Tadabase, which @Adi has been crushing, were inspired 100% by @SafetyUniversity and some other customers. The whole team and I take your feedback very seriously. I attribute all our success to your feedback.

Ultimately, weā€™re here to help you crush it and make you and your business loads of cash. Iā€™m eager to hear what we can do better if we do something other than that.

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Thank you for the detailed clarification . I can only say from my end that i am very happy with Tadabase and all of its expanding possibilities.

@moe thanks for clarifying this. I will give some more context.

  1. Bug fixes: I dutifully report most of the bugs, but once it goes to ā€œThe Tadabase team is working on itā€, usually no more updates. In my list I have 14 of those (oldest is 21st of December 2021), and then 2 more where it says being processed.
  2. Development. I love the updates by Adi, and he is giving it a very casual approach. Every Tuesday I look forward to his news. But the release notes are the official changes log, usually.
  3. Development. I see indeed many features, but they are almost exclusively low-code. Nocode improvements for the citizen developer are limited. Great, all those improvements above, but almost all fall in the category of lowcode. The value of a Pages API, would have been for me that I can have a user at the front-desk login into the app with a QR-code, taking care of the role of using the visitor registration in my app only - but I understand that it is not thatā€¦
  4. Answers to questions in this portal. Now that access to support has been limited within the chat, compared to the old days, this community is the place to learn. Search here is what I use most to find out what I need to do. And in community you only answer once, and it will be used by many, much more efficient than the chat for tb. But in that case: take care that you answer it also from Tadabase team - have someone of your team patrol it once per day and take care that there will be answers.
  5. Employees: according to LinkedIn there are 11 employees at Tadabase. Only a few developers. I understand that there is a lot of development going on, but 11 employees is low compared to others like Glide (53) and Bubble (289).
  6. I love the Build it with Tim. I understand he moved recently, but frequency was once per week, like a clock, and that is not the case any more. His episode about the multi-tenanted family planner, after 4 months has 83 viewsā€¦ That is low, frustrating for Tim, but how can it be that the number is so low. His effort is incredible and you learn so much, where are the viewers?

I love tb. Especially the IT security I donā€™t have to worry about. And I know my way now, even with some CSS and starting with JavaScript.

Having this platform is crucial for my company. We are at a point when tadabase would stop working that we lose oversight and our efficiency goes down the toilet. We are growing fast, and I need to look at the risks for business continuity for our next growth phase. Tadabase is the biggest risk over which I donā€™t have any control, nor do I have information, other than publicly available, which is not much.
From now and then, I need your reassurance. Because now I see signs, not only what is mentioned above, that the focus of tb is somewhere else and customer support is not where I feel reassured.
Looking forward to AI-support, though.

PS: Just an example of today of no answer since a long time: How can I change decimal places in pivot table element?

PS2: if you bring low-code or code solutions, please let it come with some explanation. If you are an IT-developer it is probably self-explanatory, but for citizen developers, just mentioning something like Pages API, is abracadabraā€¦

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@peter, thanks for the context.

  1. Bug fixes: I will review this list and get back to you via email.

  2. Development: I agree. Weā€™ll ensure to update both going forward.

  3. LowCode: This is precisely why we donā€™t roll out many of our features. It has specific use cases and enabling it for everyone only causes more confusion. PipeScripts, Custom components are just two examples. What you want to do with a QR code may or may not be possible with the Users API, but it certainly sounds like a potential security concern.

  4. I agree about your community thoughts. Sadly, not even 10% of our client-base is in this community. So many of our customers built apps 3-4 years ago, are happy, and have minor changes once every few months. I do wish I can find a way to get more engagement from everyone.

  5. Employees: aside from myself, none of us are active on LinkedIn at all. Yet still, I hate wasting my time on there. That number is not accurate, the right number is 19.

In the spirit of this great conversation, Iā€™ll explain Tadabase, employee count, and more. I may be oversharing, but Iā€™m passionate about this, so why not have some fun?!

Your question about employee count, viability, and general worries is something I would certainly think about if I was in your shoes. From our point of view, we want to be as transparent as possible but also not give up our secret sauce. So itā€™s quite a balancing act. I often get that question but have never addressed it in the community.

I work with several high-net-worth investors and VCs as their behind-the-scenes technical auditor. Iā€™ve helped guide investments into some huge companies, including Unqork (great company btw) and a dozen others. Seeing metrics of what Unqorkā€™s key customers look like or what some other companies are doing is exceptionally insightful. Some of those companies were direct competitors of ours. This gave me insight worth more than gold and helped shape our direction.

Hereā€™s what I can say: there are companies out there that have over 50 employees on LinkedIn and doing 1/4th of our revenue and not remotely profitable. Another company invested $22 Million dollars and doing 1/8 of our ARR, again with many employees, according to LinkedIn.

These experiences over the years have made me steadfast in ensuring:

  1. We never get like that, and we must become 100% sustainable.

  2. VC funding is almost always the riskiest thing for customers.

Another point as to why we have so few employees. 1) What would it say about us if weā€™re in the world of optimizing businesses with software and we arenā€™t optimized? :crazy_face: 2) We have one sales guy and no other sales or marketing, we donā€™t advertise and grow 100% organically and via our partners.

Hereā€™s a quick flex:

  1. Weā€™ve grown 300% year-over-year since 2019.

  2. We have over 1,400 businesses and a few dozen customers paying us in the hundreds of thousands a year.

  3. One customer pays us more than one of the competitorsā€™ entire ARR, a competitor that raised ~$15 million and has a few dozen employees.

We had multiple offers for funding, and it seems exciting to inflate our LinkedIn Employee count and get that coverage in the news. Thank God we didnā€™t cave to that, and hereā€™s why: In conversations with VCs, they drool when they see our customer base and metrics and see the potential for us to grow even quicker by doing things not beneficial to our customers. I 100% refused any such demands, and we eventually went our separate ways. In hindsight, it would have destroyed the company if we had taken the money. Iā€™ll explain below.

Many companies have raised more money than their preferred shares are worth. Meaning the founders and employees have 0 upside. For example, suppose the following: Company B raised $100M with 2x preferred stock while doing $10M in ARR on a $400M post-money valuation (this was common 2 and 3 years ago). Now the feds raised the rates, and the tech sector is down 80%; the companyā€™s value is max $100M (10x), but the investors will likely be owed $200M (2x preferred). If this is the scenario, why not shut it all down? This will certainly happen a lot in the coming 18 months. Thereā€™s been a push for people to shut down and return whatever money they have left. So how is having x employees and x funding beneficial at all for the customers? Itā€™s not! This has plagued most of the tech world. Just look at Dropbox; they are worth less now than when they went public nine years ago. We are fortunate not to be on that boat. For us, this is the most exciting opportunity. The best companies are born in down cyclesā€¦ here we come! :clinking_glasses:

So why donā€™t we have more buzz/views? We have a success paradox. The more successful our customers are, the more they donā€™t want the world to know they use us. I remember three years ago when we launched a short video; the first comments were about Tadabase being their secret.

I do not know what you are building, but chances are youā€™re not screaming Tadabase off the rooftops. For us to get a case study is generally looked at from our customers as them giving up their secret sauce. At first, this was a terrifying realization for us. Still, weā€™ve leaned into it and have invested in deepening these relationships, which is how weā€™ve had multiple customers go from paying around $250/month to $28K/month. Literally! This right here is our secret sauce.

So my key points are:

  1. We are truly profitable, and donā€™t be fooled by the vanity metrics you see on LinkedIn. We are here to stay, and if something goes quiet, it means something exciting is on the horizon.

  2. While we must focus more on a customer paying us $500k/year vs someone paying $2500/year, that is in no way an indication of any less commitment we have every one of our awesome customers.

  3. We will never compare Tadabase to a competitor in the community forum. Iā€™m sure Glide, Bubble, and others are great. But we pay exactly zero attention to them and focus on what counts - you. If someone is happier elsewhere, we have no objections and will do what we can to help the migration. But one thing is certain; no one will care about your ultimate success as much as we do.

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Thanks @moe
I see you got my point on business continuity. I really needed this information and thanks for being honoust and opening up. It really helps.

One point though; I am not screaming about Tadabase, but I am being vocal about it. I am not ashamed to say that we make our own software with tadabase, I am very proud about it. For us it is internal usage software only: CRM, Applicant tracking, document management, ISO 27001/9001 repository and management, task management, checklist workflows, etcā€¦ vital.

There is, imho, still a lot of evangelizing needed for nocode in general. Companies are very reluctant to go that way, one point being: dependability on one platform is risk on business continuity. But I have recently had a discussion with the CIO of a big chemicals multinational in the Netherlands: they are working with ServiceNow, but that is not kicking off there. Making your own software, when you have Excel, seems to be deal-breaker.

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@Peter yes, I agree with you that Tadabase is still actively updating its platform. While there may not be any big updates yet, itā€™s possible that they are working on something big for us in the future.
i see they are actively updating here Updates | Tadabase.

also need to add one more thing

  • @Peter As i am customer we donā€™t think about developer count we know they did tremendous work for us. count doesnā€™t but success matters.
  • @moe you are really honest and transparent. i appreciate you and your team because you really added value in my business.

cheers :clinking_glasses: for Tadabase.

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This was a fun and insightful read. :popcorn:

I have been a customer since the initial launch four years ago. My experience has had its bumps here and there, and like some of you, Iā€™ve had some anxiety about relying on a single platform. I probed and tested other software like Knack, Bubble, and some others, and with each one, it felt like downgrading from a powerful Porsche Macan to a shiny and clean Toyota Corolla. I eventually came to the realization that all said and done, Iā€™d rather have a platform that evolves and has the transparency demonstrated in this thread. When I look at the stats, itā€™s been nearly 100% up for me and my customers. While Glide may have a slicker interface, nothing beats Tada for business apps. I have yet to hit a roadblock of something that wasnā€™t possible in my use cases (I work in custom apps for healthcare). Thus far, I have had about 5 calls with Moe, and heā€™s even helped me close a $190K deal about 2 years ago. This specific client is ongoing and still pays me a monthly retainer, which in itself is a salary for me. Needless to say, I am grateful to this great platform. I do have (unfounded) anxiety, as I have no reason to assume anything other than my 4 years of experience, which was 99% pure joy and success.

All that being said, my personal feedback is still that there can never be enough updates and transparency on a platform that I have running for 18 different clients of mine. I too eagerly look forward to Adiā€™s weekly updates, and his style is something I enjoy reading too.

On my last call with Moe, I requested we do a meetup and have a Tada conference. Perhaps Iā€™ll start another thread for that, but I think it would be awesome to meet others who feel the same about Tada.

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Hey Moe and Tim and the team at Tadabase,

You guys have put in a lot of wonderful features and we can see Tadabase improving day after day. Yes, the journey with Tadabase is not without bumps and frustrations. We are still struggling with some performance issues that a low coder will not expect. But we are finding ways around it, and the team does listen in to the feedback. The feeling is that we are growing together, and learning together. We are on the same boat.

So thanks to Moe for the insightful sharing. You have my utmost support!

All besides the point. Sarcasm not needed. You are acting like I put a frontal attack on Tadabase. I did not.
Great platform, great people, great intentions, great CEO and visionair.
Maybe I have misread the signs, and that made me worried.
Keypoint here is: building trust (which Moe did), because we as users of the platform have a business continuity risk, based on sole dependencyā€¦

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I appreciate Peterā€™s request and your clear and concrete answers.
However, in my small way, I donā€™t like some factors:

ā€¢ I understand that a 1 to 1 assistance is extremely expensive, dispersive and and I appreciate the usefulness of the Forum, but this needs to be more supported (I highlight supported) and probably the threads need to be better ordered and with more specifications.

ā€¢ the fact that there is little support in the forum, often (too often) without answers, forces me to make use of the chat, and this is counterproductive to what I was saying about the advantages of the forum, I would very much like there to be constant assistance on the forum

ā€¢ as you know I make use of maps and images, unfortunately these 2 are the least implemented by Tadabase, I understand that facing customers like you mentioned, and the fact that few use them, it is uneconomical, but over 3 years, for simple implementations on the maps, they are many and too many. The more the development of tadabase continues with new functions, the more the detachment with the maps is high, see now the Pdfs that do not support the maps.

Nonetheless, I canā€™t help but appreciate the strategic business clarity, everyoneā€™s commitment, and the platform.

The conference idea is one Iā€™m also interested in - networking and learning more from one anotherā€¦I was going to post something similar - great idea :grinning:

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Great post @moe, I am somewhat amazed that anyone thought there was a problem though, although I appreciate the concerns some have shared. Iā€™m always astounded how much you guys achieve each week, it makes you very accountable knowing you have to post each week :slight_smile: and like many others I look forward to the weekly Tuesday post. I did think your intentions to provide an up to date roadmap, bug fix list, etc etc was pretty optimistic so Iā€™m not surprised some of these things might have slipped behind due to other priorities.

I too consider my biggest gamble was placing all my eggs in one Tadabase basket but I have to say, I have not been let down once and I donā€™t regret it. There have been some bumps in the road, some that Iā€™ve created myself and the team have got me out of jail on more than one occasion and I am one of those users paying just a few thousand a year! I am extremely grateful to you and your team for sticking with me and getting my app live - itā€™s brilliant.

The worst news for me would be to wake-up and find out you have left and a VC has taken control, it will be the beginning of the end, this I am in no doubt.

As a Partner now of Tadabase Iā€™m excited about the opportunities and the future and I would be delighted to see more activity around material, events around the Partner Program and the channel. Proposal Templates, Solution Selling, Partner Networking etc as I think this is how you build a channel of partners and our businesses together, Iā€™d just love to be part of this great successā€¦ Iā€™d also feel more comfortable if I was paying a lot more (as long as I was billing a lot more too :slight_smile:

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Thanks @moe and the team. Not just for these updates but for all the work you have done, and all that you do. I hear the concerns of other users, and I share the nervousness of some - we too rely upon you.

But my overriding feelings are astonishment and delight at what we have been able to do by working with Tadabase. I could only dream that a (non coder) business owner like me can imagine and create in real time. In 18 months weā€™ve developed our own platform that has features we could not have even conceived when we began.

Like others I could wish for (and have asked for other features) but truthfully the real only limiting factor for us is our imagination in what else we can build. And thatā€™s exactly what I say to anyone that asks me.

4 years ago I was told a ServiceNow origin story. How it was originally the Now engine, a tool set that needed imagination to turn a solution. I imagined how great it would be if I could have such a tool in my hands ā€¦ now I do. Thankyou.

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As a TB user for over a year now, I can mostly agree with the things which have been said in this thread earlier. I also did a good search for a low-code platform which would enable me to run my business and after this I came to TB and I am very happy since.

I also experienced the same ā€˜fearā€™ when it comes to relying on one platform for running my business, but the support of the TB team @moe @tim.young @Chem @Adi is asthonishing and have never let me down.

Every Tuesday (late evenings due to the time zone) I look forward to the Tadabase Tuesday updates, snippets and videoā€™s and the bookmark functions helps to remember all the nice features TB offers which I can implement. And when it comes to the announcements of all the functionalities which are still to come (The Excel feature can hopefully replace my external Sparklite integration :slight_smile: ), I know from experience that developping new things can sometimes take more time then planned. But for me, knowing that itā€™s coming is enough for me.

When it comes to obtaining knowledge, I use the community heavily. Whenever there is an issue, the roadmap I use is : 1) search the community 2) ask the community 3) submit a ticket.

So, I agree that reviewing the community every once or twice a day by the TB staff has a benefit over using the ticketing system, since results from the ticketing system are private and the community is public.
As a user gaining experience, I tried to ā€˜give backā€™ to the community myself by helping new users with issues I experienced myself in an earlier stage.

So, I just want to use this message to say thank you to the great TB and I am looking forward to all the great stuff you make!

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These 2 points really resonate with me and I just want to say that I agree 100%. From here forward, weā€™ve decided to put significantly more resources (mainly time) into the community.

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I would like to jump on this thread and provide my unsolicited two-cents. I have been with TB since 2019, just after they launched. Since this time I have reviewed virtually every other competitor out there and none of the come close to the true essence of low/no code like Tadabase.

In full transparency, I was struggling a great deal with TB about a year ago and strongly considered leaving. This was during the change in the companyā€™s pricing and what I perceived as a departure from allowing the $2,500/yr customers to prosper and a run towards the $350k/yr customers needs. This resulted in a kerfuffle where @moe, @Chem, and @tim.young exchangedā€¦letā€™s say ā€œfrank wordsā€. It was a tenuous situation. After a 1:1 conversation with @moe, we both understood where we were coming from. I had to accept that TB provided me custom service that they no longer could provide if the company was to grow. Moe accepted that there opportunities for improvement; the biggest was communication.

Through the years, conversations with Moe have been the EXACT same as he mentioned above. Long term viability and existence is the vision for Tadabase. The employee count is strongly correlated with the pace they have chosen to grow. They are growing cautiously; not fast. Moe has been authentic with me by saying they very much appreciate their high paying customers but their core drive is to help us small ā€œfishā€ to succeed. I truly believe in Moe and his team.

As a industry expert in business continuity, I can understand the concern of @Peter. Single sourcing a main SaaS application provider that supports a large amount of a business is concerning. There are alternatives that can mitigate the sole sourcing that does not require a ghost build with a competitor. (feel free to engage me if youā€™d like to discuss further). After the outage several months ago, I am confident that TB is maturing their business continuity/disaster recovery program. (Also @moe, Iā€™d be happy to review anything youā€™d feel comfortable sharing in that realm if you want a ā€œcold eyeā€ approach completed).

@Adi and @tim.young updates have been a highlight of my weeks. I also know that completing a 20-50 min video each week on ā€œhow tosā€ is time consuming while juggling a full support team. I think @tim.young approach to engaging the community would be more effective than the chat support. In fact, I have all but stopped using the chat support in the past 12 months since my needs are more technical than what chat can provide.

Finally, after 4 years of building I have finally launched my first application. As stated above, I had a difficult time accepting the move away from TB folks providing me customize support. However, after launching my first application, I now realize why they finally ā€œcut me offā€. My needs required extensive custom coding that a company supporting 1,399 other customers is just not able to provide.

With that said, Tadabaseā€™s @partners have been literally the lifeline I need and rely on. Specifically, if it wasnā€™t for @kruizf201 (Advert Science), I would never have launched my apps. If others need customized support, the partners of TB are a strong option to consider. Even a small business like mine can afford it. I donā€™t want to speak for the TB team but if asked, they may have a non-public option to help out depending on your circumstances.

In closing, I very much appreciate the TB team being available for 1:1ā€™s, open for feedback and at times strong criticism, and the TB community. I am not going anywhere, period; hard stop.

~Adam

P.S. A Tadabase Users Conference would be one hell of a great event. I attend in a New York second.

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