I have had my apps in production for 2 years with little to no issues, so yes I do believe it is a mature enough product. But that is just my opinion. I was using Knack before I came over to Tadabase and I was much more impressed with Tadabase compared to Knack.
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My unsolicited two cents…
I also agree with @mtif that trust has to be established to ensure that the features/quality/support remains the same. I had a conversation with @moe and expressed to him in plain language that Tadabase is the best product for small businesses being able to provide robust products. He assured me that their mission is to not price out us “small guys”.
With that said, @centellix does have valid concerns on bugs and features (PDF is the bain of my existence still). Again, I trust the Tada team’s 2022 comments that they will be bug free by the end of 2022. I also have heard (from @moe) that the PDF functionality will have some significant updates soon. The Eledo interface will be a good short-term solution with the long-term resolution being a totally rebuilt PDF functionality that will be housed in Tadabase. I was assured by Moe that the long-term PDF functionality will be available to Pro + plans.
In full transparency, I have been with Tadabase for over 2 years now and I do not have a published application due to the PDF functionality not being fully launched. I have had numerous conversations with virtually all customer-facing team members and they know full well my concerns/exasperation.
To the Tadabase team: You all have developed a platform that is growing fast and you are experiencing not-uncommon growing pains. I challenge you to remain true to your belief that anyone (I’m focusing on small businesses especially) should be able to provide high-quality database products. We all understand that price increases and feature availability changes occur but please do not outprice us “little people”.
Thanks all for listening,
Adam
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Agree with everything that you (SafetyUniversity) said - especially We all understand that price increases and feature availability changes occur but please do not outprice us “little people”.
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I share the opinion of the majority here.
Tadabase has been a great small business solution of very high quality and incredible support. This price hike is uncomfortable, especially in our case that we only have one client.
Price hikes are understandable like any other, especially in these changing times. However, as a suggestion, it would have been good to respect current customers with current prices and leave the new rate for new customers as I have seen in other cases, this in order to respect and take care of your current customers for having trusted in your product.
Tadabase is still a good option, the rise so high is not understood, but we have to wait to see what happens. For our part, we will try to apply the increase to our client and see if we can maintain it.
greetings to all,
Hi all, Moe here. First off, I wanted to thank you all for your comments- I truly appreciate the open dialogue here and take each of your feedback to heart.
So, reading through this thread, it seems that the overwhelming feeling is that our recent price increases seem fair and even overdue, but the concern is that prices should not continue to increase drastically and should not “outprice us little people” as @SafetyUniversity phrased it in his eloquent as always response.
I’m so happy that you started this conversation @Peter_J and I’m thankful for all your responses because I can see that there is still some confusion and concerns regarding our pricing changes and this gives me the opportunity to clarify.
To clarify: Our new per-app pricing model will impact new customers only. This pricing change will not impact existing clients and existing clients will be grandfathered into the ‘per-account’ model forever.
Full transparency on this pricing change to explain why shifting to per-app pricing was necessary for new customers: As you know, Tadabase can be fully white-labeled. Not semi- white labeled like most other companies. Truly white-labeled to the point where our customers have the competitive advantage of using Tadabase to build apps not only for their own businesses but for other clients’ businesses as well. This feature alone has attracted a large number of incredible Tadabase customers who, upon finding Tadabase, started new businesses building white-label apps for other businesses.
This means that in addition to servicing our usual customers and their users, a sizable number of our customers include multiple clients, each with their own app and each with their own set of hundreds to thousands of users (all on one customer account). This is incredible and inspiring and we love it! But, for obvious reasons, it’s also not sustainable as a pricing structure. Each of our customers’ clients and each of those clients’ end-users is our responsibility and must be fully supported by our infrastructure and support staff. To allow multiple apps on one account no longer made sense given our extensive white labeling functionality and our intense commitment to providing stellar customer support and reliability to every user utilizing our platform.
With respect to our existing customers who have already invested in Tadabase until this point, we made sure to grandfather each existing customer into the per-account pricing structure forever. If you are a current customer, please rest assured that you can continue enjoying the benefits of multiple apps per account for as long as your account is active.
I hope this provides clarity and insight into our per-app pricing change. Please feel free to reach out to me anytime if I can clarify further.
Now, to address our recent price increase: Price increases sting, no matter how fair they may be. We tried to do everything possible to make it sting less. While our recent price increase may seem drastic, it is actually long overdue and has been postponed by us for several years now. We haven’t increased prices since Tadabase first began charging back in 2019, and when we planned on increasing prices in January 2020 we immediately postponed the increase due to the pandemic, and we kept on postponing increases for almost 2 years. Even now, we gave existing customers the option to lock in their current pricing for a year which postpones the increase another 12 months down the road.
We truly did our best to postpone and mitigate any price increases over the past 3 years, however, with that being said, should there ever be another price increase in the far off distant future, it will definitely be more gradual. We have always and will continue to do our best to mitigate costs for our customers, even when costs rise significantly on our end, and you can be assured that we have your backs. As I always say, our big lofty goal is to simply help our customers win. All of our customers, big or small.
Tadabase is in the extremely fortunate position of being bootstrapped, profitable, and in charge of our own destiny without any investors forcing us to “grow at all costs.” We love our small business customers and we have the ability to invest in them and see them through to success with the apps they build on Tadabase. We understand the trust, time, and investment all of our customers have placed in Tadabase and we do not take your trust lightly. We know that worrying about drastic price hikes is not a way to maintain your trust, and once again, I assure you that we have always and will continue to always mitigate any price increases to the best of our ability.
As a number of you mentioned in your comments, price increases are inevitable with every (growing/ innovating) company. While this is definitely true, I’d like to highlight some of the specific reasons behind our price increase at this time. We at Tadabase are aiming to create the most comprehensive, secure, and dependable development platform on the market. For a platform of our scope that hosts thousands of applications that run entire businesses and enterprises from A-Z, this means tackling security as a constant, continuous effort to achieve the highest levels of protection and the highest levels of certification across the most reputable accreditation standards. We have never and will never look at security and reliability as static, one-and-done features. And while our security and infrastructure are by far our biggest expenses, they are without a doubt our most worthwhile efforts that will pay off a million times over for our customers. In addition to security and reliability, our price increase will also reflect in our 2022 commitments to bug elimination, an expanded support and engineering team, and more built-in functionality to eliminate more of our customers’ costs on 3rd party tools. As a teaser example of an incredible native feature soon to come, I can tell you that PDFs are about to go from being the bane of @SafetyUniversity’s existence to the light of his life with our upcoming PDF update. The update will be in 2 phases, one with a PDF form filler (Feburary, 2022) and a second update for PDF reports (April, 2022). Stay tuned for more details on this one! You can also read more about our goals for 2022 here.
I hope this lengthy post addresses your concerns regarding our recent pricing changes. Please feel free to reach out to me anytime with any further questions or comments.
Happy new years, everyone and thank you as always for your continued support!
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I want to say more about tadabase a little later on, but I don’t see “per-app pricing” on the web site. It still says 10,25,50,125… Or am I misunderstanding it?
We were supposed to update the pricing page to this: https://tadabase.io/pricing-main, but there’s still a few bugs with the per app pricing model we’re fixing prior to doing so.
First let me thank everyone who responded and participated in this thread. Your thoughtful comments are much appreciated. tada is in many ways a great product. Excellent documentation, great videos, etc. I love the roadmap and the ambitious schedule of constant new features. As well the dedication to putting out a high quality product, state of the art platform and so on. And thanks to Moe, one of the company owners if I understand it. Your comments and participation are especially meaningful.
I don’t know how open tada is to suggestions (seems like you are). The new pricing model is much more reasonable in my opinion. However, it doesn’t work for me personally and here’s why. For my own personal data app which is currently in MariaDB using other front-end RAD tools, I have something like 150 tables. That includes a personal PIM as well as all my project management stuff (I’m a database developer). I’m just guessing at the 150 table number. I suppose I should just do a table count. But in my personal app even though I have “150” tables, I probably have less than 50,000 records TOTAL spread among those tables. A Pro plan with a max of 30 tables would never work for me. Even at 150, I am constantly coming up with new tables. But they usually only hold a small collection of records. Perhaps tada could come up with a more flexible formula to accommodate people in my position?
OTOH, I have clients with 50 to 100 tables with 100,000’s of records. But even in those cases, the larger record counts are usually limited to a few tables. Often the majority of tables contain a few 100 or a few thousand records. That’s not unusual in my experience. If I ever were to have any hope of converting those applications to tada at some point in the future, I would need a plan flexible enough to meet those requirements. So, right now, tada is beyond my reach. But I will definitely be paying attention.
Thanks for listening.
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@moe
I’m new here and only just discovered Tadabase a few days ago. I realise that this conversation is a little old and I might be late to the discussion.
I’m evaluating Tadabase for a Health and Safety app I am creating. We are a small H&S firm that works with heavy-industry clients.
I was delighted to discover Tadabase – its features and functionality seem to be a perfect fit for what we want to achieve in our app. Tadabase is the leading candidate for us – almost a no-brainer.
As part of my evaluation, I’ve been looking at the pricing plans and found this post on the new proposed pricing structure. The new one-app-per-plan concept works fine for us and especially the ability to scale up as we get more clients by moving through the pricing tiers. Looking at just the “headline” features of the plans, we would start on the Explore Plan while in development, launch with the Pro Plan and move up beyond that as and when we attract clients and need the capacity.
Unfortunately, what doesn’t work for us is the proposed limitation on the number of tables. As Health and Safety affects every aspect of our clients’ businesses, our app will be very “broad” – if I can use that term. It will touch every part of their operations – employees, assets, equipment, locations, jobs, sites, workflows, compliance, etc. This means lots of tables. Some of these tables can be quite small (static reference tables). I’ve already scoped much of what our app requires, and we will very likely need 50+ tables. For us, the number of tables required won’t change if we have one customer, or twenty – scaling is strictly a matter of the number of clients and their records / files.
This struck me as a strange limitation to impose. It seems that the tiers don’t just scale the capacity, but they also restrict the complexity of an app.
This limitation means that we would have to start on the top-tier Gold Plan during development - well before we can even take on a single client and even then, we would need several more clients before we achieve break-even, which simply won’t work for us.
I understand that different users have different requirements, but I’d like to let you know that this one facet of the new price model would be a deal-breaker for us, as it might be for others attempting to create sophisticated business apps, regardless of scale.
I hope that you might re-consider this part of the pricing model, so that the tiers reflect size, scale and capacity, rather than also app complexity / sophistication.
Anyway, I wanted to let you know that you have an excellent product and I wanted to register my vote for a change to this part of the new pricing model.
All the best
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Pricing is hard. There are a lot of factors to consider. And when you make a decision and announce it, it’s not that easy to take it back if you discover you made a mistake. I sympathize with Moe and his colleagues who are dealing with this, and I respect them for taking the time to get it right. I’m especially grateful to @Moe for his thoughtful and candid response earlier.
.
That said, this discussion has made me nervous. For over two years I’ve been plotting my move away from FileMaker (which has been my development platform for 20 years) to something genuinely web based. There are too many options for anybody honest to say he’s looked at everything but I’ve looked at a lot and I think I’ve seen the most promising candidates, including (but not limited to) Tadabase, Knack, Caspio, AppSheet, SmartSheet, Bubble, Google Tables and Airtable (with and without the front-end assistance of Softr, Stacker or Noloco). Knack and Tadabase are the finalists.
I’m a consulting developer, not an in-house developer. I have a bunch of active clients and hope to keep most of them, and that means I’m working on a bunch of apps at any given time. I frequently create prototyping or test apps, “playpen” apps where I try out techniques. The ability to create a new app without thinking twice about is critically important for me. At the same time, record counts matter, too. Most of my apps right now contain 30–60K records, and a couple have well over 100K. I can streamline that when I convert, but most of my apps aren’t going to get trimmed down to 10,000 records or fewer. Finally, I don’t want to have to think about user counts.
As I suggested earlier, for the database applications work I do, the best options appear to be Knack or Tadabase. I like them both for different reasons. Knack’s current pricing gives me more apps per account, while Tadabase’s current pricing gives me a high max record count. But if I squint my eyes, their current prices are pretty comparable at the tier that I would be committing to. Knack does have the advantage of two quite affordable account levels, great for learners. On the other hand, Tadabase has an almost decisively stronger feature set. The ability to track user access to an app, to have canned filters and ad-hoc filtering available on a table page at the same time, better export options, some control over where to store files — these are the factors that have been making me lean strongly in favor of Tadabase. I’m currently paying for accounts with both services. Can’t afford to do that much longer, especially since I’m not yet making any money from either service.
Now Knack has its own attractions. If Tadabase does switch to per-app pricing — if for example I have to pay to build a test app in Tadabase — well, maybe I’ll bite the bullet and stick with Tadabase. Or maybe Knack’s weaknesses will start to matter less to me than its strengths. I don’t know.
As I said, it’s a hard decision for a company. But these are hard decisions for me, too, as an independent developer. I hope it turns out well for all of us!
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Perhaps there is a compromise
I humbly submit there be a sub-menu for add-ons. Something like ( I just made up some figures) …
Extra Tables (20 extra tables) - $XX/app/month
Table Upgrade (additional 500,000 records) - $XX/table/month
Storage Upgrade (100Gb) - $XX/app/month
And so on…
This type of pricing could be a flexible compromise and is something I’ve seen some other platforms do. This would help Tadabase be a better fit for those of us with additional, specific needs.
I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, or presume to know what’s best for your business, I’m just trying to get my head around possibly paying $1K/month for a lot of capacity I won’t need, just to be able to have enough tables to prototype my app.
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Well, I don’t think the horse is quite dead yet. 
And while I don’t presume to tell Tadabase what’s best for its business, I do have some opinions about what is best for mine.
Yes, I have the same problem. And I personally might find an “extras” menu a good idea. Knack does something similar and it’s part of what I find attractive about their pricing. The midlevel Knack plans that cost roughly the same as a couple of Tadabase plans provide more apps, but fewer max records. But Knack makes it possible to buy extra records and add them to your account. Problem solved. (Of course, you’re still using Knack, so there’s that.)
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I would also be interested in seeing some upgrade options for existing clients that have signed-up but need to purchase X thousand more records (as their systems grow) but can’t justify the leap to the next plan
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Coming from Knack, the pricing seems high but I can sell it based on capability, speed, support, etc.
The bigger issue for me is the “Per app” (unless I am missing something?)
I need at least 2, test and prod, so $100-$200 a month becomes $200-$400?
Background: I am very new to Tada, just 10 days into migrating Knack > Tada, starting with my biggest customer app, and now reconsidering. 
Having come from a ‘dev >> test >> prod’ mindset, for me it’s just not an option to not be able to easily back out changes that impact a production environment. As I understand it, restores are available from support, but snapshotting before major changes, or user-level access to backup/restores is essential in my opinion - particularly being in Australia with the time difference.
In Knack I currently get around this by just copying the whole app, tasks and data and tasks to one of my 8 Application slots before any major changes, I can then test, and also back out if any issues arise. However, the new Tada pricing and 1 app per environment means this is not possible that I can see?
Also, I don’t have a “backups and logs” section in my settings, so I assume the functionality mentioned here is unavailable yet?
“We discovered a critical bug that forced us to revert the update on this. Stay tuned!”
Anyway, I have written to my account/onboarding person asking for options. Like the chat support, they are very responsive.
Fingers crossed there is some solution, because I really love everything else about Tadabase! 
@calvin - You are not wrong to worry. I am worried about this pricing structure as well. Something has happened in the past 4-6 months. I have been told that and custom support (for no-Enterprise accounts) has to be posted on this Community board instead of working directly with any TB support staff (as was the case for the past 2+ years in my experience).
My experience in the past 4 weeks with this new change has been less than 10% of my questions being answered and NONE of the successful solutions were provided by any TB staff. If you don’t mind me asking, what level of subscription do you have? I have Pro and the recent support response has been no less than 2-3 hours before someone pops online. In fact, most times, the chat support says they are away at the moment when it is the middle of the work day.
My intent as a small business paying it forward was to host and provide free applications to the industry that I am targeting. However, if each app costs loads of $$$, I won’t be able to afford to provide free services.
Good luck, I’d seriously try to get in touch with a TB staff/support person that could answer your questions before investing any more time into your applications. It would be a shame to waste time and effort on an untenable application.
If you find anything out, I, personally, would appreciate any info you could pass along.
Moe reached out to me to schedule a meeting to discuss my issues and concerns and I was eager to chat with him. However, there has been no response to actually schedule a meeting.
Adam
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Hi Adam @SafetyUniversity – All good points, and thanks for taking the time to reply.
I have come from experience on local DB’s and also 2 other online DB platforms, and I have to say the functionality in Tadabase is superior to both the online platforms in nearly all cases. And it is also faster.
However the downside is there seems to be a few more bugs or things that are not complete yet in Tada? ( I understand from @moe 's post here Tadabase in 2022 that bug elimination is big focus of the TB team this year, so thats encouraging!)
To answer your question, I just bought the ‘personal’ plan @$149 a month just while I trial, however the app I am migrating will need the Performance plan, if I continue.
I have also found the chat support great. I have only dealt with @tim.young and @Megan and both have been very responsive and knowledgeable, but all the things I have chatted about have turned out to be bugs so not something they can fix on the spot. Also guess just having the option of chat support is also a big plus, most other platforms don’t offer this. Mostly though, I think I will use the ticket system as I have four issues/bugs open now so it got harder to track with chat anyway. I will leave chat for emergencies.
Getting back to the ‘elephant in the room’ and @Peter_J s OP: The change to per app pricing (so no more Dev>Test>Prod capability) + now with no ability to rollback (I am referring to the “Versioning, backups, and restores” post I linked above - functionality that was launched in March ’21 and then seemingly still pulled?) is going to be a showstopper for me.
One of these has 2 factors has to change.
I am actually continuing to develop on Tada, since I have spent a good 3 weeks on it already (trial and then bought a month plan) but yeah, seriously concerned and at that same time encouraged to know that others are also of the same mindset.
Hopefully the ‘backups-and-restores’ functionality will be re-released soon ??
Calvin.
No Dev/Prod versions is a concern, but for me paying over $350 AUD a month to be able remove the Tadabase branding on an App is also a major concern.
No white labeling unless on Scale plan ( Over $350 AUD) is crazy.
I have been trying Tadabase and it looks so promising, I have applications in Caspio and Bubble, and was looking to Tadabase for it’s simplicity of use for building out and application and looking to move off Bubble.
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Hey @eLearnHQ , not sure if you saw this recent announcement this week, but Dev / Staging / Production versioning is now available, details here
I’m not sure what price plans this will be available on though.
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Thanks @GREDDIE - a little too late for me as we moved back to our original platform. Shame.
I have 2 more Australian customers interested in apps that we are about to develop, so I will check it out again once we know what plans this capability will be on.
@SafetyUniversity may be interested to hear this (if he doesn’t already know)
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