Softr or Glide: two internal tools, two ways to count users

Softr charges for builder seats and end users; Glide charges credits whose intensity you set yourself. Both turn a database into an internal application. The choice comes down to three lines: who counts, where the data lives, and what you take when you leave.

Softr or Glide: the answer lies in two pricing schedules recorded on September 2, 2026 on the publishers' pages. Softr starts at $19 per month and separately counts builders, end users, and records; Glide starts at $25 per month for 100 credits and counts team members.

Two meters measuring different things

Softr runs three meters in parallel. A builder is a construction seat: one included at $19, two at $99, and additional ones at $5–$20 per month. An end user is counted only once even across several applications, divided into Team users, sharing your builders' email domain, and Client users, everyone else including personal addresses: five plus five at $19, ten plus fifty at $99. Database records and automation actions are additional, with actions paused until renewal when you hit the monthly cap. Glide's unit is the credit, and its burn rate depends on a setting you choose: light, medium, or intense. What a credit buys at either provider: we found it documented nowhere and prefer saying so to guessing.

What the counting method changes

That difference determines your three-year bill better than the advertised price. Softr's model grows with your audience: fifty clients in the portal, then two hundred, and you move up a tier even if not a line of the application changes. Glide's pricing does not count end users: it counts team members and credits, so opening an application to two hundred field workers does not itself change it. A customer portal for a broad audience leans toward Softr when numbers remain modest and becomes expensive as they grow; an internal tool for a broad field workforce leans toward Glide. Both approaches charge for your success, as we described for per-user pricing in a hiring team.

Where your data lives

Softr is the only tool in its category offering European residency on every plan, with an explicit choice between Germany and the United States, plus SOC 2 Type II certification. Glide hosts in Iowa on Google Cloud, with no announced European option. Its subprocessor list, updated July 13, 2026, names Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and Z.ai. For a portal displaying French client records, that German option weighs in the decision and will weigh more when a client asks the question in writing.

What remains if you stop paying

Nothing resembling software, in either case. Softr produces no code: your application is a configuration served by Softr, and its documentation describes only one publishing path, a subdomain followed by your own domain. Your data survives if it lives in a spreadsheet or database you already control. With Glide, code exists, since the new platform was rebuilt to give agents direct access to all code; but 'View code and project files' appears only on the custom-quote plan, and the verb is 'view'. Another point before signing: GlideOS is a separate subscription from Glide Classic, with no published end-of-life schedule or migration procedure for the old platform.

What each does better than Maestro

Softr puts an interface with accounts and permissions over an existing online spreadsheet and opens it to fifty clients within a week, including German hosting. Glide turns a tracking spreadsheet into an application a field team can use the same day, on mobile and desktop. Maestro does neither and plays a different game: an agent team writes a French requirements document, you approve it, work is divided into steps, tests are written before code, and the result stays on your Mac. Someone must then deploy it, a step the other two spare you. When the need is simply a portal over a database, renting remains the rational choice.

Choose in half an hour

First count end users, those opening the application without ever modifying it, then builders. With three builders and fifty clients, Softr can be priced in a minute, while Glide makes you count credits whose exchange rate nobody publishes. Then assume success: you double in size in two years and the bill follows. If the idea of leaving empty-handed at that point makes you uneasy, redo the five-year calculation, subscription included before signing anything. The amounts above are in dollars; neither publisher displayed euro prices when recorded.