AppSmith Pricing Teardown
AppSmith is an open-source tool for building internal applications similar to Retool. Learn how their pricing works in 10 minutes
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here.
What is AppSmith?
AppSmith is an open-source low-code internal tool builder.
When you build internal apps, chances are you trade convenience and looks for speed of development. Engineers are scarce and you don’t want to spend time on polishing what works.
AppSmith helps to speed this up with drag & drop “lego bricks” app components and built-in integrations with popular data sources.
On one hand, it saves time for your engineers, but in practice you want to teach your product or ops folks to do it on their own.
I really wish I had such a tool for my time back in same-day delivery.
Amazing blog post on AppSmith’s rationale for usage based-pricing
29K stars on Github
https://www.appsmith.com/blog/usage-based-pricing
Pricing structure
3 plans for self-hosting and cloud
Basic things (unlimited users and apps, widgets, custom code, custom domains) are available on all plans, though Community plan:
allows Git version control only for 3 apps – you can still launch however much you want, but
prohibits embedding apps without publishing in template marketplace ("Embed private apps") instead of just using AppSmith’s UI
has only community support
Business lifts 3 repos Git limit & adds custom branding, private apps embedding mentioned above, backups, granular permissions and email support
Enterprise does not mention price (go talk to sales) and adds AppSmith-managed hosting, airgapped versions for self-hosters, more SSO/IDP options and even better support — custom SLA and dedicated team including soluitions engineer
Usage-based pricing – $0.4/hour of usage capped at $20/seat/month. So, any full-time user, both 2/2 or 5/2, is just a $20 seat
Users are distinct from app developers, who would still get charged if they use production version of their deployed app:
Anybody who uses the deployed app is counted as a user when measuring usage. Developers aren't charged for using Appsmith when building or editing an app. They are only counted as a user, and get charged, if they use or view a deployed app.
In practice it is a number of distinct hours someone has logged in – as they put it:
An hourly session starts with a user-initiated action and lasts for the next 60 minutes, regardless of any activity during that period.
I see that as a marketing trick that allows you to "save" on team leaders, app developers and other non-frequent users, though it actually monetizes their hours
One license key can be applied to multiple app instances, but it doesn't seem that volume discounts are possible even though it's a standard for usage-based models
No visible discounts for annual plans either
Does it make sense to pay?
My take – almost always.
If you’re too big to want an app instead of Google Sheet or just a read-only Metabase/Redash report or chart. You build internal apps to give ability to change production data to non-technical staff and you want to really know who did what and when. So, permissions are critical.
3 repo limit of free version can be hacked around by creating enormous apps, but in my experience — no one wants a bloated monolith internal app.
Prepare for hosting/storage costs and some time for server maintenance. Self-hosting is the only option – unless you’re ready for Enterprise pricing.
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing. See full list of articles here.