Glide Tutorial: Your First App in GlideOS or Glide Classic

Using Glide (glideapps.com) starts with a choice most tutorials skip: Glide sells two separate products. GlideOS, the current one, builds an app from a chat where you describe it or upload a spreadsheet, PDF or screenshot. Glide Classic, the original builder, has you shape the data, screens and actions yourself. Both let you build for free, and neither Free plan publishes. On GlideOS, publishing starts with GlideOS Basic at $25 per month, billed monthly, with 100 credits^[1]. On Glide Classic it starts with Glide Classic Explorer at $19 per month billed yearly or $25 billed monthly. For learning, Glide University and Glide's certification cost nothing, and the docs are split into a GlideOS part and a Classic part. Learn one product. Not both.

Step zero: decide which Glide you are learning

The two products share no accounts, plans or data, and Glide says it has no tool for moving Classic apps into GlideOS, as our Glide review explains. That makes the choice sticky. New visitors are steered toward GlideOS, since glideapps.com/pricing is the GlideOS page and Glide Classic has a pricing page of its own. Much of the learning material online predates GlideOS, though: the certification posts describe Classic features such as Big Tables and SQL sources. Check which product a tutorial covers before you follow it.

Pick GlideOS if you want the agent to do the building and can live with credits, monthly billing and a product whose open beta started in July 2026. Pick Glide Classic if your data lives in Google Sheets and must stay there, because Classic syncs a sheet both ways from Glide Classic Maker up, while GlideOS copies the sheet into its own database and never writes back. Glide Classic Maker admits only personal-email app users (Gmail, .edu), so staff on a company email domain need Glide Classic Business. Glide Classic apps are web apps that Glide does not publish to the Apple App Store or Google Play, and no store publishing is documented for GlideOS.

A first GlideOS app, from chat to shared link

Give the agent something real to read

Open a new chat and either describe the app in plain words or hand GlideOS a file. Glide's docs list text and Markdown files, JSON, images and PDFs, plus CSV or Excel uploads and a connected Google Sheet; a sheet alone is enough to start, with no prompt at all. The home-screen prompt connects one Google Sheet per project, and further sheets go through the chat panel. Before building, GlideOS mocks the app up with sample data so you can ask for changes, and its SheetSense pass points out contradictions it finds in a spreadsheet.

Keep the first spreadsheet small. SheetSense begins with a lighter scan because a full one is expensive, and a Glide blog post advises importing a trimmed version first. Credits pay for all of this. Paid plans let you pick Light, Balanced or Heavy per chat (light, medium and heavy on the pricing page); Glide's docs say Balanced uses about three times the credits of Light, Heavy about five times, and use per message is not reliably predictable.

Know what a project holds

Everything you build sits in a project: apps, chat history, workflows, integrations, tables, secrets and files. Every app in a project shares one database, so a second app for managers can read the same orders table as the first. GlideOS also keeps a project memory file that every chat reads; you cannot edit it, but you can ask the agent to read it back. Export important tables to CSV now and then. A deleted project cannot be recovered.

Publish, then share

New apps are drafts, and changes you see in preview go live only when you publish. Only organizations on paid plans can publish^[2]: GlideOS Basic allows 2 published apps, GlideOS Plus 5, and the GlideOS pricing table lists unlimited published apps on Pro. Access modes run from invite only to anyone can sign up, optional sign-in and anyone can open. The public modes start on GlideOS Plus, and data in a public app is open to anyone with the link. The first publish shows a QR code that adds the app to a phone's home screen.

People reach your app in two ways. A guest invited by email sees only the app shared with them and takes no seat, though admins can invite only 10 new guests every 30 days (3 per member on GlideOS Pro and Enterprise); team members build, are billed, and are invited by owners only. Workflows split the same way between building and running: you can create one on GlideOS Free, but it runs only on a paid plan, and GlideOS Basic enables a single workflow.

A first Glide Classic app: data, layout, actions, publish

Glide Classic works the other way round. You build, and the data decides the shape. Start in the Data Editor with neat rows and columns and a named first row. New apps default to Glide Tables, and uploading an Excel or CSV file creates a table. Each sheet of a source becomes its own table and then a tab in the app, while each row becomes an item in a collection. Spreadsheet formulas do not travel. Macros and charts stay behind, and a VLOOKUP must be rebuilt as a Relation column.

The Layout Editor is where screens take form. Glide Classic offers 40+ components, from Kanban, Calendar and Data Grid collections to charts in eight kinds, maps and ratings, and apps run in modern browsers on a phone, tablet or desktop. Hiding a component is not security, because the data can still be downloaded to the device; row owners, enforced on the server, are what restrict data. Get that right before inviting anyone. A builder agent is in beta for new teams only, and it cannot set up workflows or permissions.

Actions and workflows add behavior. An action can set columns on a row, send an email or trigger a webhook, and the Workflow Editor runs schedule, webhook, email, Slack and manual triggers. Here the bill appears. On Glide Classic, workflow runs, integrations, Glide AI and Google Sheets syncs spend updates, while edits in Glide Tables and Big Tables generally do not. The plan grid and update allowances sit in our Glide pricing guide.

Publishing is the paywall. Glide's quick-start says a Free team is prompted to upgrade when it tries to publish^[3]. Glide Classic Explorer costs $19 per month billed yearly or $25 billed monthly and publishes one app. Glide Classic Maker costs $49 per month billed yearly or $60 billed monthly, publishes three and adds Google Sheets sync and a custom domain. The published app opens in a phone browser and can be added to the home screen. One catch for office apps: on Explorer and Maker, app users must sign in with personal addresses such as Gmail, and colleagues on a company domain need Glide Classic Business, unless Glide agrees to treat a Maker team's one email domain as personal.

Where to learn: University, certification, docs and the forum

Glide University is the structured route. Glide relaunched it in July 2023 with no account needed to read the material; signing up adds progress tracking, and finishing a course can lead to a certification. The certification itself is free and asks for no card^[4]. It has three levels, and passing Levels 1 and 2 unlocks Level 3; a Glide post says the Level 2 exam allows unlimited attempts. Separate certifications cover AI agents, building AI business software and intelligent automation, with no prerequisites.

The docs are split by product: GlideOS pages sit in their own section, while the rest of the docs and the Classic API reference describe Glide Classic. Glide's support team does not build apps or teach you how. It handles bugs and billing and points builders to the docs, templates, YouTube, the community forum and Glide Experts. On Glide Classic Free the forum and help center are the only support, and human help starts on Glide Classic Maker; GlideOS lists human support from GlideOS Pro.

Experts are the paid shortcut. Glide's directory lists consultants and agencies, filterable by region, industry, data source and project budget, and Glide offers matchmaking on top. New Expert applications are temporarily closed, so the directory is for hiring help. Templates are the cheaper shortcut when they fit, and our Glide templates guide covers their prices and what a copy leaves out.

What to learn first, and in what order

For GlideOS, learn the meter before the features. Owners can open the Usage page, which splits credits by user, project, mode, building versus Runtime AI, workflows and integrations. Workflow pricing comes next. Steps cost 0.1 credits each for the first 100 and less after that, each integration call costs 0.01 credits, and each trigger shows an estimated monthly figure. When monthly credits run out, new AI requests stop until they reset or you buy extra credits, as our Glide pricing guide explains.

For Glide Classic, learn data structure before design. Relations, lookups and rollups decide what screens can show, and the 25,000-row ceiling on spreadsheet sources, the same on every Classic plan, decides when you need Big Tables, which hold more rows only from Glide Classic Maker (50,000) and Business (100,000). Updates come next: know which actions spend them before you add AI columns or a barcode scanner. Design comes last. It is the easy part.

The bottom line

Glide is easy to start and easy to start wrong. GlideOS rewards clear prompts and a small first spreadsheet, and it charges credits both for building and for AI inside your apps. Glide Classic rewards a clean data model and charges updates for syncs, workflows and AI. Build free on either product, publish on a paid plan, and take the free certification once you know which product it teaches.