Is Glide Free? Both Free Plans, the Trial and the First Paid Step

Glide (glideapps.com) is free to build with and to try, but not free to launch. The company sells two separate products, and each has a $0 plan: GlideOS Free for the current AI agent product and Glide Classic Free for the original no-code builder. Neither one publishes apps. GlideOS Free gives you a limited pool of credits and zero published apps, while Glide Classic Free keeps drafts inside the builder. The cheapest way to put an app in front of other people is GlideOS Basic at $25 per month, billed monthly, or Glide Classic Explorer at $19 per month billed yearly ($25 billed monthly) for apps used by personal-email users only. Free means try, not launch.

GlideOS Free: build with the agent, publish nothing

GlideOS is the product Glide's main pricing page sells to new buyers, and its Free plan costs $0 per month. Glide presents it as the way to try GlideOS before purchasing. You get 2 team members, 10 projects, one integration and the ability to build AI features into your apps, all driven by the Glide Agent working from a prompt, a spreadsheet, a PDF or a screenshot. The pricing table lists 0 published apps and 0 enabled workflows on Free. ^[1] You can still create a workflow. It needs a paid plan to run.

The credits are the second limit. Glide does not publish how many credits GlideOS Free includes; the docs call them a limited number that does not reset or renew ^[2]. The free allowance is a one-time budget, not a monthly one. Free cannot buy top-ups, since extra credits are sold on paid plans only, and it cannot choose the agent mode (light, medium/Balanced or heavy). Once the credits are spent, new AI requests stop. Treat GlideOS Free as a test drive on your own spreadsheet.

Glide Classic Free: drafts that stay in the builder

Glide Classic Free also costs $0 per month. Its pricing page lists unlimited drafts, 1 editor, up to 25,000 rows, Glide Tables and Big Tables, Google Sheets and CSV import (two-way Sheets sync starts on Glide Classic Maker), 500MB of file storage and 40+ components. Changes in Glide's native tables use no updates, so the plan needs none, and support is the community forum and help center. The catch is sharing. Glide's help center says Classic Free apps can only be built and tested inside the builder, cannot be shared with others and show a publishing quota of 0/0, a restriction Glide says it added for performance and security reasons.

Two more limits matter to spreadsheet users. Since December 2024, Glide Classic Free no longer syncs with Google Sheets, Airtable or Excel, so a sheet arrives as a one-time import rather than a live connection. Two-way Google Sheets sync starts on Glide Classic Maker. Glide AI and workflows need a paid plan, and the comparison matrix marks integrations on Free as limited; all three open up on Glide Classic Explorer. Classic Free is a sandbox for learning the Data Editor, components and actions on native tables.

The first paid plan in each product

The two $25-per-month figures below, GlideOS Basic and Glide Classic Explorer, both billed monthly, are a coincidence, not one price. GlideOS Basic bills per organization in credits and only monthly, and Glide's pricing page says annual plans are coming soon (as read in November 2026). It unlocks the agent mode choice, one credit top-up a month and custom domains, and its pricing table lists unlimited guests, with admins able to invite up to 10 new guests every 30 days. Guests use published apps without taking a team seat. Public apps, open to anyone outside your organization, need GlideOS Plus, whose smallest option is 250 credits at $50 per month, billed monthly. By our arithmetic, GlideOS Basic comes to $300 over 12 monthly payments.

Glide Classic bills per team and meters users and updates instead of credits, so the two products' allowances cannot be compared. Explorer and Maker cover personal-email users only, such as Gmail or .edu addresses; colleagues on a business domain need Glide Classic Business at $199 per month billed yearly or $249 billed monthly, with 30 users included. By our arithmetic, yearly billing saves $72 over 12 months (24%) on Glide Classic Explorer and $132 (about 18.3%) on Glide Classic Maker. A team that turns on unlimited updates pays 2¢ per update beyond its plan's monthly allowance; without it, AI, workflows, integrations and external syncs stop at the limit. Our Glide pricing guide covers every plan.

Glide Classic's 14-day Business trial, and its strings

Glide publishes a free trial of a paid plan only for Glide Classic; for GlideOS, Glide points to the Free plan as the way to try it. The Classic pricing FAQ says the trial gives 14 days with unlimited apps, the newest workflow triggers, Airtable and Excel data sources and other advanced Business features. The free-trial page sets the terms ^[3]. A valid credit or debit card is required. The team moves to Business at once and pays nothing during the trial. It renews automatically into paid Business unless you cancel, and Glide sends a reminder 7 days before the end. Mark the date anyway.

The rules are strict. There is one trial per team, for Business only; Maker and Enterprise have none, and a canceled trial cannot be restarted. Unlimited usage cannot be switched on during the trial, and the Send Email action stays inactive. Ending the trial early charges the card at once. Cancel inside the 14 days and nothing is charged: the team returns to Free, and paid-plan features stop working. If the trial converts, the Classic pricing page offers a full refund within 14 days of the initial subscription payment, counted from the first charge.

Discounts, and what stopping payment brings back

There is no nonprofit or education discount. Glide Classic's pricing FAQ says Glide does not currently offer special discounts for nonprofits, and it points educators, students and nonprofit communities to Glide Classic Maker for its unlimited personal users; staff signing in with a company email domain would need Glide Classic Business. No education or nonprofit discount is published for GlideOS either. What does exist is a US sales-tax exemption for qualifying nonprofit and education accounts, requested through a form on the Billing page. That lowers tax, not the plan price. For a school or a charity, the free plans remain the only zero-cost route.

Canceling sends each product back to its Free rules, and they differ. A canceled Glide Classic plan stays usable to the end of the billing period, then converts to Free, and paid-plan features stop working; overages from that period are still billed. On GlideOS, paid features also last to the end of the cycle. After that, every invite-only project opens to everyone in the organization, every member except the owner who canceled waits for a seat, and paid credits expire. GlideOS's Terms (July 2026) say fees and credits are non-refundable except where the law requires. Glide Classic's 14-day refund has no GlideOS twin.

How free compares across AI app builders

Build free, pay to launch: that rule is common in this category. Bubble's Free plan has no time limit for building and testing but cannot go live; it includes 500 AI credits and 50K workload units a month (Bubble review). Base44 Free gives 25 message credits a month, at most 5 a day. Lovable Free gives 5 build credits a day, up to 30 a month. Bolt.new Free includes 1M tokens a month with a 300K daily limit. Outside our catalog, Google AppSheet is free to build and test with up to 10 users. Each vendor counts in its own unit, and none of them converts into GlideOS credits.

What sets Glide apart is two free plans in two separate accounts. GlideOS and Glide Classic share no data, and Glide says it has no tool for moving a Classic app into GlideOS. A prototype stays where you built it. Pick the product first. GlideOS suits a team that wants an agent to draft an internal app from a sheet or a file; Glide Classic suits a builder who wants to lay out screens, data and actions directly and, from Glide Classic Maker up, live two-way sync with Google Sheets, though Maker admits only personal-email app users and company-domain staff need Glide Classic Business. Our Glide review weighs the two side by side.

The bottom line

Glide is free to try in both of its products and free to publish in neither. GlideOS Free suits a quick test of the agent on your own spreadsheet, with a credit budget that never refills. Glide Classic Free suits learning the original builder on native tables. To share an app, plan on GlideOS Basic at $25 per month, billed monthly, or Glide Classic Explorer at $19 per month billed yearly if your app users sign in with personal email. Start the 14-day Classic Business trial only with a calendar reminder to cancel, because it renews into paid Business on its own.