In this video, we’ll explore the data limits of Google Sheets when used as a data source for AppSheet apps. While AppSheet supports various backends, many app creators start with Google Sheets. But at its core, Sheets isn’t a database, and that means there are some real limitations you should keep in mind as your app scales.
To illustrate this, I built a moderately complex commerce app and used a custom script to generate datasets of increasing sizes: 100 1K, 5K, 10K, 20K, and 30K orders. This allowed me to simulate realistic growth and observe how performance changes at different total data sizes.
Google recommends staying under 100K rows and 10MB of compressed data when you’re using Google Sheets as your AppSheet datasource. In my testing, performance remained strong at lower volumes but started to noticeably degrade as we approached and then exceeded those thresholds. At 30K orders, the compressed size hit nearly 15MB and the total row count exceeded 170K rows. At that level, the refresh time slowed significantly, making it clear that you would need to start thinking about alternative data sources or optimizations.
To help you evaluate how your own app might perform at different data sizes, we’ve created multiple versions of this sample app that you can test yourself.
To get access to those apps, just fill out the form below, and we’ll send them right over.