@Josh, thanks for this thorough and thoughtful response to some of the concerns and suggestions brought by other community members. This is reassuring and refreshing after feeling so abandoned by Bubble leadership over the past week.
Does Bubble have any intention to allow code export for large or enterprise-level Bubble apps?
My response on this topic is one of the most liked responses to your original post, so I was surprised you didn’t address it. I’m hoping that a lack of a “no” means this is something you guys are at least discussing.
Some additional thoughts/ideas/feedback on this topic:
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We do not want to have to leave Bubble. We want to continue to operate and build in the Bubble ecosystem, so please don’t write me off (and others that feel the same way about code export) as “not being your customers.” We are your customers, who want to stay with Bubble for the long run as we scale our businesses, but we need the ability to export and backup our source code for Bubble to be viable long-term.
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The ability to export our code translates to millions of dollars difference in our valuation as a company and dramatically affects our ability to exit. As I covered in my response in one of the earlier threads on this pricing, we just had a $10 million exit opportunity fall through because of Bubble and the lack of code export.
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Lack of code export substantially impacts our ability to raise capital. Yes, I know about this article, and it has some great points, but the conversation with investors always comes back to the ownership of the code. This may not have been as much of an issue a few years ago, but now that investors have become educated about no-code and its pros/cons, this is a significant concern for any smart investor.
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If Bubble wins when we win (especially with this new pricing structure), then does it not make sense to empower companies in your ecosystem to maximize valuation and fundraising ability? Hamstringing your users on valuation and fundraising potential because you’re worried they’ll take their code and go (which isn’t actually why we want the code) doesn’t help us or Bubble.
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With so many Bubble alternatives now allowing code export, I expect this will become a significant factor in deciding which no-code platform to use for a project, especially for educated enterprise-level buyers. Does Bubble not wish to be competitive in this segment of the market?
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When I say code export, I don’t mean exposing Bubble’s proprietary code markup or engine. I would expect the code we receive to be only HTML, CSS, and Javascript and be stripped of any functionality from third-party plugins. This code would also not be immediately functional in any real way (except for maybe very basic apps with no plugin usage), but would be enough material that a regular development team could refactor and stand it up on its own without having to rewrite the whole application from scratch. There would be no ability to re-import this code into Bubble, so if someone exports the code, they are on their own from then on out.
Looking forward to some kind of communication on Bubble’s intention here.