While a step in the right direction for the new pricing, this all makes no difference to the ability of a serious SaaS business to continue to rely on Bubble. Here’s why.
Pandora’s Box Has Been Opened
The Bubble community spent the last 5 days researching Bubble alternatives, and what we found surprised us.
Not only are there comparable alternatives, but in some cases these alternatives are easier and/or more powerful to use. Most importantly, these platforms also allow you to EXPORT YOUR CODE. They have enough confidence in their product that they allow their users to walk away, at any time, with the React/Flutter/Vue source code for their application. No vendor lock-in.
The Cost of Not Owning Your Code
Regardless of any adjustments to the new pricing, Bubble has shown us the untenable business risk of building a product without owning the source code. If you don’t own the code, you don’t own your app. If you don’t own your app, you have substantially less value to sell when you want to exit and the entire cost structure of your business can be changed by as much as 10,000% overnight with no recourse other than to get on your knees and beg.
I think I speak for many Bubble users when I say that we will only consider putting our plans to rebuild outside of Bubble on hold if we have a permanent option to export our code from Bubble (without penalty) within the next 30 days.
A Bubble Without Vendor Lock-in
It may take some time (or not make sense at all) to actually build a UI for code export, but the option of requesting a manual export via Bubble support would be sufficient. You have promised to do this already if Bubble closes up shop, so if that’s actually true, manual exports on request shouldn’t be an issue.
I think it would also be understandable to require some kind of annual commitment to a higher tier plan in order to have the code export option. We’re not asking for handouts here, the key thing we need is the optionality. We are willing to pay a reasonable price for it.
Counter-intuitively to what I think you believe will happen, very few apps will take advantage of the code export. The ones that do take advantage, will mostly be doing so as a fail-safe, not because they are leaving. It becomes much easier to raise money or sell your business if you can tell your potential investor/acquirer “we use Bubble for speed of development, but we have a copy of our code sitting on GitHub as a backup.”
Thank You Bubble
I will sum this up by saying thank you to @emmanuel, @josh, and the whole Bubble team. Bubble has opened many doors for me and empowered me to launch a fast-growing SaaS business as a UI/UX web designer, without having to hire developers. I DO NOT want to have to leave Bubble (it will take 4-6 months to rebuild our product elsewhere), so I sincerely hope that, in addition to these welcome adjustments to the new pricing, you add the code export option to allow companies like mine to continue to build happily in your ecosystem.
All this being said, I (along with many others) will have no choice but to rebuild elsewhere if you refuse to allow us ownership of our own code.