Hey all,
We’ve heard you loud and clear that our planned pricing for database things is, to put it mildly, not popular.
We want to be a bit more transparent with our thinking and get your feedback on how to move forward.
We do really want to phase out capacity and switch to different pricing. We think it is bad for users and bad for us as a business. We see a steady stream of complaints about how unpredictable and opaque it is, and how it breaks user apps in the moments they need uptime the most. It also does not map particularly well with how successful our users are on our platform: we see apps just starting out using a ton of capacity, and some of our most successful applications not using that much at all. We rely on our most successful customers helping us pay for making it cheap for new users, and also for the cost of finding new users. I know we raised a lot of money recently, but we see that money paying for further investments in the company, and want our business model to stand on its own regardless of how much we have in the bank, because that’s important to build a long-term sustainable platform.
One thing we considered was just charging by monthly unique daily visitors. The problem with that is there are a lot of applications built on Bubble that aren’t external-facing: they power some kind of backend system and are mainly interacted with by a handful of users, even though the total amount of data processed by those apps and the importance of those apps to their users can be really high.
What do you think the best way of charging for that kind of app is? We’re discussing whether database items are the right thing, but we just set the limits too low, or whether database items aren’t great even with high limits. A few people have suggested charging for database storage, instead. Our hesitation there was that it is harder for you to predict, because it depends on the way we store things behind the scenes and it isn’t easy to do the math, but maybe that’s a better option.
Anyway, we really do appreciate the feedback. We can’t promise never to change the platform, but we can promise to listen and be responsive.