Since introducing new pricing plans earlier this year, we’ve been working hard to make it easier for customers to select the most cost-effective subscription for their app. One of our goals has been to introduce workload units (WU) at the right time so that customers have the information they need about this metric when their app starts to scale. This is particularly important for customers who are moving from legacy pricing to new pricing.
This week, we rolled out a new checkout experience that recommends a workload tier at the time of checkout—but only if it helps you save costs on your monthly bill. If it doesn’t make sense to purchase a tier, you’ll see “No additional workload” as our recommendation.
In the example below, I’m on the Growth plan, which comes with 250K workload units per month. You can see that I’ve consumed 387,139 workload units so far this month. Behind the scenes, we’ve done the calculations to determine whether it is more cost effective to pay for overages or purchase a workload tier. In this case, it’s advantageous for me to purchase a workload tier of 200K workload units to minimize costs.
With this new flow, you can confidently change plans and know that we’re setting you up for success by recommending the most cost-effective subscription for scaling your app. Coming up next: Our team is working on a new App Plan tab that will make it easier to manage your subscription and give you better visibility and insights into your app’s monthly bill.
I love that it does the math, but using the word “recommended” makes it seem like it doesn’t have your best interest at heart. Very much a salesy term that erodes any confidence that it’s actually the cheapest. I would suggest a name change. Something like “most cost effective for your usage” or to that effect.
Great addition, can we access it even we don’t have to upgrade from legacy yet?
Also, do you have plans to create a detailed guide on best practices for Workload Units? Lastly, if our apps are consuming too much WU, can we have someone from your staffs to check the app and to discuss what can be done to improve WU Consumption?
Thanks Justin! Let me muse in it for a bit. There isn’t a ton of space here for a longer phrase but I can definitely jam on this and see if there’s something that hits a little better and doesn’t give off bad sales vibes. Not my intention!
I think this is great, and have no problem with the ‘Recommended’ as it’s still up to the user to decide. What I would like to see as a user, something that would help me make my decision, is if the pricing for overages based on the previous month was included, something like this:
I found myself reaching for my calculator to see how much money I’d spend without a workload tier, and thought it’d be helpful to include that cost on there.
Yup, “Recommended” makes perfect sense to me, but I think it’s all in one’s mindset. If you inherently believe Bubble has your best interests at heart, then you read “Recommended” as what’s best for you because Bubble is trying to do you right. If you still think the pricing change ain’t so great (or something along those lines), then you probably read “Recommended” as Bubble doing what they can to take your money. Words and perspective… quite an interesting combination, eh?
For what it’s worth, from what I’ve seen of the new app plan screen, there’s a whole host of improvements in billing clarity and breakdown so the language might well fit better in that context.
The other major communication thing with regards to WU that I think (?) is already being worked on is making the WU cycle anchor date the same as the plan anchor as it’s a bit hard to keep track of when everything gets billed.
Sounds great but I can’t see it yet on my plans - is this still rolling out?
Something I think needs to be clarified (and I have had a question in with sales on this that hasn’t been answered) is the timing of workload’s when you downgrade
I have a site that has a very large workload this month (17m WU’s) and I want to switch it to a lower plan for next month but changing it now on the month end gives me the impression I’m downgrading the current month and I’ll pay massively for overs. If I let it slide to next month I’ve paid $1499 for WU’s I won’t consume when I want the $599 package.
This could all do with some real clarity or at least link to how and when this is worked out.
Thanks for improving the “less fun” features of Bubble too
johnnyweb
This is out now - if you go to upgrade our plan (so move from Growth to Team for example) you should see this.
I would definitely recommend chatting with our success team about your situation because it sounds complicated (and potentially expensive)! Workload is calculated on calendar month and tiers cover overages on calendar months as well. I would not downgrade your tier until December 1 (when you should be able to downgrade with some proration) but I would definitely chat with our team tonight/tomorrow to get things clear!
I don’t know what to trust - the website planner or this upgrade tool. As you can see below, the tool reports 900k WU, but our app is running close to 2Million WU and then it suggests Tier 1. What’s going on?
The Logs show the past 30 days, but on the App plan tab it says “Current month’s workload usage” and just counts from the 1st of the month, so it only shows the past 13 days as of today. Maybe the upgrade tool is only counting from the 1st?
