Hi all,
This is our April community update! Read last month’s update here.
The topic most on our minds right now is pricing. We won’t spend much time on it in this update because we’ve been discussing it in other threads: here’s a link to our latest post. As mentioned in that post, we are going to publish another update this weekend.
That said, we did want to make one general comment in response to some of the questions in the pricing threads about our overall vision for the company. Our goal for Bubble is for it to become the next major platform for software development. We want to host all kinds of apps, and we hope as we become larger and more successful that we are able to increasingly subsidize exploratory, playful, and educational use cases. We still see ourselves as near the beginning of this journey: although the Bubble community is huge relative to a few years ago, it still accounts for only a tiny fraction of web applications being developed.
We know that getting our pricing wrong can prevent us from getting there. We very much appreciate the sharp feedback from our community that our initial proposal would have risked driving a lot of people off the platform and hampering our overall growth. Our goal is to keep Bubble affordable for entrepreneurs, and to have pricing scale up in a fair and sustainable way for larger companies and enterprises.
In addition to pricing, we continued working on reliability improvements to address last month’s outages, deployed some improvements to our new responsive engine, and continued growing the team. We’d like to welcome:
- Matthew, Perri, and Vlad to the engineering team
- Jeremiah to the data team
- Michael to the success team
- Jennifer as our new head of recruiting
Our open roles can be found here. If you’d like to join us, a great role for proficient Bubblers is our Technical Product Support Specialist opening on the Success team.
Changes we made this month
We continued improving the new responsive engine, including releasing transitions on height, width, and margin properties. Check out replies to the thread for some super-slick animation effects the community created with them!
Alongside the improvements, we’ve been releasing videos that show off the new features:
- How to Use Padding in Container Elements
- How to Use Gap Spacing in Row & Column Container Layouts
- How to Create Vertically Scrolling Groups (Overflow)
We also continued working on performance and released a major speedup to our bulk create API endpoint: you can now use the data API to upload data to Bubble significantly faster. Another small-but-annoying performance issue we fixed this month was with the “add plugins” button in the editor.
On the community front, we just kicked off a new Immerse cohort yesterday! Excited to see what everyone builds. And on our blog, we released a number of posts:
- An explanation of why no code is great for engineers written by me with the help of the team.
- A profile of one of our bootcamp instructors, Shiku Wangombe
- Ten new App of the Day posts, featuring the great work of the Bubble community
- A how to build Mint on Bubble post
This month in numbers
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New conversations via bug reports or support@bubble.io: 9,504 (up 14.9%).
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Average first response time to messages: 1h 56m during business hours (down 48.6%)
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Average response time to messages: 2h 2m during business hours (down 45.4%)
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Open tickets being investigated by the engineering team: 57 (up from 55)
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Of those, tickets that have been open longer than 7 days: 33 (up from 22)
Things on our minds
Aside from pricing mentioned above, we don’t have too much to share here this month. We usually use this space to update on our ongoing efforts to make Bubble more reliable. March was a very smooth month in that regard. We’ve been continuing to work on the issues we identified during our rocky February, and have seen some payoffs in terms of more stable infrastructure. We plan to continue making preventative maintenance a major priority for the rest of the year, alongside our performance work and our efforts to make Bubble easier to learn for new users.
What we’re currently working on
As mentioned above, we are focused on preventative maintenance, performance, and making Bubble easier to learn for new users, including getting our new responsive design engine ready to leave beta.
On the responsive engine, the two big chunks of work we are tackling right now are updating the plugin editor so that plugin creators can make plugins that are fully compatible with the new engine, and enabling drag-and-drop in the editor within row/column containers.
For the new Bubble user experience, we are working on tweaks to our onboarding flow, as well as better in-editor educational materials.
On the performance front, we are continuing to roll out our optimizations for invisible elements, and generating HTML and CSS upfront instead of on the fly. Our expectation is that these workstreams will continue for months or quarters, but we do think there are intermediate milestones that will result in noticeable performance improvements.
As mentioned last month, we are kicking off an overhaul of our network architecture and infrastructure organization with the goal of hardening our security posture and aiming for SOC2 compliance. We are shifting the focus of this work to prioritize reliability-related improvements ahead of the work that will get us to SOC2, so we may end up pushing the date back for SOC2. That said, we think the investments we are making here will help with all of our major goals, including security, performance, reliability, and compliance.
On version control, we are continuing to fix bugs in the algorithm, while working on a designing a set of feature improvements that will give more visibility into what changes your collaborators make to their versions.
On the QA front, our outsourced partners have now built 776 tests. For migrating code off of CoffeeScript, we’re now down to 45.3% CoffeeScript
Thank you for all your support and feedback, and wishing you all a great April! Best,
Josh and Emmanuel
