I respectfully disagree 100% with this model. I prefer the way things work today. And glad this is the general direction Bubble is taking for this price update.
3 Likes
Totally agree with this goal. I depend on Microsoft and Google for critical business things, and Iām technically at risk of them pushing through a major price change/increase that forces me to change services, but I donāt even think about it because they have made their pricing so reasonable, stable and boring that itās not top of mind.
2 Likes
it is still a plan you can use for free - the only thing that changes is the messaging.
People need to understand bubble invests in them when they can build on the server and also publish it thereā¦
Bubble Pitch Deck
Some restrictions on our free plan increase conversion to paid by 70% in February. We have a lot of room for improvement
If it wasnāt for the free plan I would have never gotten into bubble. Iām worried things will get too restricted. Like everyone else, I use bubble free plan as a scratchpad. I wouldnāt mind paying $9 a month for unlimited & unrestricted apps that arenāt live. Then depending on what things you use for that app bubble recommends you the proper payment plan.
Bubbles pitch deck Bubble pitch deck to raise $100m Series-A round -
2 Likes
Hi Bubble,
Thanks for this speedy recovery and update.
Glad you listened (also to MAU limits being the wrong way forward) and conducted many interviews, including with some people I personally have gotten to know over the years, who are doing well thanks to bubble, this radical innovation.
Power users were always going to find a way around row limits, some of which involve paying for another service.
Your main weakness is still retention for starters and more casual users and will always be retention in 5 years.
Hence making things as easy to start with for a side entrepreneur is key, ie everything in one place with not too many options and limits, and also to make upgrading/paying more a no brainer for power users.
Paying more for so many services I used was exactly that. A no brainer.
An example. Google, Microsoft and Amazon for years, even decades, undercharged. If they want a big year like Google last year (see last quarterly reports), they do that and make absurd amounts. But market share is more important and thatās also what you should be after.
Free word of mouth is an exponential driver of success. If i claim bubble is giving me a deal with their offering on my youtube/twitter/next meetup, this gets 10 undecided people to follow, who rake in more than me.
One of them will manage to build a beautiful plugin, workflow or app, that again persuades the next wave.
2 Likes
This is massive. It already sounds like the new thoughtful approach will render great results. However, giving us time to adopt these changes if we deem them fit for purpose feels very empathetic.
Looking forward to learning about the new pricing.
3 Likes
Just droping a message to thank @josh, @emmanuel and the Bubble team for having the sensibility to review the new pricing model and to work things through.
The world is lacking good listeners like you.
I begin to feel more confident that Bubble has got its train back on track.
I hope that the new pricing will achieve the goal of charging the apps accordingly, making Bubble a long term relationship.
Best regards to everyone, specially those who have helped in finding a good solution.
3 Likes
Great, Iām very happy to read this.
Thanks
I still think limiting users to DB Rows (even on the free plan) is counterproductive and doesnāt make sense from a performance viewpoint.
If i build a survey app as a prototype with 10 users each 30 questions, that should not cost much to host. If I however have the arbitrary limit of 200 entries i have to completely muck up my database to squeeze my few answers in there. This just ends up abusing the list of things feature by cramming a lot of unstructured data into single rows and filtering and sorting them in the app multiple times, probably using 50 times the CPU cost necessary compared to a simple read call into a normalized database structure.
Limit it by traffic or cpu, maybe storage (give the free tier a few MB and thats fine for small prototypes and incentivises to upgrade for actual products) This allows to intuitively structure the data cleanly and perfomantly instead of arbitrarily crammed.
Maybe add some options for low-tier applications. Id be fine paying 5 bucks for a prototype, but having to pay vastly more than what i can justify makes bubble not too viable.
1 Like
I think that itās great that Bubble retreated on itās original pricing update. You clearly heard the āvoice of the customerā and recognised that it probably wasnāt the most well considered update. From my perspective, the timing was fortuitous. I was just about to start building an app on Bubble hopefully leading to a test market launch followed by further development. I was already a little dubious because Bubble didnāt offer any kind of āpersonalā plan for somebody like me just looking to test the waters (yes, I know that you have a low-level professional plan that you call āpersonal,ā but I was looking for a REAL āpersonal/introductory/exploratoryā plan). After following the debate regarding your pricing updates, I now know that Bubble has no plans to introduce an exploratory pricing tier and as such isnāt for me or people like me who are looking to launch an app and then grow.
Thats tough to do when they are dependent on a third party hosting company. If AWS did a price hike iām sure we would need to see it passed on. If they tied the pricing to AWS then it limits them from switching to someone else.
1 Like
Yeah, I meant a general guarantee based on their costs on any provider. So whichever provider they use and whatever prices they pay for hosting, we will at least never be charged more than 3X/etc what they pay. It would work this way even if they switch from AWS, the amount of the guarantee would update
Iām pretty new to bubble (and to this discussion and the related threads 
) so I might have missed a comment about overseas instances but just in case it hasnāt been mentioned. . .
Something to consider when comparing to AWS, Azure, Google cloud, (virtually any provider) is local points of presence.
Iām front ending one of my startupās products in Bubble and building solutions for others so Iām all in. A challenge many outside the US would face is the need for client data to stay in country. The cost for your own copy of Bubble is huge (especially with the crappy exchange rate to the Aussie dollar), albeit with a great set of features - but at a much bigger scale than I need.
If you want to compete with AWS - could you consider a local instance in some countries? 8X the production licence cost is just too high. Happy to pay more, just not THAT much more 
Really appreciate the candour you have shown having this discussion with your customers.
Cheers,
John
3 Likes
I had to move my backend to Firebase for exactly this reason. I pay 1 penny a month for my production app + the $29 per month for Bubble. Hosting Bubble in Canada was astronomical and several times more than the revenue I make from the app itself.
6 Likes
I think I get your idea. I would say, letās not make it so complicated.
Keep free with all the features. We need new people start using Bubble. It will benefit Bubble and therefore us.
Simply see Bubble as a wrapper around storage that lets you build an intelligent UX called an app. Nothing more, noting less.
Keep it open and bill based on server capacity used, bill a small premium on storage used. In this case they earn money on the wrapper service (Bubble) and they earn on storage.
If people move storage away to cheaper platforms? Totally fine! It means you have buy-in for Bubble on the part that is unique. But make sure that keeping everything on bubble billed storage so easy, that most will not bother to do so.
But all the free plans will cost a lot of money in this case, I hear people say. Well, if Bubble core is build efficiently it should be able to handle lots and lots of free users with apps that are only used by a handful of people per month. And storage can be limited on GB used. Easy to understand and understandable.
Should a free plan need more DB capacity but the app still hardly use Bubble core resources? Simply let them buy extra storage.
Myself and all reasonable people on earth are happy to pay more when business takes of and lots and lots more when business is going so wel that money is pouring in. For a startup it should ideally be free to validate your idea so let them add domain names and use all other features for free and as soon as the business takes off, having a platform that handles everything that otherwise tech teams should do is gold. Think about a programmer that will cost ā¬8000 a month. If Bubble becomes that stable with scaling features a price of ā¬8000 is no issue at all.
Bump. Updates? Thanks
2 Likes
Bubble you have one move left to ensure the financial viability of your business. Here is what you need to doā¦
- Start charging for pro rata usage of services
- Entice users to use services that you can charge for instead of driving them away through friction.
Re 1. Charge for all the metrics you have been exploring. You have the most sandboxy app in the world, the use cases and styles are unlimited. Charging for one metric leaves you exposed to abuse of another. Do all theseā¦
Generous Charge for server capacity used
Generous Charge for storage Gbās used.
Generous Charge for unique user visits used.
Generously Charge a monthly sub retainer to cover other business costs.
Pretty much all usage senarios will be covered by that model.
Re 2. Set the pricing hierarchies for the above services so that new customers receive very little friction upon entering your ecosystem.
I would setup the plans as follows.
Free tierā¦
Feature taste test
Personal tierā¦
- $25 sub
- Upto 3 units of server cap (+ $30 per unit)
- 10gb of free storage
$20 per 100gb storage - 1000 free users per month
$5 per extra 1000 users.
Professional tierā¦
- $115 sub
- 3 units of server free
upto 10 units of server cap (+ $25 per unit) - 20gb of free storage
$15 per 100gb storage - 10,000 free users per month
$2 per extra 1000 users per month
Production tierā¦
- $475 sub
- 10 units of server free
upto 30 units of server cap (+$20 per unit) - 50gb of free storage
$10 per 100gb storage - 100,000 free users per month
$1 per extra 1000 users per month.
A few notes.
The storage price is a lot lower because you want to encourage devs to pay you to use the (frictionless) integrated aws s3 storage instead of missing out altogether when they provision their own 3rd party storage service.
Also normalising some arbitrarily limited features across all paid plans like daily scheduled workflows and unlimited editors (soft limits) might also reduce signup friction.
The personal tier (where you guys are getting crushed) will provide a low barrier to entry for basic internal apps. But the moment usage picks up, higher plans are encouraged through cost effectiveness.
1 Like
I wouldnāt even suggest charging for unique user visits, this would already be covered under the server capacity charge, and what if you have an app that has a ton of users but they donāt do much, vs an app where you have a few users doing a lot?
Bubble should have no tier system. Instead you have a free plan for building, but to go live you need to be on a paid plan, then they just bill you monthly for every CPU cycle and GB of storage used.
How can they advertise us making the next Twitter if their pricing for storage is in the GBs? It should be a slightly marked-up price of AWS storage and in the TBs, and charge heavy on the CPU usage + the luxury of the visual editor and thatās it. Then it scales infinitely without a crazy tier system that people would easily outgrow.
3 Likes
I was looking at it from their business standpoint. Customers donāt like large deviations from the current status quo, this suggestion keeps all the plans pretty much as they are.
If any business built on top of an external platform (like bubble) canāt generate 0.1 of a cent per user after they already have 100k free users, then there is something wrong with that business.
If you take a large site generating a million users per month, then my changes would add an extra $10k per year to the revenue from that customer.
Meanwhile 90 percent of their customer base who arenāt āscaledā yet, would see a value increase due to 10x cheaper gbās (even this would lead to a revenue increase because customers would store (and pay) with bubble instead of finding a third party api (plug-in) solution). These 90% of customers (including all the agencies who have been hit the hardest) would be on these forums cheering bubbleās new pricing changes.
The more expensive āpay as you goā for the lower tier plans encourages customers to upgrade plans.
Bubble as a platform made the huge mistake of trying to monetise the people who couldnāt pay, the devs / editors and their creative use of data. Meanwhile completely missing monetising the people who could pay for usage, all the app end users. Who are gaining valuable access to boutique software never before available (through creative no code devs), until bubbleās innovative services came along.