5 months worth of fees charged in 1 day

tane1 · 2025-03-18T02:02:57.115Z

I recently took over ownership of our Bubble platform from someone who finished up with our business. I needed to load new card details against my name before I could remove the previous user. Overnight my card was charged 5 x the teams plan amount in a single day - that is nearly $4,000 NZD.

I raised this immediately via the support chat and have still not been repaid (its been a week now). I keep getting told that they are waiting to hear back from the team that looks after this - it sounds like Ai response to me…

It is hurting my business cash-flow. Has anyone else had this experience? Does anyone have any ideas on how to escalate this?

Thanks in advance.

Jici · 2025-03-18T02:06:23.899Z

You probably get charged for WU overcharge. Did you check your logs? Also, I don’t know who finished your app… but maybe it’s not optimized for WU stuff.

Maybe you can share apps metrics…

sem · 2025-03-18T05:56:08.953Z

Most responses are auto responses. Most cases it takes a week or longer when the question is a bit harder to respond. Sometimes it also happens though that you do not hear anything anymore so always wise to ping them if you think nothing is moving. Just make sure to ask open questions in order for them to tell you what the issue is and what they are doing

tane1 · 2025-03-18T06:08:03.170Z

Cheers but there are no issues with WU.

tane1 · 2025-03-18T06:09:08.941Z

Thanks. I’ve chased repeatedly since last week. I dont understand how they can over-charge so badly with no warning or justification. I find it absolutely disgusting.

sem · 2025-03-18T06:32:39.302Z

I understand your feeling. In the past I had some technical issues like Bubble down, slow or other things and I thought that calling support would help only to realize that paying hundreds per month would not mean that as a customer I could call for support when the platform is down. I think you can call when dedicated but I am not sure. It has a $3500 a month price tag I think however.

So I started emailing. Always get an automated response and at least it takes another 24 hours to get a second response. If the issue is challenging it will usually take a week or so and three to four different Bubble employees to get the issue across.

I was complaining about this with the idea that Bubble would understand how weird this is. Having customers paying hundreds per month and running their business on your platform but no way to get priority support. Nothing changed.

So eventually I accepted everything. If something does not change in years there is probably a culture at the company that prevent it from changing or it is intentional.

We made our business less depended on Bubble, cut therefore our Bubble bill by 5x and are working on our next steps.

I still think that for some ideas Bubble can be an option. Prototyping and first few years in business to tweak and improve your product after which you can use AI to write the product in plain vanilla code for instance. Or when you are an enterprise and do not care about $10.000 plus bills per month for Bubble and have a dedicated support member.

In the end we must not forget that Bubble is in transition mode. It is moving away from mum and dad businesses to enterprise and agency type of business. So a lot of old Bubblers feel the pain as they grew with Bubble and Bubble with them but on the other hand more and more agencies and enterprises come in.

Moral of the story, accept it for what it is and use the strong points. If you build your business on it you might need to consider the dedicated products in order to get meaningful support.

tane1 · 2025-03-19T01:24:13.184Z

This is really interesting I appreciate you sharing this experience. I think we should be able to expect a decent level of service for nearly US$400 a month. I certainly don’t expect to be significantly over-charged and to have to chase repeatedly and virtually beg for the issue to be looked at.

Someone did finally get back to me and let me know the money would be refunded which is a relief but I now have to wait 5-10 business days. If at the top end of that, that would be 15 business days that they have taken to repay me what should never have been taken in the first place. US$2,000 is not an insignificant amount of money. Its been a very dissapointing experience and I warn others to beware. cheers

johnny · 2025-03-19T04:17:27.901Z

sem:

Most responses are auto responses.

I think you’re referring to Tier 1 support? I don’t think there are any auto-responses unless you’re referring to the AI chatbot that tried to answer your question. Tier 1 does typically have canned responses tho, but if they can’t help, they escalate to Tier 2 and it seems like that team’s quite overwhelmed nowadays with slower response times

sem:

I was complaining about this with the idea that Bubble would understand how weird this is. Having customers paying hundreds per month and running their business on your platform but no way to get priority support. Nothing changed.

So eventually I accepted everything. If something does not change in years there is probably a culture at the company that prevent it from changing or it is intentional.

We made our business less depended on Bubble, cut therefore our Bubble bill by 5x and are working on our next steps.

I still think that for some ideas Bubble can be an option. Prototyping and first few years in business to tweak and improve your product after which you can use AI to write the product in plain vanilla code for instance. Or when you are an enterprise and do not care about $10.000 plus bills per month for Bubble and have a dedicated support member.

Food for thought, but I think Bubble’s support is more than support, they’re more success-oriented meaning they don’t only answer “support questions” which is what I would classify as billing or bug-related reports, they actually help users with diagnosing issues with their app. It might seem like a lot of the reports they get are bug reports (based on the forum or whatnot), but I’m sure the majority are also just questions users who aren’t on the forum need help on that on their Tier 2 team are equipped to work on.

It’s true that you get a dedicated Technical Success Manager when you’re on Enterprise, but that kinda just makes sense when you’re paying thousands a month, but yeah it also does kinda suck for those who aren’t at that level yet.

What they should do IMO is prioritize support by app tiers or cost per app, but that would have a side effect on new users getting started having trouble reaching support - I guess we win some and we lose some

tane1:

Someone did finally get back to me and let me know the money would be refunded which is a relief but I now have to wait 5-10 business days. If at the top end of that, that would be 15 business days that they have taken to repay me what should never have been taken in the first place. US$2,000 is not an insignificant amount of money.

Great to hear that - what ended up being the issue if it wasn’t a WU issue?

sem · 2025-03-19T05:26:55.565Z

Tier 1 or 2 does not matter. Rarely you get a useful answer within 48 hours. First an auto response “we get back to you” and in 24 hours “we forwarded your response to a specialist” and then the fun begins.

I understand that it is a difficult business to be in for Bubble but that does not mean you can let you customers wait for a week or more.

It happened in the past that the app was down or something was not working, asking support, no response, app still down so pressing for a fast reply and eventually there was a bug or technical issue.

It just makes it harder to build your business on top of it I think.

Therefore I think it is wise from Bubble to focus on enterprise businesses and let the current mum and dad businesses act as a nice cushion and helpful army of support people in the forum

johnny · 2025-03-19T05:44:37.047Z

Yeah fair, maybe you can pass some of this stuff onto the success team @fede.bubble

I think what would probably be helpful is including a “This is an urgent issue that affect my app” toggle that people can select when their app is completely down that flags it internally for the success team.

Hopefully it won’t be abused for things that aren’t that urgent, but you won’t really know. Based on experience from running support operations, I haven’t seen that option abused that much, but who knows, kinda depends on the user base

sem · 2025-03-19T05:55:50.533Z

Did all of the above without any meaningful effect. At some point you stop doing it and move on.

johnny · 2025-03-19T05:58:58.901Z

They didn’t implement what I suggested above though?

Since day 1, Bubble was even created to begin with was to help non-technical founders build a web app without needing technical coding skills. It doesn’t make sense for them to just focus on enterprise because non-technical founders don’t usually have an existing enterprise they want to move to Bubble - they have an idea that they want to bring to life quickly without he need to know to code.

tane1 · 2025-03-19T07:57:46.061Z

I actually have no idea. No explanation was provided. I have asked and will let you know if I get a response. It does seem very odd.

tane1 · 2025-03-19T07:58:18.933Z

Spot on.