A word of caution to Bubble-powered entrepreneurs

building4stripe · 2024-07-23T13:31:48.281Z

We’re running a startup with pre-seed funding on Bubble, which we started developing in 2022. We’re hosting an advanced suite of services, including a fintech/neo-bank feature that is dependent on banking partners.

In 2022, we migrated to the Enterprise plan solely because a static IP address was required by one of our partners. It was an expensive upgrade, especially since we didn’t really need most of the features offered on the plan, but we didn’t have any choice if we wanted to be able to partner with a bank to offer banking services.

Looking back at this decision (and many others we made immediately after securing our pre-seed round), it was a major mistake. The pre-revenue startup investor market drained around the same time, and we now know that we needed substantially more runway in order to be able to fundraise a seed round at an acceptable valuation. Building on Bubble has some major advantages, but if we had decided to go the traditional route we would have been able to make use of $200k in Google Cloud credits and $50k+ in AWS credits. Instead, we’ve accumulated ~$75k in Bubble fees, and much much much more in financial partner fees (although none of our partners have threatened to cancel our contracts due to arrears).

We’ve reached the point where we’ve been in arrears with Bubble for a couple cycles (although we’ve made several payments on a payment plan), and they’ve now decided to turn off our dedicated instance, which will put us and our customers in a very difficult situation. It’s hard to judge them: It was our decision to sign up for an expensive plan. But again, with AWS and Google, we would still have plenty of runway and be able to spend cash on growth instead of hosting.

The good news is that we’re growing, profitable, and closing in on a new round of funding, but we likely won’t be able to meet Bubble’s final payment deadline and we’re biting our nails worrying about the consequences for our financial features. Hopefully we’ll be able to return to a dedicated instance and resume all services when our new round closes, but of course that’s still at Bubble’s mercy.

So fellow entrepreneurs, if you build on Bubble, think long and hard about whether Enterprise is truly necessary for your startup. Don’t fall in the same trap as us. And keep in mind that Google Cloud and AWS has some awesome startup credit programs that I wish we had made use of.

georgecollier · 2024-07-23T14:42:08.528Z

I empathise with your points - I might respond to a couple which might put things into perspective.

building4stripe:

we would have been able to make use of $200k in Google Cloud credits and $50k+ in AWS credits. Instead, we’ve accumulated ~$75k in Bubble fees

If you’d used these partners, you’d also have accumulated $500k in software engineer salaries building the product over a year, versus on Bubble with one developer in 6 months for $50k or something.

building4stripe:

The good news is that we’re growing, profitable, and closing in on a new round of funding,

The question to ask is, would you have gotten here without Bubble? Would you have been able to find the money to pay traditional developers or find some that will work for equity (why would they when they can get paid $300k plus equity at FAANG?).

Congratulations on your new funding and I hope it works out for you. What Bubble costs in terms of code ownership and self-hosting, I think it more than makes for by reducing cost of development (not hosting necessarily, but development by reducing the development time), and increasing the speed of iteration. My clients have been able to launch products that rival competitors that have existed for 2+ years and been funded with 8 figure sums. No other platform would’ve allowed them to do that so fast and so cheaply!

building4stripe · 2024-07-23T15:02:43.327Z

You’re 100% right: There’s no way we could have developed our platform this quickly and affordably without Bubble.

My point regarding AWS/Google Cloud was more towards how we might have been able to leverage free credits from those services and use them as a proxy for some of the most advanced Enterprise-plan features and our partner integrations (e.g. static IP). On the other hand, we avoided the shared instance service disruptions over the past few months by having our own dedicated instance.

We wouldn’t be anywhere close to where we’re at without Bubble, but we really should not have been so quick to jump on the Enterprise plan. Stay on a regular plan for as long as possible, even with pre-seed funding.

hi.luisacosta · 2024-07-23T15:10:11.000Z

Stay on a regular plan for as long as possible, even with pre-seed funding.

Yup! Keep costs down all across the board as much as possible. Hoping you guys can pull this off! Good luck!

mac2 · 2024-07-23T15:31:45.508Z

Woof, tough situation!

georgecollier:

If you’d used these partners, you’d also have accumulated $500k in software engineer salaries building the product over a year, versus on Bubble with one developer in 6 months for $50k or something.

^^ My thought also…

hi.luisacosta:

Hoping you guys can pull this off! Good luck!

^^

sem · 2024-07-23T16:13:39.677Z

Thanks for sharing! I understand the pain. Have you consider rebuilding the front end on other no co code tools and have some business/data heavy logic offloaded to a backend like that of Google, Supabase etc? And is so, would you be willing to share that journey with us? All in all this post has valuable insights. Thanks and in any case be proud of what you have accomplished and all the best for the rest of the startup journey!

opinionspace.africa · 2024-07-24T09:46:11.123Z

Personally I built everything on bubble, decided I would only increase workflows as needed. After I went live, I exhausted 175k workflows in 5 days. So I purchased and extra 200k and those lasted 3 days. Then I jumped to 750k and those were out in 24hrs. It felt like the more I purchased the more I used up. I decided early to shut down the app and rebuilt it as a frontend-only with all the massive data and workflows hosted on Firestore. Basically bubble is only the GUI,80% of the business processes are on google cloud and 4months down I have yet to pay a dime to google. Same app is running on half the capacity of bubble starter package with 87,000 users and all external partners are linked directly to the backend on cloud. Now I’m ready to scale.

gerbertdelangen · 2024-07-24T10:39:58.084Z

opinionspace.africa:

Same app is running on half the capacity of bubble starter package with 87,000 users and all external partners are linked directly to the backend on cloud. Now I’m ready to scale.

Now this is impressive man!

marcusj007 · 2024-07-29T12:51:38.573Z

Legendary, sounds good. What are your thoughts on Xano as an alt backend and database solution? Thanks

tkamal · 2024-07-30T08:46:57.780Z

building4stripe:

In 2022, we migrated to the Enterprise plan solely because a static IP address was required by one of our partners. It was an expensive upgrade, especially since we didn’t really need most of the features offered on the plan

I believe the issue lies in this part. You selected the easy way to fix your issue, but you are paying too much to implement this solution. However, there are many cheaper solutions to get a fixed IP without needing to upgrade to a dedicated server.

For myself, I had the same issue, and we fixed it by using custom code running on AWS. It costs us less than $20 per month, plus the developers’ fee for the first time. Bubble is not at fault and doesn’t force you to select a dedicated server with high prices; you chose the wrong way.

marcusj007 · 2024-07-31T06:23:26.529Z

opinionspace.africa:

I decided early to shut down the app and rebuilt it as a frontend-only with all the massive data and workflows hosted on Firestore. Basically bubble is only the GUI,80% of the business processes are on google cloud and 4months down

Hi there, I’m starting out but will attempt this configuration from the offset because undoubted my project will require this level of brilliance. Please can you advise me did you use plugin like firebase, Zapier for the firestore connectivity or you managed it drectly. Guidance on a suggestion here would be greatly appreciated, apologies if its a silly question Many Thanks for sharing these insights. Most helpful!

charles6 · 2024-07-31T06:53:09.166Z

I think Xano is great and simple to setup with ready plugins and all. My only concern was that the payments kick in after 2weeks and for a data-intensive app it would run my budget into the ground.

charles6 · 2024-07-31T07:15:32.911Z

marcusj007:

Hi there, I’m starting out but will attempt this configuration from the offset because undoubted my project will require this level of brilliance. Please can you advise me did you use plugin like firebase, Zapier for the firestore connectivity or you managed it drectly. Guidance on a suggestion here would be greatly appreciated, apologies if its a silly question Many Thanks for sharing these insights. Most helpful!

Its a blend. My app just has too many sync operations to use tool like Zapier (would accrue huge bills), so I used the Firebase plugin by Estare for its simplicity. However, its a relatively new plugin and not all the provided actions work properly so after testing it out I decided to run some data through manual CRUD functions over Bubble’s API connector. If you are not familiar with the setup you can get detailed step by step instructions from chatgpt. I used rowy.app to bulk import things/documents for free and Flutterflow to setup everything firebase (Backend workflows, push, mobile app etc).

marcusj007 · 2024-07-31T07:23:26.856Z

Many Thanks Charles. Very helpful…

ericm · 2024-10-03T18:43:26.668Z

I’m finally at a point where I’d like to take on “serious” technical partner(s). I’ve taken my bubble build about as far as I, alone, can. And yet I’ve always seen it as just a prototype, a road-map to building a gen-1 version outside the bubble-sphere. My biggest stumbling block is/has always been finding someone who sees bubble as a value-add to the process. With my 20 years industry experience I’ve identified a problem, researched it, designed a solution, built a prototype ( Bubble build ) I’ve conducted limited beta tests and NOW is the time to push! Sure we could clean-up the bubble build and flip the revenue switch. But IMO that would be short-sighted. Anyway, it’s a huge market segment, and this solution remains relevant, so I’ll keep plugging away at.