As I was bench testing my development, loading my app with data, and running some remote APIs to manipulate it, I didn’t notice how many WU’s were being consumed. I got an email from bubble that I crossed the limit, and then the client side was shut down.
Bubble support took hours to respond, only to tell me that this has been escalated to Tier 2, but that the team is very busy until October 10th - 5 days from now.
Even when I try to upgrade, I don’t know what to upgrade to. I get warnings from Bubble, which I don’t know how to relate to (are you sure… you will be charged for…).
I thought one of the main points of the workload unit pricing was that your app won’t just shut down, but rather you will incur overages. @bamapt, are you sure you aren’t on a legacy plan that hit its capacity? Regardless, I don’t think I have ever heard of an app being frozen or needing to upgrade to relaunch, and nobody in the forum is going to be able to help (as in unfreeze your app). Your best bet is probably to bite the bullet and upgrade to Growth so you can keep going.
Enable overages on your app. If you think you’ve accidentally created an unreasonably large spike in WUs as a result of user error then contact Bubble, explain, and hope they refund them.
I was surprised to face disruptions during development mode while conducting data manipulation for bench testing, especially without prior warning. It was further perplexing when Bubble escalated me to Tier 2 and mentioned their unavailability for the upcoming week. While I didn’t anticipate direct assistance from the community, a bit of constructive guidance would have been appreciated. I believe my frustrations stem from my background in traditional development environments, where one purchases a development license, operates everything locally, and only incurs hosting fees post-launch.
You don’t think the part about overages was constructive? Did you look into that before replying? And again, I thought overages were enabled by default… did you disable overages at some point?
I must admit I felt a bit overwhelmed by some of the responses and found it challenging to distinguish between helpful insights and those that seemed to have a hint of sarcasm. I’m on the agency plan because I’m developing on behalf of someone else. This plan offers tools not available in the free tier, with the intent that once the app is completed, the client will assume the payments. Some aspects of this plan have been confusing to me, and I’m here to seek clarity and guidance, and mainly to find a way to get moving again without meeting with unexpected results.
We’re trying to help but the answers are in the screenshots you posted.
Your app has outgrown it’s Bubble plan. You can upgrade to get it back up. When you’re prompted to upgrade, you’ll be charged the WU usage for this calendar month. You can see this usage in your logs so you can make a decision. If you think the WU is crazily high due to a development error, contact Bubble before upgrading the app so they can credit you the WUs and you won’t pay for them.
Thank you for sharing that link. I did go through it earlier. The section mentioning “Apps on the Free or Agency plan cannot incur overages because these plans are designed for development” stood out to me. I chose the $85 a month agency plan mainly because I believed it would provide me the freedom to experiment and iterate without constraints. It’s essential for me to have that flexibility during the development phase.
Thank you, @georgecollier. I tried to contact Bubble. I described the attempt in my post, along with my astonishment at their response. If I were on the free plan, I would bite the bullet, but I am paying good dollars and did not expect to be waved off…
I’m going to weigh in here as I’ve done a lot of app optimizations recently since people have been concerned with their workflow usages.
Yes, you’d need to have overages turned on or buy a plan to resolve this error.
However, I would be very careful with the overages feature because if you happen to make a mistake and run something recursively a few million times it will just charge your card. I’ve reached out to bubble when this has happened. The first time I got a credit for 100k workload units, wasn’t a major overage but I reached out anyway and they were very good.
Recently I had another overage issue and reached out again for another 100k units and their reply was alarming. Workload credits are strictly 1 time per user. I manage dozens of client bubble apps under my user so not being able to credit back accidental overages is concerning. Having no automatic warning or block on the high overages is even more concerning given that credit cards are also auto charged…
Sure, bubble have an automated email that sends 1 hour after detecting high usage - but I could be out of office when it sends, and there is a lot of workload that can be consumed in 60 minutes! For both of the examples above I caught the issue before the bubble alert even sent, so it would have used a ton more units if I relied on bubbles built in alert.
I imagine they will fix this glaring issue soon. Bubble is really the best at what they do BUT if they are going to charge users for overages and then not have a way to manage that effectively I will have to move apps to a different service.
Indeed @georgecollier like you said, a development-stage platform needs to a playground for making mistakes, and should allow you to launch and stay relatively lean. Bubble’s starter plan is not too bad, but with Xano, which I considered using for the backend, you have to leave $85 a month to launch. I’m now considering Supabase instead.
I’ve been getting Bubble’s ads intensively on my social feeds and news app portraying people without dev skills whatsoever that had a business idea and have used bubble to develop their online business or startup and are now making lots of money. Although I personally know someone who stated out this way (and ended up paying a lot of money to not-so-skilled agencies) I’m concerned the platform is putting a lot of weight on those users rather than on professional developers. A limited backend (difficult to do complex searches) tells me it might be so.
I started programming on Lotus Domino (Lotus Notes, back then) 25 years ago. They were one of the first low-code environments, advertising extensively that any manager can put together her own software to run her team, etc, and that’s exactly what happened - orgs got plugged up with 100’s of databases that did not share information, and were an IT manager’s nightmare. When Microsoft released exchange built on the slick UX of outlook, that was when domino was quickly shown the door in many orgs.
Bubble should be careful that as they themselves scale - and probably have stakeholders breathing down their neck to meet their yearly targets - that they cater for the professional community just as much as for the non-tech. For example, I’d love to find some white papers on the way their backend works more deeply, etc.
This is terrible behavior from a company and one that doesn’t fill me with confidence that the WFU are anything but a cash grab (no logic involved in terms of how they have been explained) and the whole bubble funnel is not setup for the average user but for those who will get the enterprise plan.
I haven’t been able to not make whatever i need using Bubble. I’ve made CRMs, form builders, a pretty complex event calendar, a quiz app, student portals and just simple websites. I haven’t found anything that i couldn’t build.
WU does make it restrictive for certain kinds of apps but you can offload almost all kinds of specialized processing.
Over the years I’ve seen alot of experienced programmers start building Bubble apps expecting Bubble to function like traditional coding. It does to a certain extent but in the end Bubble comes with its own “language” and quirks.
Its like when I design in Illustrator versus Photoshop. There are many functions that give the same result but the abstract layers run differently and require me to switch my brain around.
Unlike Adobe’s products you can build your own plugins, run your scripts or link other services to your Bubble app.
And yes, Bubble’s end goal is to have Bubblers grow to use their enterprise solutions which doesn’t have any WU constraints.
All of my builds run exclusively on Bubble. I do push some client side processing to Javascript.
For example searching through my CRM’s indices. I can do it with Bubble workflows and Regex (which I find to be the fastest way of filtering through complex lists the Bubble way) but some indices already hit 10k text lists and it’s causing small little hiccups. Pushing the search to JavaScript really helped.
Maybe someone can offer insight on this but it feels like if using an external backend (Xano, Supabase), there’s not much value add to using Bubble at all over its competitors (WeWeb, FlutterFlow for mobile), many of which allow you to self host and own your code.
Edit: Bubble’s probably more no-code compared to the alternatives but if you have the technical competence to integrate external backend you probably have the competence to work with a little bit of front end code on other platforms. Again, this is my perception of it and I believe Bubble is strong because of its front end/backend link, but others may have more ideas to contribute.
