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 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.
I’m happy to share that bubble tier 2 support came back to me, and after a few exchanges and an explicit request from me to reimburse the WUs they did just that.
I was accredited the WUs and can now go back to work.
Thanks for everyone’s support.
@georgecollier you can re-edit the title adding “bubble credited within 24 hours”
