@Future where did you read this?
some observations:
- @josh can we have a reply to @aaronsheldon’s comments, please? The community really cares about the methodology you used for this pricing policy as you can see by the number of likes in Aaron’s comments. The more you avoid it the more doubts arise.
- This kind of comment really makes me worry about the work behind this pricing policy. Imo it is just a plain example of first-order thinking: heavy users should pay disproportionally more to cover newcomers. Have you considered the after-effects of this: heavy users putting in doubt the long-term feasibility of working with bubble or newcomers not understanding pricing? This intransigence in not considering/discussing alternatives is making you guys look really bad and we doubt everything.
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Can I stay on my current plan for the next 18 months paying monthly?
Do I have to switch to an annual plan?
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Thanks @josh for the further clarifications. The ‘last active’ one would be really appreciated if you can implement that on the bubble end.
On that same note, could I also ask that you try to give us some kind of easy method to determine how many users are using our apps at any given time. The main reason for this is that we need a way to deploy changes live, without disrupting users. For example, they could be in the middle of a transaction or other important thing and the last thing they’ll want is the famous “black bar of doom”.
As to this criticism:
I think this will balance itself out, a bit like someone mentioned about Jeff Bazos’ mentality… If they give us more, we end up much happier, we talk about how much we love bubble, they get good reputation which leads to new loyal users for them. I trust that they would rather this way of getting rich.
Final thoughts… I’m going to remain on current plan for a while, do measurements, figure out what that will translate to in terms of new users vs WUs and then jump in, with faith and trust in the bubble team.
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@josh Price increases will never go down well with anyone. However, the way in which Bubble manage to alienate their customers is impressive.
In my mind there are 4 types of people that use Bubble.
- Prototype user. These guys build proof of concept, usually on a free or cheap plan and never expand beyond that point.
- Corporate user. Companies that want to build custom software. These guys often scale as time goes by or until Bubble can’t satisfy their needs.
- Entrepeneur small. Most of these guys build small app’s with a very limited client base. Income is usually subscription per user and ties in very closely with their Bubble costs.
- Entrepeneur large. These guys build an single app for global deployment and might scale quite a ways with Bubble before they move on. Often their income is also generated on a per user subscription.
As someone wearing a few of these hats this is my unique take on each user.
- The prototyper is here to stay, he’s not going spend serious money on Bubble and generally you have to accept this user as a given expense in the ecosystem.
- The corporate user. Usually asks 2 questions before starting on the journey. How fast can we build and how much does it cost us. ie. You need to get approval for X budget from the board before jumping on board. In all likelihood these guys benefitted from the old model in that their apps would use more than the average cpu. They would find ways past some of Bubbles limitations since they have money to spend on elaborate workarounds. Probably they are also the ones most concerned about Bubbles inability to scale and work with large datasets. In the past the workarounds was a nuisance but it was bearable if they wanted to stay on Bubble. You are now penalizing them in that they have to pay for things they need to do to accommodate inefficiencies in your system. As an example anyone doing serious reporting in Bubble will understand the concept of keeping dedicated reporting tables.
The new pricing will cause you to lose some of these clients, other might stay because, well, even with a 4 x price increase after your most recent refactoring Bubble is a bargain. New corporates won’t sign up because there is no fixed pricing and existing corporates now need to rethink every single thing they do. As an example we calculated adding a single extra field to a dashboard report adds USD 0.06 to our monthly costs. Not big in itself but considering some of our dashboards contains up to 400 values, this keeps adding up to a point where the scaling question needs to be asked based on cost no just performance. - I believe a rather large portion of Bubble users fall into the small Entrepeneur category. This is where you distorted “averages” comes from as many of these guys have products that they are just parking or trying to sell to companies. The per user pricing model only works if you’re guaranteed to know what your input costs are. Your new model broke pricing predictability so there goes a whole bunch of paying bubble users.
- Large entrepreneurs very closely follow the small entrepreneur as they especially need to know their input costs if they’re going to start shopping around for seed money. Get ready for a large exodus as well.
So this is my summary and my prediction is we’re likely to see another significant adjustment the way pricing is done withing the next 1-2 years.
With the next round, here is my advice.
You need to make money so inherently there is nothing wrong with trying to build a fairer model. However, you need to understand you customer, they want fixed costs, or rather predictability.
Take these WU’s and converted them into CPU units. For example, 1 CPU = 5000 WU’s per hour and assign CPU units to plans. Enable dynamic CPU with a cost budget for those that want to accommodate periodic spikes in CPU.
On a personal note, I’ve switched off every single app I have on Bubble. Unfortunately I’m scheduled to launch 1 app come Monday. After the trial we’ll have to see if the customer is willing to sign a contract which stipulates cost escalations can be done as an when it suits Bubble. One thing is certain, personally I will not do any more development on Bubble nor will I ever recommend Bubble to anyone ever again.
On a corporate level, we have the resources to move a lot of things out of Bubble so that’s what we will start doing, thank you for breaking my development schedule for the next 6 months… We won’t be leaving Bubble quite yet but we’re certainly not going to continue scaling and entrenching in Bubble. You’ve proven time and again Bubble is too unpredictable to be a technology partner to be locked in with.
Also, I believe I’m not alone in saying you’ve upset many an IT manager with your new pricing model. We work with budgets that need to be approved and adhered to. I cannot say to my CFO I think Bubble is going to cost me 24k this year but it might be 30k depending on what we build and how much we use the system. This in itself motivates me and many like me to keep an eye open for something with more stability and predictability.
So that’s my 2 cents. Use it or lose it. Good luck, building a big company has never been easy. 
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so basically I’ve just wasted months developing an app on bubble that I now all of a sudden have no idea if I’ll even be able to afford launching and scaling it… are we just supposed to close our eyes and hope that the apps we are building are financially viable???
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I bet you the new feature of selecting which data fields to retrieve in search is rolled out in under a month.
I’d expect to see everything from this thread in under 4 months.
Bubbles got the engineers now, so a very different amount of available man hours than what they had in rolling out the flex box.
In my 5+ years on Bubble, I haven’t seen as many new features as I have in the past 3 months.
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That would help to reduce satellite data types and additional WU cost of their maintaining. But not sure it will be rolled out within a short timeframe 
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@josh Hi i have some questions regarding workload usage. Currently i am in a Personal plan.
My workload usage for last 30 days 
As you can see above my WU usage for last 30 days is around 3 million and its around 100K per day on average. Even though for the last couple of days my WU usage is reduced considerably from 100K per day to around 10K per day. But still for 30 days i would be using around 300K per month which is still expensive for a small business owner like me. This forces me to upgrade from Legacy Personal plan to Growth plan or buy an additional Workload Tier 1 which is still expensive for me.
I have around 2500 user records out of which only 200 are active users. And 10,000 records of Data Type: Customer Plans (which contains customer order details).
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As you you can see from from my 75% of WU usage is from fetching data which is very essential to manipulate data to run my business. And i am using Do a Search for: operator a lot. For example if i fetch a user’s name by Search for User:each item’s Name:first item and i use some constraints in Search for User: to narrow the search, Does this expression utilizes less WU for fetching single item or it utilizes more WU for fetching single data from 2500 records? If its the later then does it mean the more records you have in DB the more WU you will consume?
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I have a repeating group which fetches 100s of records from my DB at once. Does pagination of RG helps in optimizing WU consumption?
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How WU utilized for count: function ? If i wanted to count a list of items: then does it mean the more items in the list the more WU is utilized to count ?
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And while using the Do a search for:Items list in a dropdown or RG, the WU consumption depends on total number of records you have in DB from which list is fetched or number of records that gets fetched ? By using more constraint in the Do a search for: expression reduces the WU consumption?
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What is Individual data request mean in the above pie chart?
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Since my 75% of WU usage is from fetching data are any there solutions to optimize the search?
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Are we gonna be charged based on WU usage from May 1st or do we have 18 months to optimize our app ?
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It’s in their monthly updates… They addressed it because it’s something the community keeps on asking.
WUs have been recalculated. Started 13th April i believe. So your chart doesn’t reflect the new reduced WU as the new calculations are not retroactive. Take your average daily WUs from the first day of the new WU calculations to estimate what your new 30 days is gonna be like.
Yes you can
My WU calculations are reduces 60 to 80%. Depending on the app. With dome optimizations I should be able to reduce 20% on top of that.
That only a 110 to 120% increase in price. Really happy with that!
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Hi folks,
Where can be find the new pricing per subscription table and the wu add on pricing?
Thanks for the help
Here: Upcoming Changes to Bubble’s Pricing Plans in 2023
But I recommend just using: Subscription Planner | Bubble
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Here’s the main blog about new pricing which includes charts of the new monthly plans, and additional WU add-ons:
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as I understand and according to josh last post, there will be an additional 100k of WU’s on top of what is specified in the current price table
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It’s an additional 100k WUs / mo on paid plans for development
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I mean yes. But I am happy to know that they listened to the community and are making improvements