I agree with this truly. I believe Bubble still has a lot to figure out ever since they transitioned from bootstrap to invested business.
I won’t speak for their values as i am not familiar with them but yeah i still wonder which magical fairy’s ass WU came from.
I get the WHY and support the idea of equivalence. It’s the HOW that still needs more work and better documentation. Oh yes and as always, better optimization on Bubble’s backend and more optimization features for us.
As a member for many years I can tell you with confidence that Bubble never responds to angry people displaying attitude and calling them names. (and I’m not sure why I am.)
I understand you are frustrated. However there has got to be a better way to approach Bubble in order to receive a response.
What’s done is done, plain and simple.
The fact this topic is still open is pretty astonishing to me, they clearly aren’t going back on anything and moving forward.
I really don’t see a use case for bubble at this point. If you have a market place, which is a template that’s been beaten to death, people can hammer your databases driving up your WU’s not buying a single thing. Then what?
What if you developed a plug-in and have a site to show it off. Either you pay for overages or get it shut down half way through the month? Maybe your plug-in revenue can supplement the WU overages?
I’ve had a bunch of ideas to use bubble for aside from my main project, but instead of the How/When question of making it, I keep trying to figure out a way to monetize usage that would make it worth the time. But then, I could waste a bunch of time and realize it’s not profitable. 
But yes, the little quality updates here and there are kind of odd to me, as the editor needs some serious TLC, since the “editor speed increase” update seemed to have worked and then quickly took a nose dive after official release.
But I also agree that tagging people isn’t worth the time it takes to type it out, they have bigger fish to fry.
To be honest, I probably fall in this category - and that is mostly a time thing. I’d love to share knowledge more, but as a full-time employee, and an entrepreneur founding my own company that was about to launch with several customers (and is now delayed indefinitely, thanks to this bubble mess!), and a family man - I really can’t spare a minute, especially when bubble goes off and throws a grenade into the room with a time set to explode in the next 18 months. I for one have no interest in being in that room when it goes off, and I see no further value in investing my time in upskilling in bubble, as in my eyes - bubble is no longer part of my future app roadmap. The credibility is gone.
I think many of us have tried various means. I’ve even pointed out how their corporate values (as shown on their main website) are being broken by this change. Even that kind of “corporate” speak doesn’t seem to elicit a response from @josh and @emmanuel. It really makes me question what could be more important than engaging with their customers - it’s as if we are not the focus of bubble’s efforts, we are simply an obstacle (anyone following D&D will have seen the internal discussions from Wizards of the Coast over the licensing saga… the actions by bubble to date seem to be disturbingly familiar?) - apparently our apps are costing too much for bubble to host and impacting profits, and now the VCs are investing - they have an expected OPEX target that needs to be hit, and the only way to do this is by forcing customers to reduce our infrastructure use, whether by forcing low-profit customers to leave in frustration or fear, or by forcing us further into the rabbit-hole of deep optimisation in a platform that lacks even the most basic functionality for optimisation…
There are very few use cases left IMO. Simple web UI, with as many client-side workloads as possible is the only real viable option. Keep the workflows extremely simple and use another backend provider, and it might be affordable. You just need to spend an inordinate amount of time fine-tuning and optimise your app, rather than doing what an entrepreneur SHOULD be doing which is focusing on building their company. Oh and don’t forget - avoid going viral at all costs, or you’re business will be sunk by a sudden WU surge!
How I’m working on it is completely moving my entire processing back-end away from bubble into a new provider (I’ve tested backendless, the new pricing model will be a problem at this stage but I’ll probably use them in future. In the interim, I’m using Xano). Put all your important data that gets processed in there, but leave any static content in bubble (including data). In all your APIs, return a list of ordered unique UIDs, and any major request in your bubble app that does any form of function - set that up as an API instead in the backend. Use bubble client-side plugins such as List Shifter (for sorting your data, client side) and Floppy (for simple iteration and client-side browser caching), and you have the chance to dramatically drop your WUs. The ultimate goal is to simply avoid anything that requires effort in bubble. Lookups of data by UID is a cheap operation, as the UID is an indexed field and thus very light WU - thus why it works best to return the UID from an API instead (just watch out, too much data from an API call or many calls will also cost you - think very carefully about your authentication model too!). It does mean however that bubble UIDs need to be stored in your backend database too (and indexed!) so you will need a means of keeping things synced, but unlike with bubble - most backend providers allow you to optimise your DB using various indexes. As an example, I have one query that in bubble was taking about ~2s per displayed item, but with my backend - the same query executes in 0.02s for the complete list AND sub-items. That’s the efficiency you can get by simply moving the backend.
You’d think they at the very least would provide some form of update to the community on what is going on, or at least acknowledging that they have heard our concerns. We are ultimately the end users, and have invested our time and money into this platform - but like you, increasingly questioning whether any element of this change is actually even viable. I reckon the bulk of their effort is probably focused on some form of damage control at this point.
The lack of any form of engagement and very minimal feature iteration raises alarm bells that something quite serious is going on internally at bubble… the fact that we can even raise concerns over the lack of adherence to their own stated corporate values, or mention the poor viability of the platform to an entire portion of their customer base (entrepreneurs, MVP scale-up, etc.) and illicit no response, not even a PR one from bubble - it says either they are not listening, don’t care and will do it anyway, or something is going wrong internally. I suspect it’s sadly probably a combination of all three.
It’s because you are quite new to the community and don’t understand it’s role in the early days of bubble’s success. Just like Facebook was ripped by community amongst many others if you build on community and you attack said community then their are repercussion, just like you keep attacking the community because clearly your app is in early days and don’t truly understand the unscablable costs.
If you build on community and gain support from that community you cannot easily walk away from them, no matter how much you want to.
So let people complain if they want too, and stop being negative against everyone. For all you know this is the sour pill bubble needs to swallow to reach their success. They might not like the medicine but they patient might need it.
At the end of the day if Bubble’s strategy does not pan out of getting corporates to use their platform, which corporates will be hesitant to do as its locked in and not say Amazon or google, then it’s going to be the downfall for all those people who built their apps here. And with a bubble being scaled so big that downfall can come any second.
Microsoft just release their AI for building apps, and it’s going to be more and more powerful, it’s going to be hard for Bubble to get into the corporate market.
I have already started the transition to move away and around 30% of my app is off bubble, and expect to be done by the end of the year. The reality is that I do not believe in Bubble’s future strategy and I don’t want to risk all my hard work disappearing one day due to a bad decision done by a management team I don’t know so well.
I personally value positively the direct calls to @josh and @emmanuel made here and elsewhere: these calls seem to me as attempts to prevent this Bubble from meeting the fate of every bubble, which - as well known - is to give so much wonder and amazement for a while and then, at the climax…pop!
With a few negligible exceptions, direct callers are all pointing out very serious problems that impact, yes, on their personal situation, but they are doing so - as they always have done - with a spirit of community.
Personally, I very much appreciate the politeness, the calm and professionalism of those calls (especially if we consider with empathy the drama each of those people is experiencing), and I suffer to see them ignored, just as I have always rejoiced until yesterday to see the magic created by the close contact between community and management.
Bubble became what it is today primarily because of this synergy between users and management. In 30 years, I have seen management very often decide at some point to capitalize on the contribution made by the community - ending up losing, in order, community, market share, and company itself.
Too drastic? Well, everyone here seems to agree that the remaining use cases for Bubble have shrunk dramatically. Anyway, I’ve tried to collect numbers on this point (please check this survey, cast your vote e read the CAVEAT below). At the moment I’m writing this post, these are the results:
Now, will a company that has continued to hire so many units per month for over a year be able to remain profitable once…
… could find itself with only a small fraction of its current customer base (the survey - which let’s state clear, is currently based on a ridiculous dataset of only 17 respondents - estimates a loss of 80 %) .
… “build everything on Bubble” will no longer exist because it will have morphed into “build on Bubble only apps that guarantee you a minimum profit equal to the consumption of the WUs you will use without you could have any idea today what that consumption will be and only start developing if you feel confident that you can master WUs keeping in mind that we have to finish tuning them and nocoders are no longer allowed to make mistakes here, since even innocent error could cost millions of WU that will be invoiced!”
…the community that was supporting you and bringing you hundreds of customers a day is dispersing and indeed boycotting you because of the way you treated it.
…the ecosystem of plugin will stop growing/evolving
…it will be recorded on Bubble’s CV that in 2023 it made decisions that forced the closure/escape of its customers.
…competitors who were previously scrambling to find a small opening suddenly find themselves inundated with demand (and financial resources useful to compete) from customers to whom Bubble taught (at his expense!) the magic of nocode, incubating a market demand that they then blew up for the benefit of competitors.
I hope I’m wrong, however these are not prediction: these are things we are seeing now going live here, on Twitter, Telegram, etc. Personally, I consider it a mistake for management to remain silent while all this unease is being expressed – of course my opinion counts for nothing, but the statement of Bubble values does, and this silence is absolutely contrary to that statement.
So, even if nobody asked us, perhaps the community can still do something to prevent this from going any further. However - and I totally agree with @bcart0v - we should get past the “grievance” stage.
We may try to offer “problems + solutions” to management in a more usable way than a thread with 800 posts. For example, there is no denying that here @Jici with 1 post and 36 likes delivered a strong and clear message. As well as there is no denying that concrete proposals from @boston85719, @tylerboodman , @kossiorek1 , @justin.hume , @gaimed , @NigelG (and many others I’m not allowed to mention here) have all get an answer from Josh…
I do hope that the next monthly community update this week will not highlight the “Table element” for the third month in a row, but will offer a clear update and timing on those suggestions which have been said to be “on our list”.
Perhaps our contribution could be more useful going somewhere in bewteen those mentioned above, for example: a series of threads each titled “NEW PRICING - [Problem] - [Solution]” where using likes to the first message could measure the level of how much this or that proposal is felt by the community and any post inside will further elaborate, without deviating from the focus.
[personal belief] Considering all the issues I see popping up every day in the fora, I tend to believe that at this point they can’t ask for help , but they would like to [/personal belief].
Would anyone like to get started?
Judging by the product roundup for May, they have no interest or care to even mention WUs in their monthly updates but hey we have a faster editor if you discount all the comments on the forum stating the opposite 
Bubble management reading forum posts about WUs:
That monthly roundup email is a JOKE. 70x faster design canvas…yeah right! Felt like another Slap in the Face from Bubble. I experience bugs in the editor every day. I can not give up any more of my time to Bubble to log Bug reports about them, otherwise I will have no time to try and build to earn a living.
@boston85719 70 x 0 = 0
As another poster noted, your responses come across tone deaf.
You are part of the problem. Whitewashing Bubble’s major screw ups and giving them credit where credit is not due. Why? For no reason other than being a fanboy.
If you have no skin in the game to demand answers from the top, what are you even doing replying to those who does?
Another one comes out of the woodwork! How do i put this? Suck it up, put on your big boy/girl pants and move on like most of us.
It’s extremely pathetic and very sad to see people like yourselves continuosly degenerate yourselves by resorting to petty playground bickering. It’s always, “you must not have a lot of users” or “you must not have built a REAL app” 
I’ll just say that ya’ll aren’t the only ones who had to have awkward conversations with clients, tuck away potential projects or end up absorbing costs.
I won’t justify myself or have anything to prove. Not in this thread anyway. Go look around for my posts if you feel obliged to make yourself feel less silly.
If you moved on what are you still doing on this thread? Genuine question.
Seriously, give up. Let those who demand answers be.
You are part of the problem, so I’m glad you put your pants on and left.
The less fanboys here the better.
Let’s not degenerate to fighting, it isn’t productive. Ultimately, we are all being impacted by this whether we have the ability to absorb the cost impact or not. I for one fall into the category of being too early on in my journey, without paying customers to support the costs of scale-up. I am entirely self-funded, and have nobody to help build my app or manage my company, and have made a conscious decision to avoid VC funding to allow me to scale my company at my own pace. Many others speaking out are in the same situation.
Whilst some might already have clients or a stream of funding, many of us don’t and are simply frustrated at the lack of a path forward. I think the recent announcement of “70x improved performance of the canvas!” with not a single reference to resolving the REAL issues, has simply inflamed things further, so let’s try and be civil.
FWIW - I too will be “moving on”, and that will be away from bubble. They have a good product, but with this new pricing model making a mockery of “fair pricing”, I would rather invest my time in learning native front-end code to build my code properly anyway (since bubble lacks any useful optimisation tools), and leverage a new backend provider for the core APIs. In my case, I have settled on Xano as that backend.
I like how you asked me to put my big boy pants on and went on to make the word degenerate bold 
hopefully school starts for you soon.
Back on topic - thank you to everyone who is still active and pushing for answers. Bubble will do nothing unless and until we demand improvements.
Hopefully things will improve with more WU optimizations and cost reductions.
“Hopefully” is doing a lot of work here.
fair price’ depends on which side you’re on. In the end, the cost-benefit relationship will do the job."
“Fair Price” by definition means fair for all parties, which is not the case here. The problem is, that market dynamics tend to place excessive weighting on popularity or rarity of a product… meaning a price often ends up being higher than is reasonable.
Bubble leverages this to their favour, knowing there isn’t a lot of comparable alternatives out there, forcing us to “suck it up”. This is not “fair” behaviour, as not once did they bother to ask the community what a fair price might be, apart from a survey a long while back that at no point mentioned the intent to barrel down this consumption model path, which benefits only them in the vast majority of cases.
Throughout this whole saga, the one defining factor is that bubble proves they just don’t care to listen or reflect on our concerns. There are no responses to genuine concerns, no engagement, no self-reflection, and even wilful ignorance in their tone deaf response announcing new features. I personally could not care less for any new features they release, as I have halted all development of my app in bubble. It’s clear they don’t care for my patronage, they clearly don’t care for the community or the innovators, and they clearly don’t care if any one of us might just be the next google.
Apparently they would much rather alienate an entire community, destroy their well-earned credibility and trust, all for the sake of a few dollars. Trust takes years to earn, seconds to destroy. Don’t be surprised to see the story of bubble go into business management lectures in future of how to destroy a successful business in a stroke of a pen.
Just watch as bubble competitors pick up the influx of new customers, and build an alternative to bubble. I highly doubt any nocode platforms have been sitting on their hands without working on a front end capability - they were just biding their time. Xano has my patronage now, backendless has a front end capability (although immature), it won’t take much to replace bubble from a tech stack perspective, if the competition is willing to invest.
Sadly, I think hope is going to lose here. It clearly hasn’t been doing us any favours so far. All I can hope for is that enough people leave bubble that they realise their catastrophic error, before it’s too late to correct. Bubble management has a lot to answer for on this entire saga.
