Absolutely. Constant issues with the editor and probably averaging 1 bug report a week. Having to close down my browser regularly to try and mitigate the speed issues. Are grandfather pricing users being subtly ‘encouraged’ to move across to the new pricing or is this happening to everyone?
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0.5 WU to schedule each WF + 0.5 WU to modify each item (row)? Scheduling should be 0.6 WU (as mentioned in manual), but may be you were awarded with a discount for such a big number of items 
This was via the Editor’s data tab. 
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It is buried in the fine print that you are charged for using the data editor and for using development mode.
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I ran into this just yesterday - 1600WU bulk updating a single field on 2800 rows.
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Yes, but I’m on the yearly subcription and my bill should come out every 24th of the month (I just paid last May 24). But they compute the WUs for the last 30 days, not from the start of billing. It’s just confusing and you need an extra step to calculate your WUs.
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This is terrible news. How are we supposed to deal with changes to rows of data without paying through the nose for it? 10,000 rows isn’t even a large number of items to update. Please review this @emmanuel @josh
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It really seems like @emmanuel & @josh’s strategy here is to just wait for this thread to die off…
Reading their other comments throughout the forum on this topic, it seems they’re adamant that they’re not going to be reviewing WU based pricing any further.
We can complain all we like but it seems the best and only strategy now is to either shift your biz model to suit, or pack up and leave.
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Yep.
I left.
It really broke my heart. But it was time.
Hi @NigelG , I realize this is not apples to apples… but interesting.
We have started our migration off of Bubble and are using a VPS for development with a MySQL (MariaDB) server. I conservatively estimate to add a new field to the DB table with 10k rows would take about 28 seconds (on a very bad day including re-indexing the primary key and spinning up hibernating disks). Using our annual cost for the server this translates into 0.0017 cents (YES thousandths of a cent! you’ll see later…) to execute the two simple SQL statements (ALTER TABLE table_name, ADD column_name datatype).
True Bubble is a NoCode platform however it seems a bit nasty they would charge 10K WU or the equivalent $4.76 ( $119 / 250,000WU * 10,000) to accomplish the same is perplexing? Even taking into account their API call to alter the table, network ingress charges, ect… I can only say WT_! --can’t say it here!
This means that assuming the folks that use Bubble must use a no-code tool, they are not getting a deal. Isn’t Bubble like Uber a shared service, that negates the need to drive (code)? If so Uber should follow Bubble’s lead and start charging $1,200 per block driven. Pardon the sarcasm, but you are right 10,000WU for a simple table update? Wow… must be really bad backend code!
For other’s reading this maybe if you express your WU usage as actual $ spent it may wake someone up somewhere?
John
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@jgellis I expressed this repeatedly in my early comments here. Even with the various reductions in certain WU costs (API calls, client-side plugins) it’s usurious.
There’s no point to this platform anymore.
Edit: Also as you can see from my recent posts here, WUs are mysteriously creeping up while my app usage isn’t significantly growing.
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Furthermore I never hit max capacity with my current $140 plan, yet somehow even though I never hit max capacity that same application is worth $1,700 in workload units. The whole thing is absurd.
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Hi @keith , yes… could not agree more.
You once told me to get on with ** making something ** … kinda harsh since you did not know that we were 2,000 hours in already, and unlike many here I have over 40 years of IT experience and pretty much done it all. Now I wish I had sat on my hands; it would have saved us a lot of time and money!
FYI: Our complete (new) development environment actually cost us nothing (Flutter/Dart, MariaDB, MS Code, GitKraken, Android Studio, Laravel, PHP, XAMPP, Composer, XCode, dbdiagram.io …). I do truly feel sorry for the folks that do not have coding skills that thought Bubble would provide a good solution.
Cheers, John
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Well look, getting on with making things is a net positive. But tech shifts. The thing that’s sucky about the current state of Bubble is that it’s a completely unnecessary/non-essential shift.
I liked building stuff in and for Bubble and was hoping for it to grow, but it just isn’t going to now. It’s already obvious from forum volume.
As for other tech stacks, yeah, the free tier gets you incredibly far. (And then there’s a little step function up to the “real money” level of about $300/month and then later there’s a step function up to the $1000+/month level, but you get lots of runway to get there. I work on the marketing website for an enterprise SaaS app that’s very popular and the core deployment stuff - Netlify for deployment and bandwidth, commercial Gatsby for live preview, Wistia for video CDN, Contentful for headless CMS - costs us less than a grand a month. We serve more than 1TB of bandwidth a month and I don’t worry a bit about driving more traffic to the site — in fact, what I mostly work on is SEO and driving more visits. Bubble is just silly when you compare it to normal tech stacks now.)
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@keith yes it seems Bubble is “just silly”!
For the life of me I cannot figure out their strategy? The pricing does not attract seasoned entrepreneurs such as yourself, it does not offer a cost effective SaaS solution to enterprise, it does not allow developers such as us to profitably deploy apps. It just pisses off the current client base? Odd… it seems like a market exit strategy.
We have run the numbers and we can utilize a Tier 1 VPS service and Cloudflare Gateway API routing and it will cost us 10% of the new cost of Bubble for the same concurrent user loading, however these savings are partially offset by our human resource cost. Strategically we have now decided to hire and invest in our own people so it looks like after some short-term pain we will come out ahead.
John
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The mods and fan boys might not like this, but I knew right from the screw ups I witnessed from 2021 that Bubble needs a better leadership team. It deserves a more capable and honest team.
Anyone remember Bubble starting work on a dedicated PDF plugin, only to ditch it halfway through because the intern in charge left?
Anyone remember Bubble engineers wasting months on an editor redesign only to ditch it last minute?
Anyone remember the pricing screw up of 2021?
Anyone remember the pricing screw up of 2022?
And now a new pricing screw up to top it all off.
And an avalanche of never ending bugs.
How many screw ups is too many screw ups?
Repeatedly giving the middle finger to the Bubble community, who they owe every bit of growth to, is their biggest screw up.
I have never seen a company more unprofessional, unreliable and ignorant as Bubble.
Some part of the blame should go to a few fanboys on here, who come out of the woods to ride the monthly update post and praise the godly Bubble team for drip feeding us embarrassingly miniscule features no one asked for.
Instead of using their influence and experience to hold Bubble accountable, they ride them. This is what you get.
How many times have you seen forum posts from completely new, Bubble interns who announce themselves as the creator of a new feature? Only to then break live apps and have @nickc from the product team come here saying they are rolling it back.
How many Bubblers have stopped bothering with bug reports? Bubble should reach out to every user they have forced over the years to repeatedly file bug reports and offer them a month of free usage, and they should start a bug bounty program going forward as a few bugs a day seem to be acceptable by Bubble’s sad standards.
I have never seen this kind of repeated failures from any other service, which actually seem to be deeply embedded in Bubble’s culture. Where we all find ourselves today was a long time in the making. It was only a matter of time till they got funded and their principles got binned.
@josh @emmanuel please consider handing over your baby to a more capable and reliable team. I do not think anyone, including senior OG bubblers has any confidence in your team anymore.
P.S. @emmanuel it would be nice to see you spend more time here fronting up to your mistakes than seeing you cruise on Twitter like everything is fine here.
P.S.S I find it hilarious that Bubble has been spending a considerable amount of time pushing their diversity program getting founders from outside the US using Bubble, only to then completely wreck them with the price hikes.
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My bad, used wrong term “schedule”.
Just tested bulk editing (via app “Data” tab) of 4k items in my app.
Total 1 WF run cost is 1.12 WU.
- 0.62 WU for action execution (“Make change to a thing”)
- 0.5 WU should be the cost of item modification.
I’m going to regret this but I’m on a short break anyway. I feel your pain but kind of hyperbole in my opinion. Maybe because i haven’t been here since 2018 (inside joke).
Have you worked with bootstrapped startups? Cause that’s what Bubble was till not too long ago. It’s always a complete mess. Any investor will have to take a leap of faith (or have loads of money) putting money into one. If you think about it, that’s what we are, investors. We saw something interesting, decided to put money into it, voiced our opinions, and then project our (sometimes unrealistic) expectations onto the dev team.
In regards to work culture, I for one think it’s great to encourage interns or team members to be a part of the community they work in. It keeps the organization grounded. Albeit, sometimes things do get unfinished as is apparent but the same can be said for a lot of the plugins and plugin builders.
People demanding for @emmanuel and @josh to respond to every other post need to chill. What’s the point of paying a communications team if the C-suite has to respond everytime they get tagged. Comms will shit the roof if anyone of them says something else that can be misinterpreted as a ‘personal promise’.
To be fair, it’s only been a few weeks since WU gate started and as someone who has been actively bugging support with bug reports (i made a pun see) i would rather Emm/Josh shut up, get to work (one of them is back to leading the engineering team) and come back every once in a while with announcements pushing Bubble forward for us.
Call me a fanboy or whatever but I am still on the Bubble train (while working on a different project on another platform). Win Win for me IMO.
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I tend to agree to your assessment @ihsanzainal84 , but this is a mess that didn’t need to happen. The biggest problem has been poor communication by bubble (agree, that the CXOs don’t need to respond to every point, mind you!) - where we have been seeing zero regular updates. The rare updates we tend to get are often “justification” for what the community has been trying to explain is an entirely flawed pricing strategy - and to most the community, it feels like we have no voice whatsoever, despite being paying customers that for years, have been the mouthpieces helping promote bubble and all its capabilities.
To many in the community, I get the sense there is a genuine feeling of betrayal. Those of us who have spent countless hours building an app, only to see the pricing destroying our hopes and dreams before the idea can even get off the ground. Many of those using bubble may not have native coding abilities, or have more important things to focus on (e.g. building a company, family, life, study, etc.) - and the enticement of bubble allowing anyone to realise their vision in the digital age, it was like a bee to honey - you get dragged in, but are completely trapped in vendor lock-in, watching the risk of you losing your home and mortgage materialise just trying to pay the bill for an app you dreamed could have one day changed the world.
I do agree that there needs to be a bit more time for bubble to sort their way out of this, but bubble needs to stop sitting silently on the fence and come clean. Do a reset, and work WITH the community. Give the community a clean explanation on what they are trying to achieve with this pricing change, explain the options available, the pros and cons, the risks, etc. - just be open and honest, and stop barrelling down a dark road without a map. As it stands right now, bubble is just killing their credibility by remaining silent and just hoping the community moves on and forgets, and that somehow the “improved performance” and “enhancements” magically make it all right. They don’t have any credibility left to say “trust us”. They’ve already tried this twice, and clearly have failed to learn any lessons.
As I pointed out above, backendless recently announced they are upping prices. But unlike bubble, they were completely transparent about it and explained their reasoning and provided lots of flexibility in the way forward to minimise the impact. As it stands right now - bubble is essentially saying this: “write efficient code, and we won’t punish you”. The WU is a flawed, opaque metric that means anyone who doesn’t want to be hit with bill shock every month is S.O.L., since you’re gonna be forced to constantly watch your reports every DAY, perhaps multiple times per day, to find ways of reducing the platform, leading to a counter-intuitive situation where some bubble customers may actually WANT their platform to be less in demand, just for it to be affordable. How does that align to any of bubble’s core values? Get an incredible promotional piece where a sudden viral video draws attention to your new-yet-unfunded-app? Sorry, you’re on the street now, you can’t pay the bill for the platform to run. Now the craze has died, you couldn’t deliver as you couldn’t pay the bill for the app, your company already has zero credibility - it’s run its course. Years down the drain, all thanks to bubble. HOW is this a viable option for anyone? This is a massive problem - you make a simple mistake, perhaps unearth a flaw in bubble, suddenly you are paying REAL money for what should have been an easy fix.
The WU metric is just far too complex, cannot be fairly applied to all use cases for all apps equally, and ultimately distracts from bubble’s own values. And why, oh why, does WU get charged for a DEV version of the app??? So let’s go there, @emmanuel and @josh to point out how bubble’s values have already been broken by the current actions:
- Empowerment: “Helping build others up by giving them leverage and autonomy.” - I would argue bubble does provide this genuinely with the platform, it IS the platform. But apparently it’s only for the elite who have been gifted funding from day 1.
- Genuineness: “Communicating and taking responsibility as human beings rather than hiding behind corporate-speak.” - This is laughable, as this is exactly what bubble is NOT doing right now. There is no genuine element in explaining their reasoning behind this broken “WU” metric or the reasoning for such a dramatic change in price. Why not run workshops with the community? Why not have votes on the options? Why not show genuine numbers on why things are not going as well as we’d hoped? Is bubble on the verge of collapse, and this is why everyone is so tight-lipped? Anything is possible, it’s all speculation here, as long as only PR statements are made without any genuine engagement with the community. As many have pointed out, even bubble’s own metrics in the rare announcements do not tie with reality.
- User-centricity: “Remembering that Bubble exists first and foremost to have a positive impact on the people who use our software, and making decisions accordingly.” - right now, I’m losing sleep over the stress of now having a runway to migrate away from bubble to a new backend, so I can continue to pay the mortgage. I’m essentially rebuilding my app from scratch, instead of building my company, questioning why I wasted my time learning bubble instead of JS, APIs and establishing my own cloud presence from scratch. And I mean SERIOUSLY questioning why I wasted my time with bubble. Being “user centric” for bubble should have been about supporting us imagining our dreams, but the costs compared to writing native code? I should have just delayed even announcing the app to my customers. Now instead, I have had to tell all my customers that the launch is delayed indefinitely, until I can deal with an impending cash-crunch, due to my service provider deciding they want to destroy my company before it starts. I will not take on extreme risk due to unknown platform state (yes, I have a risk matrix and review my suppliers, and yes bubble is currently marked as “extreme” on it. This is sink-the-company risk I am contending with now, thanks bubble!).
- Kindness: “Treating our teammates and our community with friendliness, consideration, and respect.” - similar to genuineness, the community doesn’t feel any love from bubble whatsoever. We are voiceless, or so it feels, and any suggestions we make falls on deaf ears. If bubble is taking notice, they certainly are not making it known. Right now, the community is venting and angry, and all bubble seems to be doing is waiting for Armageddon. It is really, really baffling.
- Fire: “A shared intrinsic motivation to turn our vision as a company into reality, with determination, courage, and enthusiasm.” - I’m not sure about this, as the fire has been extinguished for some of your most ardent supporters. Even @keith , who has spent years solving major failings of bubble’s core platform (client-side capabilities, particularly) has almost disappeared. I haven’t seen any movement on his plugins for weeks, and rightly so based on his previous comments in this thread. Without his plugins, many apps on the platform would not even function. Without his plugins, in fact, bubble pricing would sink my app on price alone through a single user - so if that’s what bubble means by “fire”, as in burning your community, then it’s pretty clear where this value lies.
I feel most of us are not even close to being OK with any of what is going on.
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So much of what you say is true. Something that really irks me is seeing new features of privacy rule tweaks coming out when in my opinion all engineers should be focused on putting in the features necessary to build optimally with WFUs…any other ‘enhancements’ at this time are unwelcomed by me. All I would like to see happening now are releases of new features aimed at making us pay less (ie: build optimally with WFUs)
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