I’ve been gone a while waiting for Bubble’s Native features to come out. I even asked if I could beta them. They turned me down. There is no native support. So this leaves $395 BDK Native. Ok, so be it.
Then we have Bubble’s monthly fee. Not too bad.
Next we have Bubble’s CPU cycle charge. How bad does that get for a fairly widely use app?
Then finally we have Stripe taking a HUGE chunk of money with every transaction.
Then we have taxes, employee health insurance, etc.
Is anyone here actually making any money from their app with all these drains on profit? If so how??
Are there cheaper payment systems than stripe?
What are some tips to optimize all these drags on any hope at profitability?
Should I just go back to Ionic Framework or learn Flutter considering native is stalled here and the nickel and dimes are adding up to dollars?
Thanks. I’m not entirely sure actually which is probably why the fees are stressing me out. It’s not a business model of extremes. It works sort of like Venmo and Cash app, but does something else I can’t quite share on here yet. Stripe pulls out a pretty hefty sum for the transactions between the users. But - at least you can predict that hefty amount based on volume. What I can’t predict is Bubble’s CPU usage charge.
When you are not sure my advise is to stop coding and first figure that out. It can safe you years of your live and a less empty bank account.
Rule of thumb…if you are unable to charge $5 a month for every user using your service, Bubble is likely not the best fit. From an economical standpoint. $10 a month? You are probably more than fine.
Most Business to Consumer (B2C) type of businesses will not work on Bubble because of the WU costs.
Ah, that’s not what I’m unsure of. I’m unsure of how much those WU charges on bubble (which provides no native app support) are.
That’s the uncertainty. I have heard some horror stories and now that I’m about ready to launch, I’m getting nervous.
That’s a pretty good rule of thumb. Thanks for sharing. I don’t have $ per customer. I’m Fintech. It’s $ per transaction. So I’m having trouble applying the rule of thumb and figuring out how, with all the different people with their fingers in the pie, I will make a living.
Especially when one of those people taking from the pie is either using a finger or an entire hand and there is no way to know what they are doing without launching and running the real business.
I understand but you need to have an understanding or at least assumption how much revenue each user will generate. If you know that, for instance the number of transactions, you count the price they need the pay you which gives you your revenue. Next you take that transaction and account for VAT, for Stripe and what not. This will give you your costs per transaction and also margin per transaction. Now, multiply this number with the amount of transactions on average each user will do.
Next thing you do is important. Multiply with 2, 5 and 10.
Now, add the cost for Bubble per month. Take $5 and $10 per user.
Now you will understand better if you are in danger zone or not.
Is this accurate? No, does it give a better understanding of business model dynamics and the impact Bubble will have? Yes!
Will it tell me if optimization might be an option? Yes!
For instance, suppose you get only $15 a month in revenue and $5 in costs. This will leave you with $10. This might go to Bubble in full leaving you with a loss.
Now make some scenarios, start with Bubble, quickly go to market, no need to hire programmers. This might save you $50.000-$100.000. Might it be an option to start and decide to rewrite in real code when business model proofs to work?
We are almost launching a fully plain vanilla JavaScript Saas app. Completely written by AI. Can handle a million users on a $5 month plan. We need this because it is free for most and involves lots of heavy data computations. Every free user would have cost at least $10 on Bubble. So we could not risk it to launch on Bubble.
I only charge $8/mth (or $80/yr on annual plan), and after Bubble ($300/mth), ads, and other costs, I still have an 80% margin with 4K monthly users, 80% of which are unpaid users coming from SEO to use our free business/group directory tool.
I wouldn’t encourage anyone to use Bubble if they priced this low AND had employees, not unless you were growing really fast. For me, it’s been~2.5 years since launching paid features, and it’s at 70K ARR. It’s been a great side hustle with very little weekly time commitment, and it grew 50% in 2024, so it’s still a personal win.
@samnichols can you share your online app? Would be helpful for people to get a sense what type of app would allow them to run on Bubble with small fees per month.
Your post just forced me to do a worst case analysis of my app. I used a $100/mo bubble cost and also added a $500/mo bubble cost on after volumes of 4000 transactions a month or more and it’s coming out beautifully.
I was able to guess a break even and build in a margin above those costs and it looks good!
This exercise was long over due and I was freaking out about WU charges needlessly, I think. Like @samnichols , I seem to have a good margin above all these costs at a reasonable transactions price to the users.
I do have to grow and hire employees. There is a service to be provided beyond the app itself, so I need to hire for that. I, hopefully, have enough to do so. Seems like it once the volume is up there.
Thanks again for a post that pushed me a bit in the right direction. This was way above and beyond a bubble help post. It was a business help post. Much appreciated.
If you make sure your data structure is simple and normalized you can always offload heavy data to a service like Supabase. On the other hand, this can also be done later although it will be a pain in the ass when data is not structured logical in a normalized way. But again, when you need it because Bubble becomes too expensive you most likely have the funds to do so.
