Even so, the OP has said heās willing to pay for the extra workload he knows it will cause Bubble, whether it means hiring externally or whatever. Itās really a matter of money than it is about resources, IMO.
Hi all,
Jumping in here to explain a bit what goes on behind the scenes.
We do listen and carefully log feature requests from users (in no company before have I actually gone through and read every single backlog item that exists, but trust me that Iāve done that here!). Our roadmap does not explicitly aim to address features requested by āwhalesā. Rather, we do our best to look holistically at all feature requests as well as all other work we need or want to do. Ultimately, we have a limited amount of resources, so we have to invest in work that we think will address pressing issues, have the greatest impact for the product and/or the company, help us realize a particular vision weāre aiming for, etc.
In short, we absorb a wide range of data to formulate a roadmap that we feel best serves the community and the product in the short and long terms. We certainly hope that Bubble will be around for a long while and grow - we hope you get that sense as well.
Specifically on the topic of crowdfunding features: it doesnāt really work like that. While as a PM I would love a machine where I can input money and output a feature, in reality there are lots of complexities to this. For example, for all that Bubble makes building a complex web app easy, Bubble itself is quite a complex product technically to work on, so we not only need high-caliber engineers, but we need to effectively onboard them and teach them all the ins and outs of Bubbleās codebase. Also, if we prioritize features in the short term purely based on what people are willing to pay us for, that would result in a lot of short-term feature gains at the expense of important long-term projects. (The fact that people feel so passionately about a particular feature is something we notice and take into account as we build the roadmap.)
The current top 4 priorities - the BIG projects that are on the docket - are performance, reliability, the editor redesign, and revamping our responsive editor. These priorities have not changed recently. Weāre making headway on the first three and hope to begin the fourth in earnest soon. A few months ago, we also explicitly decided to reserve some engineering bandwidth to work on smaller feature releases, both to satisfy common feature requests as well as making those investments in the product - this is where features like large CSV imports / exports, Algolia, database change triggers, Airtable, etc. have come from.
On the feature request brought up specifically (white labeling / other CNAMEs) - this idea is in the mix. But, it is much harder than it sounds to build into Bubble. @peterj has been engaging on this idea (e.g. here) and weāve talked about this internally. If this feature only took a week, we probably wouldāve done it already. Our best analysis is that it takes much more than a week and is also a risky feature (domains are complicated and messy) - so not something we can just whip out quickly.
If you havenāt had a chance yet, I highly recommend skimming Joshās monthly community updates (Julyās). We started doing this to give you all a better sense of what weāre working on. We donāt take our community or your continued use of Bubble for granted at all; we just canāt build everything everybody wants right now!
Cheers,
Allen
Hi @allenyang,
Can you have @Josh or @Emmanuel chime in.
Emmanual promised that weād be able to sponsor a feature to have it built if we ever needed to do so. Weāve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into our product based on this guarantee. Why arenāt you living up to your agreement? Do I need to move my app to custom code to make this work?
My customers need a timeline for when this is going to be built. The community has been asking for this feature for many years (proof) - letās stop pretending like itās something new or something that only one customer needs.
Scott
we have a crowdfunding template:
At least we got a reply. But we probably wouldnāt if this thread hadnāt got some heat. You wouldāve ignored it like always.
Like @sridharan.s said, stop pretending like this is new. Youāve promised before that sponsoring a feature would be possible, but it looks like the investors didnāt like that, so things changed.
sorry @grace.hallak I totally misunderstood your question.
We need to think about it but not sure itād be possible - it would take tons of work from our side to coordinate something like that
@josh10 and @grace.hallak
what kind of plugins youād like to see crowdfunded?
What do you think would be a fair budget for a plugin?
Would any of you like to coordinate it so that we wouldnāt have to?
I totally agree on what @sridharan.s said, we have built our platform knowing the CNAME feature is coming as we heard from the bubble team that they will support it in near future at that time and it will be available on dedicated instances even sooner, this was sometime in mid-late 2018.
The CNAME feature is long over due and our business really needs it soon, it not something we can delay anymore, itās business killer not to have it for us.
I totally understand you have a road map and big projects, but knowing that many of your clients need a feature like CNAME support and their businesses survival depends on it, in my opinion is more important than an improvement feature like the Editor redesign ( You have no idea how excited I am to check out and feel the new editor redesign), Iām talking here as an 
Orange bubbler, not a 
blue bubbler.
But it is really pains me to be chained like that and canāt do anything.
Please make an exception and take another look.
Here is where I might start, but Iām sure some of the other developers would have better recommendations than me.
-
Twilio Calling Api- The Twilio text APi has been used thousands of times, but Twilio calling is an area that has been neglected. I have a hidden API that I paid someone to develop, but it would need work to be viable as a broad market plugin.
-
Repeating group Alternate Colors: Iām not even sure if this is possible, but giving us a plugin that alternates repeating group colors without utilizing group colors would be beneficial.
-
Repeating groups Print Pro: While there are some work arounds for repeating groups to print 1 cell per page, they arenāt ideal. A good high resolution option that breaks the page and eliminates dead space alignment issues would be great. This is one that could be used in hundreds of situations.
-
Clever API Plugin: This API is used by thousands of apps, but doesnāt have a native plugin in Bubble. Clever is the company that connects to 80% of student information systems and almost every school district is connected to it. You guys could corner the market on this plugin.
-
Learnosity API Plugin: Learnosity is a company that provides advanced questioning tools. They are the largest player in the game and almost all major assessment companies use their API. Again, itās another plugin that doesnāt exist in Bubble.
How much would we be willing to pay? When I have paid for plugin development, Iāve typically paid about $500 per plugin. However, I believe you could easily crowdfund $1000 for some of these plugins.
And I would be glad to coordinate it if you needed us too.
Hello @levon. It is okay (I think you were drunk and maybe tired 
). Well there are many plugins weād like to see crowdfunded. We can open anther topic and ask the community. What @josh10 said are a start and many people in the community and even people who talked in this thread would like to coordinate.
On the CNAME feature in particular, weāve discussed this as a team many times because weāre very aware that itās a game changing feature for our customers building apps that require white-labeling. Each time we break it down and try to put together a plan for it, though, we realize that itās likely months of work from our most senior engineers. The big challenge is that Bubble was built on the assumption that each app is hosted on a single domain. That assumption is everywhere in our code, from our login handling, to our page routing, to our front-end datasources. Changing it would require an overhaul of a bunch of our key systems. Thatās why we keep pushing it back. We would love to build it, and we hate saying no to features that you urgently want, but itās on a massive scale, and our biggest constraint right now as a company is engineering time from people who know Bubbleās systems really well. We canāt put a timeline on it without actually having the resources and plan to carry it out. When we rolled out our CloudFlare integration, which touched a small subset of the code we would have to touch to build this feature, it ended up being a much longer project than anticipated. Same with the editor redesign (which isnāt really in competition with this project for engineering time, since itās much more front-end oriented and requires a different skillset). So weāre really careful about taking things like this on, no matter how much we want to do them.
As far as crowdfunding features in general, I think @allenyang did a very good job explaining why we stopped doing this (we havenāt done it in years, and even when we did, we were selective about which features weād accept and only take on ones that we thought we could reasonably deliver on with the time we had). I think the crowdfunding model might work better with plugins, because plugin building is more scalable, so Iām excited to see what comes out of the discussion on this thread about it.
My biggest personal frustration with Bubble is how long it takes to change things technically. Back when Emmanuel and I first started, it was all green field development; we didnāt have to worry about breaking things or supporting existing use cases, the codebase was smaller, and it was just the two of us. As weāve gotten more customers, added more features, and grown the team, itās gotten harder to move as fast as we used to do, and I think both the team and the community were used to and addicted to that speed. My biggest personal priority right now is getting our team trained: Iām currently building out an internal training course that teaches new engineers the ins and outs of our technology, so that we can bring on more engineers and get them up to speed faster. Weāve had a bunch of great people ramp up lately and start making real contributions, but thereās still a very finite amount of things we can do. We still have issues in terms of reliability and performance with features weāve already shipped, let alone shipping new features, and we desperately want to make sure we upgrade the quality of them so that the people using them today have less pain. So when we ignore urgent pleas to add a new feature, itās not because we donāt care, itās because weāre constantly stretched to our limits of how much we can work on at once, and have to make tough triage decisions.
@Josh, thank you for the response.
Two questions, though, if this is something that youāve discussed many times as a team and itās something you consider a āgame changing [sic] featureā for your customers, then why is @Emmaneul, your CEO, telling me that itās only been requested by 2 people ever?
Why is Emmanuel saying that he talked with you about it and itād take one personās time for āa few weeksā but now youāre saying itās a crazy big project that your entire team couldnāt realistically take on.
The blatant lies and BS that your team is putting customers through on this is insane and beyond unacceptable. You cannot treat us this way, no matter how locked-in to your platform you think we may be.
Updated 7.17.2020 (in reply to Joshās thread ending post)
Josh - You can pretend like Emmanuel wasnāt intentionally misrepresenting this, but the truth is that he was and itās obvious to anyone paying attention.
Iām not trying to play āgotchaā - Iām trying to get a problem solved for my customers. In fact, I pressed Emmanuel privately on how he could possible say only 2 people requested this feature. I even sent him links to forum posts, many of which heād been included on so he clearly knew about them. His response - nothing. He ghosted me.
And, when your team chose to tell a very different story publicly, I asked you about it and gave the two of you a chance to admit your mistake (and perhaps even apologize). You instead publicly blame me for providing transparency.
Throughout all of this, you also refuse to address the fact that youāre not honoring your commitment to allow customers to sponsor features if theyāre blocked, which you had previously promised me. This is the entire point of my argument and you refuse to address it, and instead want to sweep your prior commitments under the rug as if your commitments donāt exist.
At first, I thought this may have only been Emmanuel that was in the wrong on this, but I see that youāre covering for him and unwilling to take the high road. I think itās important that the community sees this and understands how you two treat your customers when theyāre in need.
What I want -
I need to be able to white-label my domain because my customers are demanding it. You guaranteed me that if we ran into a feature gap that youād enable me to sponsor a feature. Now that Iām asking you to honor your commitment, youāre hiding from responsibility and saying itās not convenient for you.
Additional Context -
I run a virtual networking business during Covid. Our business has grown more than 25x this year. I canāt afford to be blocked by this feature gap. Itās likely going to cost me well north of $100,000 ARR (plus lost momentum, lost credibility, lost reference accounts, lower funding valuations, etc.).
Iāve had to build much of our app in custom code because Bubble doesnāt work well enough, but this isnāt something I can simply build in custom code without ripping out all of Bubble. We may do that, but I need a solution now and ripping out all of Bubble wonāt be fast enough to not cost me a considerable sum of money.
Iāve done everything I can to address this with your team. I asked you privately. Then, I insisted on it privately. Next, I asked you publicly. When none of that worked, I insisted on in publicly. Despite all of this, you clearly have no intention to honor your commitment. Thanks for nothing.
Oh dear. Was about to fall for @joshās reply, as well, until you screenshotted that.
Oh, Bubble.
@josh10 weāve discussed this internally and unfortunately this is not something weād be ready to jump in at the moment as itād be still difficult to coordinate.
I was just out of bed when I read it and realised the mistake only when my co-founder Vlad pointed it out a few hours later 
Hey Scott, Emmanuel has advocated internally for this feature and pressed for us to find a quick way of building it, in part because you reached out to him. I think the āweeksā estimate he gave you in the second email is too optimistic (we have internal disagreements sometimes about how easy / hard things are to build, and we often dig into something and realize it was harder than we thought it was), and Iām sorry if that made you feel it was coming sooner rather than later, but I think itās also pretty clear from both email threads that you pasted that he was straightforward that we werenāt building this any time soon, and wasnāt leading you on.
I donāt appreciate the implication that weāre trying to lie or deceive you. We have a lot of conversations with the community as a team, both over email and on the forum, and thereās going to be inconsistencies. You can play a game of āgotcha!ā with us and dig up every discrepancy in everything we ever say ā and believe me, thereāll be a lot of them, because weāre a group of multiple people, with different opinions, who are constantly learning new things ā but thatās not going to change the reality that we have limited resources and canāt say yes to everything.
Iām closing this thread, because this is not the tenor of conversation or level of respect we want to be having on this forum. If people would like to continue the discussion with @levon about crowdfunding plugins, please start up a new thread.