Bubble downgraded my app to free plan - Resolved ✅

I recently changed my bank, hence I forgot to update my card information for billing. I received a notification today at 11:25 am that my payment failed.

At that time, I was out and planned to fix it after reaching home. Since they use Stripe, most companies retry cards for a few days before canceling subscriptions, so I didn’t react immediately since I planned to fix it in a few hours anyway.

However, after just 4 hours, I received a notification that my Bubble subscription was canceled, and my app was moved to the free plan, with my custom domain no longer attached to the app.

I mean, how can they even do this? They don’t even seem to understand that people are running businesses on their platform, and without prior notice, they can take a business down in a minute.

What ridiculous behavior this company has exhibited! First, they aren’t responsible for their regular outages, and now they’re taking people’s apps down just because a card payment failed once.

My app was on a legacy plan, so I’m pretty sure they’ll tell me they can’t put me back on the legacy plan and that they have to shift my app to one of their current, less desirable plans due to the payment failure.

I urge everyone to move their apps away from Bubble as soon as possible. I’ve learned that if you don’t have control over your business, then it’s not really your business.
Vendor lock-in is a real issue. It happened to me, and it can happen to you.
Wake up before it’s too late.

I will update this post upon receiving their response on this issue

One of the apps I worked on for a client missed payments for a couple of months and wasn’t downgraded. Not sure why yours would downgrade straight away - I’d check your spam to see if you’ve been missing notifications, and contact support. If they did downgrade you after one payment failure, that’s not great.

ohh cmon did you even read the post,
i received failed payment notification today and today is my bubble billing date from last 2 years

That was quite rude for no reason. He was just giving his experiences, and learned experiences, so you could realize this is not normal behavior, and you should really contact support or check if you missed some emails.

I was in your exact shoes with switching bank accounts, got a new card, and forgot to update my Bubble subscription. They send you several warnings. So, either you missed some emails, or Bubble had a bug and you should report it so they can figure out what happened and why. It’s not expected behavior.

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i wasn’t rude at all , i just mentioned if he read the post, i attached screenshot to prove that i received first email today and i know my billing date , i am not a new user
anyways they are not responding so i had to move billing to WU plan to keep my app running and i don’t have any hope that they will be able to put me back on legacy
Not trying to spread negativity here but that’s how a angry customer respond , simple as that

The problem is here is that you are projecting your issue to the community. Your issue here is with Bubble. George was merely trying to assist you by giving the “normal” - so you knew that you were actually validated in knowing that you are correct, it shouldn’t have happened.

No one on this forum can help with this situation, and I am sure you really just wanted to vent about this, and try to spread the word, but the truth is this is not normal behavior.

With the recent outages, there is plenty of ammo as to why some people should possibly consider moving from Bubble. This however, is not one of them.

I hope you are able to get your situation resolved, but I do agree with your statement:

100% be prepared for this response.

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I don’t know, man. What to say here now,I think you took it more personally than him, Bubble, and me.
Also, if you noticed, I didn’t post in the ‘need help’ section of this forum; I posted under ‘Meta,’ which is specifically for discussion about this site, its organization, how it works, and how we can improve it.

So, I wasn’t expecting any help from here. I posted where I should have posted this kind of issue, and I brought it here after not receiving a response from them.

I had a problem, and yes, it was personal. I wanted everybody to know about this issue so they don’t fail to update their cards, which leads to their app going offline.

Finally as expected :clown_face:
image

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Oh no, I didn’t take it personally at all. When you said “did you even read the post” it seemed to me to be very dismissive, which to me is rude. I do realize that is a subjective thing though, and maybe I started something from nothing (which was completely unintentional, I just saw another community member being dismissed when he was just trying to provide some transparency, and I don’t want this place to turn into StackOverflow lol), and if so then sorry.


Sorry they weren’t able to help. I had a very similar experience (except I just didn’t read all the emails they sent me, my fault completely) back when they first announced the switch to WU, and I got the same response.

I’d try to push back some more, but from when I did I was told that support literally doesn’t even have the option from their CRM / panel / whatever to manually do it either, as it was removed from their internal system.

Crappy situation you’re in. Sorry man.

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Haha, no man, I wasn’t rude at all when I said ‘Did you even read the post’ I am sorry if it sounded or portrayed like this.
I was only mad about how they could do this within 4 hours without any notice.

They literally took my business offline, and the classic Bubble screen was showing ‘This used to be a Bubble app’. :joy:

This incident just solidified a vendor lock fear in me, nothing more than that.

Anyways, for me, October came early. :clown_face:

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Can you share your WU consumption to be sure that this kind of situation is related to high WU consumption legacy plans?

It’s under 200k per month, so I don’t think they did this for high-consumption legacy users.
Stripe doesn’t have such constraint options for retrying payments for specific users, or if they have, they’re definitely playing those cards with their users.

definitely just an internal policy for bubble to cancel legacy immediately after a missed payment - not user friendly but they have a business to run and want to eradicate legacy plans

Not in my experience. They send quite a number of emails and notifications prompting you to update your payment method and after a few retries is when they cancel your subscription.

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This is my experience as well, they are quite lenient towards my apps (which also aren’t on the legacy plan). Could have still been a change in their internal policy that rolled out as quick as yesterday

or a bug in their system

i also have revenue-optimizing bugs in my billing system

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haha you gave it a perfect name “revenue-optimizing bug” :rofl:

Bubble gives you sufficient grace period before downgrading your app… upto 5 reminders email, with a bold banner on your home page … so you didn’t get those? check your spam folder then

I get 1 reminder and received all email in primary inbox, 0 in spam
that’s the whole point , that’s why i bring it here , that is why is so unethical!