Bubble's New Pricing Plan is Outrageous

build.marshall · 2024-10-08T21:20:11.949Z

I feel like it’s easy to have this mindset, but really when you consider that Bubble allows you to build and launch powerful software products for less than $1k, it’s incredibly cheap.

The relative cost of building and launching a code based SaaS platform makes Bubbles pricing look like a steal, and the WU pricing is a pretty fair trade off for the overheads that come with classic dev teams. If anything it’s a good thing to push builders / founders to create more efficient systems with greater considerations of their business models and product integrity.

In terms of commercialising a software product it’s in line with post sale / COGS considerations - both critical to achieving strong gross margins, which is pretty much the name of the game in software.

From a lot of the posts I’ve seen on the forum it feels like very few people recognise that Bubble allowing you to attach a dollar figure to individual workflows based on WU (which you can access with ease) makes building a business model around any product very, very easy.

eric10 · 2024-10-08T21:32:52.897Z

For me this is for a non-profit, and I agreed to the $28/month, I was not expecting the cost to jump to $200/month(which is what my pricing now shows since I posted this). I feel like they should have grandfathered those who already agreed to one pricing plan. I get increases here and there, but to change the pricing model like this is unfair. I’ve invested so much time into building this app, and putting everything from my non-profit on to it that it would be impossible for me to change. Also, it’s not like my app is getting millions of user traffic. I have like 1,000 users, and daily users is probally 10-15. It’s not an active site.

ihsanzainal84 · 2024-10-08T22:59:07.858Z

I build for non profits too and when I found Bubble the first time (pre WU) i was initially taken by surprise by how cheap it was. Too good to be true. Like you I lavished the heavily subsidized joy of building on Bubble.

When WU was announced I was stressed out but I sat down with my partners, we agreed that the original pricing was nice while it lasted, worked to optimize and I switched to WU for all my apps a month or 2 after it became optional.

Have you tried getting in touch with Bubble support to see if they have special pricing for non profits?

net-tt · 2024-10-09T12:14:41.062Z

You may want to find out why it is taking so much WU and optimize it.

rafaelfernandes · 2024-10-11T18:15:45.173Z

hi @eric10
I believe that Bubble try to do its best, actually. But, often, this best is not enough, or is directed to what is not urgent.

But, as you may know, in the absence of an appropriate pricing policy for each market (country), keep in mind that this cost you mention:

For us Brazilians is paid 5x more (yes, that’s right, we pay exactly 5 times more due to the currency conversion).

This moves our business into a critical budget.
Further, the price needs to be very high or the margin is tight so as not to generate financial health for the business.

So, if someone think this pay may be bad, (and I agree), try to pay 5x more.
Of course, as other USA or EMEA or LATAM companies do, there is always a way to predict excesses in commercial relations. So they create prices into each market, in their currency. Why Bubble not? Here is the question and wishes for a better future.

georgecollier · 2024-10-11T21:13:21.875Z

rafaelfernandes:

Why Bubble not?

Bubble has US costs. And I’d never compare Bubble to costs of hosting a site on Wordpress/Squarespace or whatever. Compare it to the cost of employing a tradcode developer to build your project.

rafaelfernandes · 2024-10-15T17:36:49.895Z

Hi Geroge, thanks for your contribution.
You are right in this focused view, but I am talking about another issue.

In this case, we believe that we are comparing operations of a large company, on a multinational scale, where “costs” can be local depending on the position of the business and infrastructure. All of this can be manipulated, as is the case in other sectors. So, I shouldn’t compare it to what Bubble is “today”, but about what Bubble can become at a corporate governance level.

International trade = Inter-countries operations

GH5T · 2024-10-15T17:38:47.386Z

georgecollier:

Compare it to the cost of employing a tradcode developer to build your project.

I can concur with this.

My rates and labor are much higher with traditional code than Bubble itself.

eric10 · 2024-10-28T17:57:49.148Z

Ohh how I love the new pricing plan. I was paying $28/month when I started. Now I’m sitting at $225. They said they would waive the overages from the looping error that happened, but the month is almost over. I need to know if I need to increase my add-ons to see if I can reduce this.

I’m hoping I don’t have to deal with this every month, and I’m still angry we got forced into changing to the new price plan now that I’ve invested so much time and energy into this app I’m at the point of no return. I will never again recommend Bubble to anyone. I used to tell everyone about it, now I tell them to avoid it.

Screenshot 2024-10-28 at 10.53.18 AM602×640 24.6 KB

georgecollier · 2024-10-28T18:07:32.113Z

Out of interest, did you not optimise it in the 18 month grace period with all of the notifications they sent out? If you’re only getting 10 daily users, your app shouldn’t be doing 1.5 million WU per month.

I’m not a fan of the new pricing system but if you leave everything to the last minute then there’s not much we can say.

eric10 · 2024-10-28T18:32:24.966Z

No I was working on optimizing it, and also worked directly with Bubble to help. I had a workflow that was running without issue for over a year, but for some reason when it switched to the new pricing plan it started to loop. That’s why they are refunding me for that. Still the thing that is causing it to be high is the emails it sends out. I would not think emails would take that much work units, but I guess it does. It only sends to like 500 people, but it might do that a few times a week. I have a newsletter that goes out every Monday, and event notifications. Again, this never was an issue since it was a flat rate, but now with the new pricing it gets expensive to do the same thing I’ve been doing. It’s disappointing.

ihsanzainal84 · 2024-10-29T01:13:00.309Z

Unfortunately now certain features are just too expensive to run natively on Bubble. Case in point, your emailing WF. On the flip side, it does encourage learning how to stack other tech and cheaper services with Bubble.

For example, I do my mass emails with Postmark. I’m also in the midst of upgrading my Bubble apps’ backend using Cloudflare workers. They’ll run functions that will cost more to run in Bubble’s backend.

It really is a bummer since we work with teams and orgs that can’t afford expensive SAASs but the drive to keep costs low has really driven me to explore and learn more about dev work. I believe that the investment of my time will pay out dividends far and beyond my capital.

eric10 · 2024-10-30T15:44:27.772Z

I already use Postmark for my emails, so Bubble is only sending the information from the app to the email client. Is there something else I could do with the emails to offset more of the work to Postmark frrom Bubble? I feel like I’m really just having it send the information and the people to Postmark. Again I would not excpect it to be that much work for Bubble.

boston85719 · 2024-10-30T17:23:05.569Z

I don’t have first hand experience with this, but my client is maintaining a list of users in Sendgrid, I update the list via API and do so based on different actions and there are multiple lists of users email addresses, some are for abandoned carts, others are for new signups. I believe the client has automations in place inside of sendgrid that then send emails to the entire list of emails. I have not looked into it specifically, but I believe I can trigger via API the send email to the list function, meaning Bubble doesn’t send the emails looped over each user, and instead Bubble just triggers the API call to notify Sendgrid to send the email to the list of emails specified.

I’d think Postmark would have similar functionality and that this would reduce the costs of sending out the 500 emails weekly.

It doesn’t solve the problem of event notifications.

What is the source of the WU consumption, is it the email send, or the deletion of old notifications?

sem · 2024-10-31T11:44:24.546Z

Best what you can do is send a new subscriber to your email marketing product and include variables that you need for sending personalized emails. Sometimes it is just a name, but in our case we send about 30 different fields that tell a complete story about that user. When one or more of those fields get updated, we update the user in our email marketing as well.

In our email marketing product we have all kinds of automations. This means that “heavy” data operations happen outside of Bubble.

build.marshall · 2024-10-31T21:47:24.653Z

There’s a cost that comes with software and any half decent system with 1000+ users costing $200-300 USD a month is seriously well priced. Code based software you’d be lucky to get under $5k a month these days.

I get the impression that a change to what was previously very generous pricing, plus the fact this is for a not for profit means the issue is far more sensitive than it normally would be.

On the other hand if this was a paid product with 1000 users, having even 10% of the user base as paying customers at just $10 a month, revenue would be 4-5x monthly overheads.

If the product is good enough, I would speak with the client about monetising parts of it to cover the monthly overheads. Clearing $225USD a month would take very little effort if they are onboard with that.

mghatiya · 2024-11-01T03:51:05.672Z

I used to pay $170 till last month with Professional plan and extra capacity.

This month I paid $640 with starter plan and extra workload plan, overages etc. I am in India and this charge is so very high. (Unfortunately, I am locked in, as there is no export). We are a B2C app and lot users come simply checking things out without much output. So WU usage becomes high (also because of various Bubble limitations we have to use hacks and workarounds)

Things as silly as sending push notifications to our users for various updates and engagements are so costly

I use Firebase for sending these notifications. Google doesn’t charge anything for these as they are well within their free limits, but Bubble charges so much.

Anyone has any suggestions for push notifications?

johnny · 2024-11-01T06:45:09.948Z

mghatiya:

This month I paid $640 with starter plan and extra workload plan, overages etc.

Curious about why you’re choosing to stick with the Starter Plan, how much workload are you consuming?

rico.trevisan · 2024-11-01T07:00:16.540Z

I ran some simulations for a client who needed more WUs and hosting in Europe.

Conclusion: it was a better value to hire a 2nd dev who can code and we’ve been moving the apps to self-hosting (aka: almost unlimited WUs).

mghatiya · 2024-11-01T12:10:48.192Z

4.8M WU units.

I chose starter plan because professional plan meant I had to pay about $100 extra to get “12 more days of logs, an extra editor and 75K WU units”. That didn’t seem worth it.

So my configuration is starter plan ($32) + 2.5M WU Units ($299)

In my case I had overages of about 2.1M WU units which meant $260.

There was some complex calculation by Bubble because of transition from old plan to new plan and my billing date being 11th and not 1st, etc and total became $640.

Wonder what happens next month onwards. They seem to be calculating overages as per calendar months and app charges as per billing cycle months.