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