Changes to how we charge for applications going forward

Announcements
414

Hey all,

We’ve heard you loud and clear that our planned pricing for database things is, to put it mildly, not popular.

We want to be a bit more transparent with our thinking and get your feedback on how to move forward.

We do really want to phase out capacity and switch to different pricing. We think it is bad for users and bad for us as a business. We see a steady stream of complaints about how unpredictable and opaque it is, and how it breaks user apps in the moments they need uptime the most. It also does not map particularly well with how successful our users are on our platform: we see apps just starting out using a ton of capacity, and some of our most successful applications not using that much at all. We rely on our most successful customers helping us pay for making it cheap for new users, and also for the cost of finding new users. I know we raised a lot of money recently, but we see that money paying for further investments in the company, and want our business model to stand on its own regardless of how much we have in the bank, because that’s important to build a long-term sustainable platform.

One thing we considered was just charging by monthly unique daily visitors. The problem with that is there are a lot of applications built on Bubble that aren’t external-facing: they power some kind of backend system and are mainly interacted with by a handful of users, even though the total amount of data processed by those apps and the importance of those apps to their users can be really high.

What do you think the best way of charging for that kind of app is? We’re discussing whether database items are the right thing, but we just set the limits too low, or whether database items aren’t great even with high limits. A few people have suggested charging for database storage, instead. Our hesitation there was that it is harder for you to predict, because it depends on the way we store things behind the scenes and it isn’t easy to do the math, but maybe that’s a better option.

Anyway, we really do appreciate the feedback. We can’t promise never to change the platform, but we can promise to listen and be responsive.

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415

I’ve done coaching for over 50 different clients at the time, and as far as I can estimate I would say that at least 3/5 would be forced to either stop their activity, change app builder or externalize their database.

I actually already started receiving inquiries and quote requests for externalizing their DB.

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416

Well, this announcement just sucked the life out of my day!

I have one app on a legacy Professional plan with one single active user, me. At that, I already have over 17,000 rows in the main table. And this is not the only table in the database with the potential of 1,000s of rows.

What’s the main table? events and actions (you might say “to-dos”) for my personal productivity app. This is just four years of the history of plans and actions I’ve done since beginning to build the app.

With Bubble’s new pricing, there is no way the app can be commercialized, and at $115/mo or more, it is looking less realistic even for my personal use. And to keep it to $115/mo I’ll need to put more work into archiving or give up the intended value of on-going, long-term journaling that is part of the app’s vision.

My future with Bubble is clearly limited. All I can see happening in the next year is to flesh out a viable proof of concept and working model while I scout around for a completely new platform on which to build a marketable product.

But this really hurts!

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417

Will Bubble become Kodak of life? :sneezing_face: in their talk is improvement, My 200 user app the DB record is more than 10k.

Will Bubble believe he’s lived long? :rofl:

418

Very bold move asking this question at this time, TBH. Answers will be varied and messy. Now to see what folks say…! :smile:

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420

I agree 100% and I include myself in this disappointment.

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421

I think I agree with you to some extent. A new pricing model makes sense. A pricing model based on database “length” does not. My background is in Information Systems and data management. Database “size/weight” makes sense to regulate, but not the number of entries themselves.

I am personally excited to see capacity increase and would have been totally fine with a price increase (even if significant). The problem here is that many apps that I have built will be unusable when this pricing structure is rolled out. There is simply no way to rebuild them without completely ruining their database integrity. If I restructured tables to hold information less efficiently (but to have fewer entries), my searches would be too slow to make my app operable.

In the end, I don’t see this as a pricing change. I see this as a change to the appliable uses of Bubble as a whole. I really hope they don’t see it through.

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422

What about plans by daily active user AND plans by database usage? You could choose either.

But, no matter how you slice it, $20 for 5,000 things is absurdly expensive.

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423

Well, being someone who found Bubble because I am not a coder and working for months to learn, develop, and deploy my app, this definitely feels like a bait-and switch maneuver.

Bubble sells or sold itself as a no-code app with unlimited db things. I cannot even begin to guess how many signed up for this reason.

Next, bring in 100 million in funding and things start to change. The investors want to see their return and it seems as soon as possible.

Over the last months, your service went down several times. Not just buggy, but completely down. This is, for the most part, unheard of with SaaS. After things seem to be working again, you drop this bomb.

You are NOT for the boutique, small or even medium size businesses with this model of pricing.

I already was trying to figure out how much time it was going to take to move to your new responsive system. Many online who help the non-coders said blatantly that rebuilding pages was easier than trying to convert them.

This is an example of truly bad business practices which is, unfortunately, becoming more acceptable.

There is virtually no room for the small guys in this model. You have priced me out of using Bubble. I now have to figure out an alternative program, method, or system not to mention all the 3rd party companies I have tied to my app.

PLEASE if there are CODERS out there who can help with finding reasonable alternatives and or help given this bit of news, could you reply to my comment with any suggestions or alternatives.

Thanks for the short bit of time I enjoyed your service, Bubble. Looks like I am one of the many who will need to part ways given the change.

This is so disappointing and frustrating.

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425

As I said in my answer above, I understand that’s a tricky question regarding how Bubble works.

I’ve heard multiple time about pricing regarding the amount of users - which for most of the apps is a concrete metric that correlates the money generated by the app.
However it might be extremely difficult to manage and limit abuse as per Bubble database flexibility.

Talking for myself, what makes the more sense would be pricing based on features (API workflows, domain connexion, …) or as we have currently, based on server capacity, but with more comprehensive metrics.

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426

I feel the same.

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427

Just out of curiosity, why would it be such a bad thing to host all of your data somewhere else like Firebase or Backendless? I’ve been building on Bubble for over a year now and I always knew that their database was inferior to others out there. Is there something I’m missing?

For instance, I plan on adding an AI / ML component to my app. I had already planned to use a separate database for this and only use Bubble as the front end.

In general, I understand that it is going to be more expensive, but to assume that (a) Bubble wouldn’t change things up like every major tech company (i.e. Google) has always done or (b) to assume that their database would be the best for scaling applications anyways doesn’t really make sense to me to begin with.

I definitely think they need to accommodate (which it sounds like they are) for people who have large databases inside bubble currently.

But, what would it really be that bad if Bubble moves their app to be really just a super powerful frontend solution and the backend is compatible with another database provider whose sole focus is just backend? I personally have no problem with this. Especially since it is definitely better for pure app development compared to companies like Webflow.

Even though I’m personally against this change for the inconvenience, I think we need to keep in perspective that the alternative to bubble is custom app development. As someone who has paid for custom app developers before stopping that and teaching myself bubble I know exactly how expensive the alternative is and how much time I am saving with this.

P.S. I do concede that if they start to charge for API calls that would throw a wrench in the works. However, even then I can’t imagine they would be stupid enough to limit all API calls so much from a price perspective that nobody would use it.

428

This is non sense. How to record users activity ? messages ? notifications ? we definitively cannot use one row to record all things to record for one user ? Or maybe one user do nothing one an app ?
You should forget this idea, unless you want all of us moving elsewhere, competitors are ovethere, and i 've not see any charge for db record, maybe airtable but this is their core fonctionnality…

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429

same…

430

500? You mean 200.

431

Yeah that’s the most painful part. It’s such a huge switch, and every way you slice it the costs per thing are impossible.

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432

Guys, I still can’t believe the size of the nightmare this news is bringing. At the moment I am in the emergency room of a hospital, because my partner had a strong crisis of anxiety.

I’m feeling like I’m being treated like a drug addict, when the supplier realizes that the customer is totally dependent he starts to raise the price.

We are talking here about the future of many who have dedicated themselves to this tool and managed to build something, and many are also doing it now. This change moves us, our families and our future.

It would be more honest if the Bubble team came here and made it clear that these desperate measures are being taken so that Bubble doesn’t go bankrupt, because if there is a lesser reason than that, then the Bubble team’s common sense is over, and this bad news should not be the last.

You who are reading my poorly translated text, tell me: if you went back in time, to the day you first visited the Bubble plans and prices page, you would have stayed if there was the new plan and price table with their respective limitations?

For me, just the database limitation is enough for me to call it a crazy proposal, shit plans!

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433

Maybe you could use Bubble to build an app to calculate storage needs based on DB design. The user/developer can calculate and determine how many records are likely based on their understanding their app and user base.

Surely you can build the app to calculate storage needs based on your intimate knowledge of how Bubble stores things internally.

Yes?

434

The new pricing is definitely easier to follow versus the capacity model. It will be more limiting in regards database limitations. I have a few questions that were not covered:

  1. What are the metrics for overage costs?

  2. Where does workflow counts fall in line with this pricing model?

  3. What is the best alternative to housing/fetching data outside of bubble?

435

Straight database storage. We can limit picture uploads and file sizes to control this better. But the database rows is a blow to scale itself which is part of your premise.

Don’t do the database rows. I am already looking at Wappler and Xano and had never heard of them before today.

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