Not exactly… there look to be many SaaS apps around and many different businesses around Bubble. For example, Zeroqode is still a thing, AirDev is still a thing, Nocodeminute is a thing, etc. If you’re really considering on starting a business, with no technical skills you still need to either 1. find a technical co-founder 2. pay for someone else to do it for you using code, or 3. Head over to a platform like Bubble which is pretty affordable in the US and build it all yourself without code.
Plus on top of all of that, the bills need to be paid somehow. This change was bound to happen. I hope that you realize bills don’t pay themselves. I linked this thread above, but I’m going to link it again. Back in 2019, the prices raised, and within that thread @josh listed some of the fundamental things:
Who’s going to pay for all of that if the majority of Bubble Applications are FREE applications? The ultimate goal of the Hobby Plan and this newly introduced Free Plan is to give prospects a little taste of what Bubble can do.
Since you said you’ve been on Bubble for a year, do you have a paid plan? Are you supporting Bubble fiscally in any way by having a paid app? $29/USD is pretty reasonable to start off in the United States, I’ve seen concerns about those in different countries and that’s totally valid.
From the list that Josh posted above my guess is that the cost to maintain and even break even each month is high.
- AWS is expensive. There are server costs (i.e. computing power, RAM, S3 storage, etc, etc, etc the list goes on) My rough rough guess a couple thousand since they have multiple servers, etc, etc.
- They use Mailchimp as well, so let’s make that calculation. When writing this post, on the Bubble Homepage it states they have around 830,852 Bubblers, in Mailchimp terms 830,852 contacts. How much does that cost? Well, it’s about $1,190/mo for 200K contacts, assuming there are some discounts because of the number of contacts my guess would around 3K a month just for that.
- Sendgrid, they send out tons of emails I can imagine. Probably 1-2K/mo
- Frontapp, which they now use for Customer Service. Since they have about 30ish people on their team, each will probably have an account because they work collaboratively with customers (i.e. Bubble Engineers working with Sucess to resolve bugs, etc) Frontapp is $49/mo/annually in that particular case which means for 30 employees approx $1,470/mo/annually
A lot of this pricing can be fact-checked, but it’s just me looking on pricing pages and making some guesses. That’s just their operating costs for each month or whatever, but it doesn’t include employee salaries which not to mention, they have over 30 once again.
There are costs. It adds up. There needs to be a line to where they can be sustainable and scale, grow.
Just sick and tired to people complaining. On the brighter look, it looks like Bubble is doing A/B testing on some cheaper plans: An official response to Bubble pricing discrepancy - #9 by melon
EDIT: I’m thinking of more things Bubble probably pays for. Third-Party stuff like their blog powered by Ghost, Buffer to post on their social media channels, the software that powers logs within our apps, etc.