Changes to our free plan

Announcements
154

Oh, but I would.

If someone comes out with a BaaS/FaaS combo which easily (one click) integrates with better and more popular front end builders (e.g. webflow, appgyver etc.) and bubble hasn’t progressed in any meaningful way, I sure am switching, and certainly if the price of bubble is doubled (one of the A/B pricing tests had a 100% increase).

Or if wappler perhaps got their BaaS together and dropped the ridiculous 7-day trail period, which makes it impossible to learn the platform before buying into it (which incidentally is the direction bubble is inching towards with this change.)

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It was fun while it lasted

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I have been using this platform for over a year. I really don’t like this change. It is destroying businesses and causing chaos in Communities. I feel like taking away deploying it live for the free plan is a little too much. I thought this site was making websites for free without coding not deploy you website live for a $29 fee for one app. This is not a good business move if your looking for more people to buy the plans. Maybe if the plan prices weren’t sky rocket high you wouldn’t have needed to do this. It is called satisfying the people and making more profits.

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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.

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158

With this change, you really need to introduce a lower-priced paid tier, but $25/month is far to big a jump for most people who are on Hobby plans. I’ve considered paying for or asking my company to pay for this, but there’s just no way to get that across the line for the limited scope of the app we use.

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Yup, and they are doing A/B testing to see what price range might be best suited.

Note: A/B testing from what I’ve heard only applies to new accounts and can be opted out of if asked. However, we don’t see it on older accounts.

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But there were definitely more options though. They didn’t have to choose this one. Most people chose to stick with the hobby plan because they thought the prices were ridiculous for the amount of stuff you get in it. If there was more benefits or cheaper prices beforehand I don’t think this would be a problem or even need to be done.

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If they thought the prices were “ridiculous” and wasn’t worth it per say, then why stay on Bubble and leach off free resources, there are plenty people here that are on a paid plan and believe they are paying for what they are getting. I haven’t seen a no-code platform more powerful, responsive, and structured than Bubble out there.

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162

My opinion might be unpopular but people with the above mindset may be exactly the ones Bubble are trying to chase away… :sleepy:
Using up precious resources but not making them money…
On a free plan but has tons of users using the site…
always looking for fixes or more free stuff…

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Destroying businesses? On a FREE plan?

Why would you build a business on a free plan and suddenly feel entitled that they owe you something?

Pay for the product if you built a business around it for free

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164

Maybe I shouldn’t say this but I feel I get at least a 20x value for what I pay for our app’s Professional plan. Seriously, the speed in which I’m able to develop and the self-reliance using Bubble gives me is worth at least twenty times what I’m paying. I know that’s going to make the free plan and hobbyist plan people screech but for my business Bubble is an extraordinary value.

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165

I had to laugh at that part!!.. If paying $29 a month for one of your primary business tools is “destroying your business”, you’ve clearly got major problems with your business that need to be addressed, or you need to rethink your business model entirely.

The free plan is a great way to see what Bubble is and what it can do, but why anyone would expect to be able to use the full features of a powerful and complex tool like Bubble for their business, for free, is beyond me.

As plenty of others have pointed out, what Bubble provides in terms of features and value is pretty much unparalleled, and if you’re using it for business it’s just another business cost (like any other tool) to factor into your own costing. If you can’t make it work for your business then don’t use it, or revise your business model, but don’t expect to get the full features and resources of a platform (that other paying users are funding) for free.

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Perfect.
As I always say: if U$29/month is an impediment to your business plan, you need to urgently review your business plan.

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167

Fair point, but i doubt many of the template makers make enough money to justify paying for a Bubble account. You can check out the templates yourself, most of them have only been bought a few times.

I am concerned about the price A:B tests though. Has there been any official statement about that? I was already paying the $29/mo for a non-commercial hobby project. I don’t mind since I consider it paying for a hobby, but I would struggle to justify 2x that cost.

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@major_groove Here’s an official response the the plan A/B testing from a couple of weeks ago:

An official response to Bubble pricing discrepancy - Question - Bubble Forum

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Fair point, but that also goes the other way, I don’t make enough money on my bubble sites to justify paying 100% more haha. I guess the retort would be “make better templates that people are willing to pay for” or “market them better” ?

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Problem is, build a crap app and get no money - that only affects you.

If there is a blocker to people considering building templates or plugins, then that affects the whole ecosystem.

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Yeah, an argument can be made that building templates (for sale) should be subsidized by Bubble to further their product (bubble).

However, by extension, that same argument could be made for non white labelled apps.
An app with a “Built on Bubble” serves the purpose of “free” advertising and grows the platform, which should be a positive for the user base as a whole, as well.

If I understand it correctly, you can no longer deploy on a free plan? which nullifies the argument for one group of developers, but not the other.

User A decides to make an app to sell a service to others, using a free plan, and in return they promote bubble with a “built on bubble” banner.

User B decides to make a template to sell to other bubblers, using a free plan, and in return help build up the template library for Bubble.

And we’re saying that User B should be able to continue this but User A should not.

That argument in itself raises more questions. where do you draw the line for what helps furthering the ecosystem and should be subsidized and what should not? Should selling know-how also be exempt from paying user fees? An argument could be made that selling know how has a greater positive impact on the eco system than a template.

Going further down the rabbit hole of random Bubble shower thoughts, would disincentivizing User A and incentivizing User B see a further skewing towards selling products to other bubblers over selling SaaS products to the public. Which is Bubble’s stated goal, to become a web standard for SaaS creation.

Often when people ask in the forum “show me some successes then” the same handful of examples are given as successful bubble built products. But most of these are not SaaS products but are selling bubble related products to other bubblers. Which is something I always find interesting.

Now, I’m sure these changes are driven in part by VC money coming into bubble and between them and Bubble they know the answers these questions already. But I don’t, so it’s something I’m scratching my head over.

Thanks for engaging @major_groove this is something I’m trying to wrap my head around haha.

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To clarify, this isn’t Bubble’s fault, builders are the ones that decide whether to share their Bubble-built applications publicly on the forum or not. Most don’t and I have my own reasons to understand why.

Anywho, this thread should probably be locked by now, we’ve beat a dead horse.

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Oh yes, for sure, that was not meant as a fault of Bubble. As I’ve touched on in many different threads on the topic, there a plenty of reasons that Bubblers do not want to showcase their apps on Bubble, and there are many reasons that some would want to.

For me personally, I don’t showcase my apps on here for various reasons. And I fully respect that others don’t as well.

Which brings up another train of thought, should Bubble be concerned by users (such as myself) who do not wish to showcase their apps as Bubble apps? I might be too small of a fish in the sea for Bubble to reach out to me specifically to inquire what my reasons are. But, We, who say that “yes, those pages usually are being held up. But surely there are a plethora of extremely successful, large scale SaaS applications built on Bubble’s framework” what are we basing that on? I certainly hope that it is so, but I’m also aware I’m making a pretty big assumption. If my goal was to become a web standard, I would be concerned by it (I think). Of course, here again, I don’t have all of the facts, and Bubble probably have all this worked out, but I find it an interesting thought experiment.

Edit: I think this is a horse that can be kept running for as long as people like to engage and discuss a topic that has a huge impact on people’s Bubble businesses, don’t you think? There’s always the option to not click on the thread if you don’t wish to be bothered :wink: