@brandon8 that makes sense and. yeah, Bubble makes all of that stuff really easy.
So, the value we get from Bubble is pretty big when we think about it being a full stack solution with a database/CMS storage, hosting/bandwidth, build time, login features, etc.
The thing with Bubble and pricing and what you get for that is a little weird though, in the sense that we don’t see a lot of other solutions priced in the same way.
Like, if you built a JAMstack type static site (using cloud functions and APIs for database and stuff), there’s a lot you can do totally for free in the prototyping/proof-of-concept phase as you can get away with the free/community level of Gatsby, free version of Netlify perhaps for deployment over their CDN, the free level of some headless CMS (like Contentful or Prismic) and a free or very low cost.
And lots and lots of Bubble projects at the hobby, personal and even some at the professional level could (if they were built “in code”) be delivered in this way, without any actual cash outlay at all, especially if you’re just a one-person team. And, the main difference you’d see in sites like this vs Bubble is that their page load speed would be orders of magnitude faster than what you see in Bubble. (And this is probably the main frustration with Bubble on these lower tier plans – your app spends a lot of time waiting for the shared server to serve your page.)
But, even in that more modern and initially lower-cost architecture, once you get serious, you’re likely going to need to upgrade to the “pro” level of whatever CDN provider you’re using (e.g., Gatsby Cloud, Netlify, etc.) and that goes to around $20/month. The same thing might happen with your CMS of choice and you might start consuming enough compute on whatever cloud functions thing you’re using, your database, etc. And all of those individually cheap $20-$100 per month things start adding up.
(But the sheer amount of compute/storage/bandwidth you’d be buying there is in fact a lot more than what Bubble gives you at similar costs.)
And a lot of these things have a per-user model where in some cases, your costs go up for each team member (where at least with Bubble you get 1 collaborator at the Pro level).
OTOH, in a JAMstack or similar model, if you go over capacity with your CDN, you just get charged for what additional bandwidth you use during spikes like the one you experienced, @brandon8. (And this tends to be very low cost and at least your site doesn’t “go down”.)
In either model, there tends to be a big jump in cost to get to the “production/enterprise” (whatever you want to call it) level. Where Bubble is now $475/529/month for the Production level, a similar-ish level with other approaches might be like $99/mo for your CDN, a similar amount for your CMS and/or database, and various other service costs (so like, maybe half of what Bubble costs at the low end to $400-ish bucks a month, depending on a LOT of different factors). And of course, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison (for the money you’d be buying A LOT more compute, bandwidth, etc.).
Another big difference is that, where Bubble is charging per project, in other architectures you might be able to have multiple projects (repositories) all under the same account and as long as you’re within your max pages/storage/build minutes/whatever it doesn’t matter how many projects you’re running (this varies immensely between different services, but it’s generally true that in one account you could be servicing multiple and in some cases unlimited projects).
This is one of the places where the Bubble pricing model really starts to fall down. (Like just to support my plugins, I have multiple personal plans and then I have a Professional plan with a couple of extra capacity units for my VR calendar thingy. I wish I could just bundle them up on something like a Pro+ plan at around 200-250 bucks and have a bunch of these little projects in that plan.)
Basically, in the world of web app stuff today, cost grows like a step function. There’s a metric s-ton of “free” (or free-ish, right?) and then there’s a small step up to the “OK, OK, I gotta be on the paid version of a couple of things and the pro version of that one thing” level and this can last you for a long time, and then there’s a BIGGER step up where you’re in the “this thing costs real money” category.
With Bubble, the “free”/free-ish level starts at $29/month, and the “small step” is to $129. If the basic page serving stuff wasn’t soooo vastly different with respect to other approaches, this wouldn’t seem so bad to my mind. And I totally remember that getting to that small step with my VR calendar project. It’s like, “damn, this thing is ramen profitable and now Bubble gonna take my ramen!” right?
I didn’t really mean for this reply to be a commentary on Bubble pricing, but I just wanted to note that for where you app is now in terms of users/hour, even if you were on some other architecture, you’re now at that “small step” level and you’d be paying $100/mo (or right in that neighborhood) for something or in total for all of the somethings that power your site. (Though as I’ve said too many times in this post already, the value-for-money of the somethings would be rather higher than what Bubble gives us at that price point.)
