Difference between Bandwidth and Workload on Bubble site

Hi Bubblers,

Can anyone please help me answer some of the following questions:

  1. I was told that my Starter plan has 100GB of bandwidth. You can refer to this link: Pricing and plans | Bubble Docs. If I upload 200GB of videos and regularly play on my website, then, will it exceed allowed Bandwidth for my current plan?

  1. What is the difference between Workload Units and Bandwidth please?

  2. When I plays a video file on my Bubble app (Through a video player Plugin), then, will it be counted as Bandwidth or Workload Unit? All my videos are hosted on Bubble storage

  3. Is it possible to buy Extra Bandwidth?

  4. I use Bubble to collect videos from Students and then Teachers watch those videos for grading. Can you please offer me a better solution, a solution that may be better than using Bubble’s extra storage?. I know that Bubble uses CDN and it helps to load things very fast.

Thank you very much for your support and advice!

I’ve never actually noticed this, and thought that as WU were added, there should be no other constraints on traffic… Come on Bubble, you said you just wanted to give one thing to think about that encompasses everything (WU) but then add this…

Playing files would likely not consume bandwidth as files are not distributed through Bubble but through AWS.

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WTF is this? Bandwidth?

@fede.bubble can someone from the team explain what this is about? There were never any announcements about Bandwidth.

Is this just for file storage? Is it bandwidth for my entire app? If it’s for an entire app why do I have to pay more as a solo developer?

Edit: More questions I want answerd:
What happens when my app hits your bandwidth limit?
What affects bandwidth?

Again… I already pay for WU Tiers and overages. I’m a solo dev who doesn’t need features from other plans so this looks like you’re singling folks like me out and trying to get me to pay more for shit I don’t need.

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I’m confused, too. The documentation distinguishes between file storage and bandwidth, as shown by the link in the original post. However, when I visit the pricing page (Pricing | Bubble) and click “See full comparison” and then scroll down, I see the file storage limits per tier but no mention of bandwidth limits per tier.

Workload is how much work your app does, and bandwidth is how much work it takes to send it to users. We’re already charged workload for page load so who knows.

As we haven’t encountered these bandwidth limits, I’d hope they’re arbitrarily large such that you don’t need to worry about them.

I use Wasabi regularly and find it good! Use @redvivi ’s plugin to connect a Wasabi bucket.

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Bandwidth was added when?!

Remember when Bubble said that they wanted to make their pricing simpler? Since then we have had the introduction of terms that require an encyclopedia of knowledge to understand :clown_face: which still aren’t actually clear.

Where can we measure bandwidth within our apps? Surely this would be as essential as all the half working tools for measuring WUs.

Thank you very much for your reply.

Does it cost bandwidth if users play videos on my site or upload to my site please.

Thank you!

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One sec, going to ask the team about this

Edit: apparently that’s been there (in the manual) for at least a year. I’ll see what else I can find about bandwidth

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This isn’t new; it’s been in the manual for a while, but I just hadn’t paid much attention to it.

Thanks! I’ve not checked that section in a while but I do not recall any announcements about bandwidth. Also there’s way too little (close to none) information or clarity for something that affects costs and sounds like it affects performance.

Concern would be that there is no way to track it, nor is there any mention of it on the pricing page. It doesn’t show transparency when things like this are slyly introduced on one page that not everyone would likely check. It should be mentioned everywhere that pricing and plans are mentioned, not a hidden afterthought. Users should also be able to track it to give confidence that it actually is being calculated correctly.

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@fede.bubble Is there any update on this? We know its been a thing for a while but nobody knows how bandwidth is calculated.

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Essentially what was already said: it’s a limit to protect Bubble from very rare edge cases where apps could incur in extremely high amounts of bandwidth. But I’ve been told the limits are set really high to the point that it’s almost a theoretical limit at that point.

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If it’s a theoretical ceiling, then why the huge difference in bandwidth between tiers? We’re talking more than twice between starter and growth then another 2 times increase after.

Why must a solo dev like myself be “theoretically disadvantaged” for not wanting to pay for features that I don’t need?

I sound like I’m whining but a lot of the value from developing in Bubble goes back to the non-profit organizations I build for. I have to think ahead if I am expected to increase my costs for whenever I may hit these edge cases when I scale.

I’ll ask but I would imagine it has to do with the typical bandwidth usage in each tier. For each tier this limit should be so high that very few apps will run into it

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Why is it not public though? Full transparency is not something that should be avoided. It just adds to the unknown when building on Bubble. There is absolutely zero reason for it to not be public.

I’ve been trying to get a straight answer from them on this, but their own staff don’t seem to have a consistent answer.

  • Some think WU is bandwidth
  • Others knew the definition of bandwidth but couldn’t explain what consumes bandwidth on bubble
  • Mostly they refer me to the pricing and plans page (as though ive never seen it before).
  • They also said to see the pricing and plans page to see prices on purchasing extra bandwidth, which of course isn’t on the page, nor can we actually do it as far as i can see.

I know I must be being dumn here because the maths on displaying images wouldnt add up, but perhaps someone could say where I’m wrong here:

Does showing images directly from the database comsume bandwidth?

On my app specifically:

  1. Assuming 5mb per image
  2. 1 photo upload per user per day
  3. Average user following 30 people
  4. 5 visits to the feed per day

1000 users would mean:

1000 x 5mb for uploads = 5 GB per day
30 x 5mb when viewing = 150mb
X 5 for 5 feed visits per day = 750mb
750 mb x 1000 people = 750 GB

755 GB X 31 days = 23 TB per month
For 1000 active users.

100k users which is our current target would mean 2300 TB.

Obviously the above must be ludicrously incorrect.

I dont think they understand peoples livlihoods rest our our businesses and we need transparency.

Sorry to not provide answers!
At the moment its just a rant about how few answers there are.

Hopefully somebody in this community thats figured this out can help.

Alex

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Bubble has been limiting the number of WUs per second since approximately 2020. By the way, when Bubble resets their servers after a storm, the number of WUs per seconds is extremely fast. I think Bubble will come up with a solution, a kind of quantity of operations per second (bandwidth) that will be faster and faster depending on the package, or on demand. I’m speculating, of course.

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