This question came up because I saw an application that uses WhatsApp, OCR, and artificial intelligence charging less than US$3.50 per month.
I was thinking that if a similar application were built using Bubble, considering workload units (WU), external API costs, payment processing fees, and very active users, the profit margin per user would likely be quite small, around 30% or even less.
I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has done this type of calculation in practice or has real-world experience with similar apps.
No B2C app that isn’t hyper scale will make any money at $3.50/mo
You really need $10-15/mo+ to make money with SaaS regardless of niche
I mean, think about it like this:
If your users send one support request every 3 months, and each support request takes 15 minutes to deal with, you’ll nuke most of your margins in customer support!
The question you’re asking…if anyone were to answer it in a broad sense, would be yes, it could be viable.
BUT, you’re also not looking at the full picture.
You have apps like Verifi or Wishspend that can start at around $2 but are heavily throttled. You’re not going to get a whole lot of benefits…and they push upgrades for profitability.
So, yes, you could charge $3.50 if you followed those other apps’ guidelines.
But, no, a fully unthrottled app that offered those features wouldn’t be profitable on Bubble, and it’s not profitable for those apps you mention either without upgrades that they rely on
Only if those base features are loss leaders and there are upcharges elsewhere which drive revenue. $3.50 ARPU is incredibly low, especially for building on a platform like bubble, let alone paying yourself or any developers you might hire.
Although for 3.50/mo you can have a bot centered support with ability to actually contact support hidden behind enough links and forms that make most ppl give up, ala Amazon or Netflix
I’ve seen some apps that use WhatsApp, photos, OCR, and AI to create automatic invoices, charging around US$5.50 or less.
However, from a Bubble perspective, considering WU consumption, backend workflows, database operations, and external APIs, this seems very unlikely to be profitable.
From what we’ve seen, $0.01 per document is possible, but it’s definitely the low end rather than the default, and it usually assumes basic OCR, clean inputs, and pricing per page rather than per “document”.
If you expect users to process well under 100 documents (and not every month), then yes, the OCR cost alone is unlikely to be the limiting factor, especially if the app is built on something like Next.js/React where infra costs are predictable.
The bigger risks to margin tend to be:
How many OCR pages those “documents” actually translate to
Whether usage is front-loaded vs recurring
Messaging costs (e.g. WhatsApp templates outside the service window)
Payment processing fees at low ARPU
So I’d agree profit is achievable, but only if usage is capped or limited and the product design avoids high-frequency paid actions. At $3–4/month, small changes in user behavior make a big difference to margins.
Mistral API pricing is pretty cheap for OCR - they charge around $1 per 1K pages (i may be wrong with exact number but its defiantly low - if you process 8 page per doc).
Whatsapp bot setup is one time setup - via n8n.
Now sure what exactly the AI usage - but on openrouter you get lots of good model for free (depend on the use case)
So if you are able to acquire 1000 users - thats 3500 MRR - your cost will be Bubble - $32, OCR - $80 (considering all users processing 80 pages) , another $80 for ai processing , $20 for email usages, $20 for n8n.
so total spend will be - $232 . so technically its possible (considering you are not hiring freelancer)
