Hi. Yesterday I posted ā The Bubble Cemeteryā, a list of long-promised features that still havenāt shipped. It was removed for not being āconstructiveā enough.
So here is the revised version, now with a bit more feedback just to be safe.
If youāve been on Bubble long enough, you know the pattern:
Big announcement. Community hype. Then silence.
2021: Bubble admitted the problem
ā¦we spin up a lot of new projectsā¦
ā¦weāre trying to be more disciplinedā¦
Four years later, itās the same story.
Bubble Features Weād Still Love to See
With real quotes from Bubbleās own updates
Stability
ā¦increase our overall reliabilityā¦
ā¦investments to improve stabilityā¦
Apps still go down regularly. We would really love to see that change.
Speed
ā¦significant page load speed and SEO impactā¦
ā¦across-the-board improvementsā¦
Itās 2025. Still slow. Still heavy. But we remain hopeful.
Design
ā¦build beautiful apps on Bubbleā¦
ā¦new components systemā¦
Still not modern or flexible. But thereās always room to grow.
Privacy
ā¦data privacy and security is an ongoing effortā¦
Still āongoingā. We are rooting for a finish line.
If there are other features you are still waiting for, feel free to share them below.
Letās keep the feedback clear, honest, and just constructive enough.
Other than stability, the others are always due to bad builds or not understanding how Bubble works.
I have an ERP, a booking system and a website live for years now. It runs just as well as any other. I only just got started upskilling my UI design but never once have I not been able to replicate websites Iāve found.
The counterargument, āitās because of your bad app design, itās not Bubbleās fault,ā is validā¦ if you have less than 500 users and <100k rows of data.
Here are some of the biggest pain points we see as a Bubble app with 200k+ users and a few million rows of data
Latency is a huge issue - There are whole categories of apps you simply cannot build on Bubble due to latency issues. Weāve seen times it takes 4+ seconds to update records. With scheduling being a core part of our app, we were getting double-booking complaints weekly from people booking times seconds apart before we re-built the scheduling logic and database outside of Bubble.
Any kind of computation is unrealistic at best - If you want to count 1k values, sure, thatās pretty quick. But if you want to do a simple function to sum the number of outstanding invoice values or something on 1k values, your users are going to have to wait 20+ seconds to see a returned value. And you can completely forget about loading a chart of calculated values, haha.
Data manipulation is an issue - To make changes to 10k+ rows of data, it will take more than an hour. For comparison, this same action would take less than 2 seconds on Supabase or similar platforms.
Costs are nonsensical in 2025 - 1,000% markup on AWS is fine when youāre the only game in town, the problem is, a new startup is being launched weekly that all are promising similar things. This is going to be an issue in the age of Lovable, Replit, and others
Data security is an issue - Even after passing all the checks from Flusk and NQU, youāre not secure. API initialization values being exposed forever is a perfect example.
The other complaints of loading speeds and downtime are solved by moving to a dedicated plan, so just be ready to be hit with those fees once youāve āmade itā.
Hereās the solution to fix it all that Bubble will never do - Just give us the code, let us host it, and use outside databases natively. I, for one, would happily pay the exact same amount we are now, and Bubble wouldnāt be stuck with the hosting costs. Since thatāll never happen, and Bubble would rather invest dev resources toward rebuilding the UI, weāre moving toward using Bubble as just a front-end builder, and prepping for the day Bubble shuts it all down because a bazillion other apps took the self-hosted approach.
My booking app serves thousands of people in a span of an hour during peak booking times. Iād brag about my other stats but my companyās profitable enough that I wonāt.
I dislike this notion of āyour app is not scaled, so you donāt understand nonsenseā . Scale does not equate to a profitable app/business. Nor does it display any mastery. Iād say the opposite since if a product is suffering at scale, then the implementation is bad.
Bubble does have flaws, but not in the areas you pointed out in your first post (I can agree with stability issues but they still have a good uptime record). In fact I agree with your second post more (accept data security) but you know what makes Bubble great? You can still write your own code and stack other tech. I know because thatās what i do.
Itās silly for anyone to think that Bubble can support all types of businessandat scale while staying in the shared cluster. There will always be limits to any monolith. Itās why companies at scale seek and apply appropriate solutions to overcome or workaround limitations.
Congrats on the success! Really great to see people succeed with Bubble. I didnāt intend to diminish the success of smaller apps, and I absolutely agree that creating value with less code is a valuable skill that everyone should aspire to be better at. Iād also argue that what weāve been able to build isnāt even close to a legitimately āscaledā app.
Weāve been able to circumvent those limitations by using other technologies to augment our stack, using Bubble for what itās best at, and not asking for it to do things its frankly not good at.
Iām only critical because when I was getting started, I spent hours reading through forums trying to figure out the limitations of no-code, specifically around scaling. It would have saved us hundreds of hours if I had stumbled upon a post like this and known Bubbleās limitations ahead of time. It doesnāt help the product team when they see posts with legitimate concerns where not all use cases are represented.
Bubble can undoubtedly support a successful, profitable app. Just want to give a new reader an honest take on where things are at and maybe save them a few hours.
Same here. Scaling purely in Bubble is a risk. I explored stacking Bubble because I knew exactly where I wanted my apps to scale. That and being a bootstrapped company and a solo dev. Honestly, I have my appsā costs still within the range of the Starter plan, but I add WU plans for contingencies. Stacking keeps costs low and speeds up a lot of processes while keeping my company lean all these years (weāre literally just 2 dudes bootstrapping).
Itās always good to see criticisms of Bubble because they listen (even though we might think otherwise) but as business owners itās important to weigh the risks. This includes factoring reliance on āupcoming featuresā.
For all its flaws, Bubble truly does empower businesses, especially lean startups like mine, but we shouldnāt expect them to cover all of our bases while keeping it cheap. They already take an entire unitās worth of work (and $$$) away from app development while keeping the flexibility of running complex workflows that will be a pain in the ass to write in code. On top of allowing custom plugins and easy integrations of API calls.
Adding more features to the Bubble Archive
A few more long-promised features weād love to see finally escape limbo. Hopefully, Bubble is still listening.
Better performance
ā¦the biggest user pain points are query execution speed, followed by page load speedā¦
ā¦working on an ambitious project to build a complete data dependency graph of each Bubble pageā¦
ā¦significantly speed up how long complicated pages with a lot of searches and repeating groups take to loadā¦
Still one of the most common complaints. At this point, building anything truly complex often feels like a gamble.
Smart Workload Unit consumption with fair pricing
ā¦invest in more efficient ways to manipulate large amounts of dataā¦
Weāre still waiting for a system that doesnāt rely on workarounds or burn through WUs in minutes.
Native PDF element
ā¦we are working on a replacement for our SelectPDF pluginā¦
ā¦we would like to bring PDF generation in-house with a Bubble-built solutionā¦
ā¦PDFs: Iām guessing weāll be releasing it in May or June (2021)ā¦
ā¦weāve already made substantial progress on itā¦
That was four years ago. Still no native PDF solution. Hopefully, that āprogressā didnāt vanish.
Got more long-promised features that havenāt shipped? Add them in the replies.
Weāre not asking for magic. Just follow-through.
The Bubble Cemeteryā, a list of long-promised features that still havenāt shipped. It was removed for not being āconstructiveā enough.
Bubble Features Weād Still Love to See
Stability
Adding more features to the Bubble Archive