Without a doubt this is a great move for Bubble and all current/future users, but as an existing Flusk customer it’s very disappointing to lose features. I upgraded from Starter to Growth to get some of them back, but I have no need for the Team plan in order to get the rest of the Flusk features back.
Also, the security certificate and PDF is only on Enterprise now? That’s absurd.
My main app will probably warrant dedicated/Enterprise early next year, but unfortunate nonetheless.
That’s quite an extreme take. I’m on starter plans for all my apps cause I don’t need any of the team features, but I have worked with the flusk team for a security audit on one of my apps and they’ve been great.
Flusk itself is a good service and having it integrated with Bubble can only bring with it better things to come. Features are limited now but as with everything Bubble it’s a wait and see.
@fede.bubble Also on Starter plan here. It’s super misleading to say this is available on all the plan levels in your marketing. Only after going through all the signup steps, you find out it’s basically useless on Starter.
“Whether you’re on our Starter, Growth, or Team plans, Flusk is here to strengthen and support your app.” Incorrect.
thanks @dylan9 , I’ve passed your feedback to the team for review. Just so I can give them more info, I know the starter plan gets “basic security checks”. Were you using flusk before and are now missing functionality? Or is the info in these basic security checks simply too little for your needs?
Thanks! I haven’t used Flusk before, so this is all fresh. I’ve dug a bit more and see it’s not entirely useless at Starter. I’m seeing the Basic Security Checks on their pricing page, but not seeing any reference to the features in the dashboard other than Privacy Rules test. I can access Privacy Rules test, which is fairly useful. I can’t access any of the issues identified in the Issues Explorer, so I guess that means I don’t have any issues that are under “basic checks”? It’d be nice if they could list the categories from their pricing page and indicate whether their tests are passing or failing. It’s a bit frustrating having all the issues identified not able to be accessed or even see what category they’re under, although I understand from a business perspective why they’d want to highlight things I can pay more to see. I can also access Page and Database review to make the tests more accurate. Overall I’m just not sure where I’m at from looking at the Issues Explorer page, and not sure why I’d upgrade my plan to see the hidden items. I agree with others who think this should not be tied to plans, but have its own upgrade cost, or maybe just an add-on for people on Starter who don’t need more plan features.
@fede.bubble do you know why Bubble has chosen not to offer full flusk on all plans? I would reason that for both users and Bubble it is valuable to have secure apps. It would also allow agencies to make more money as people start to see that their site is not secure. In addition, a data breach on Bubble reaching the news would harm Bubbles credibility as well.
A basic tactic of including it in full in higher plans is 101 pricing strategy when t would increase the selling of higher plans outweighing the cost of having more customers running insecure setups.
In this case I cannot images that the latter is the case for Bubble though.
Probably but for startup owners who don’t know security and on starter plan bubble can really upsell them with fear into higher tier plans once flusk is fully integrated.
It’s like collaborators only being allowed on growth plan that’s multiples the cost of starter, do they have to do it and is it a bit right for their customers success? No, but it’s a major revenue driver.
Have you seen their revenue going up with this tactic?
I do not have any bubble data only history data in other organizations and in many cases it was not a revenue driver, if positive it was mostly reduced churn.
@sem Of course Bubble cares about app security, that’s why Flusk was acquired. But you have to remember that plenty of secured apps have been built without it. Flusk will help find issues you may have missed. In the starter plan that means things like editor privacy or your password policies. For higher plans, it covers more things that typically become important for bigger apps.
The Flusk pricing page (Pricing & Plans - Flusk) actually has a large table breakdown that details what goes into every plan.
No data, just anecdotal, a very large number of my past clients have upgraded to growth for no reason other than to be able to have a past developer added. Many times I’ve seen them just downgrade after.
Similar to flusk a few google extensions require you add a collaborator so the extension can have full access, unlike flusk they don’t have partnerships where you can add flusk without it counting as a collaborator. Ex) again must be on growth.
This isn’t uncommon practice in software but many times it’s a couple dollar increase or pay per collab at like $5-15. Bubbles structure to have a single collab costs $100 more per month and a 12x increase on price of starter plan to $400/mo if you need more than 1 collaborator. Which is why the community has asked countless times for an option to pay a fee per collaborator instead of changing plans bc it tends to be one of the more common reasons people upgrade (ie: a main revenue driver for upsells).
With flusk being limited on plans all it would take is bubble showing alerts saying “xyz has a security issue, upgrade to growth for full report” or similar to push fear based upsells.
No code apps in general are notorious for not being secure, I love bubbles direction to fixing that but using something as important and as big of an issue as app security may not be as ethical. when flusk was solo it only cost anyone a mere $20/mo to get the knowledge to secure their app in full. Now it’s going to require them to be on $100/mo increase to get the some of the features and $400/mo team plan to get the full feature set that used to cost $20/mo.
Not that we don’t want bubble to make money, the platform should be prosperous but buying a widely used community tool and increasing the price as many multiples as you did is very VC esq.
I completely agree with this sentiment. This is a “no cost” consideration for Bubble. It cost them $0.00 to allow a collaborator (or any number) on a project. It’s a feature that makes you “pay to develop”. Again charging an amount per seat makes sense here vs. a plan upgrade which is tied to utilization.
It’s not that easy to find the right pricing for some services. You will never have the one solution which makes everyone happy.
But when it comes to security it’s also a benefit for bubble, because if it would be included there will be of course less direct requests to the customer support.
Probably bubble paid a certain amount which needs to be refinanced or something.
Personally I would suggest to make everything accessible for every paid account, but if that’s not possible I would go for a small extra fee and not change the whole plan. I don’t need to repeat why, I think most of the people complaining here are at the starter plan and the next plan is just 3-4 times of it…