How is it that Bubble, a company with more than a decade of experience and millions of dollars in investment, still struggles with recurring stability issues, sometimes on a monthly or even weekly basis?
And letās be honest: this comes on top of a massive backlog of bugs and outdated integrations that have been left unaddressed for years.
Smaller competitors with far fewer resources continue to move faster and deliver more modern features, while Bubble keeps wrestling with the same basic problems again and again. At this point, it is not only disappointing for users but should also be embarrassing for Bubble itself.
Does anyone else feel the same way?
P.S. Hopefully this wonāt be silenced. After all, what better way to prove Bubbleās commitment to transparency than by letting users ask hard but fair questions? Silencing posts like this would say more about Bubble than anything written here.
Thereās been plenty of posts like these over the years. Rings true for any SAAS. Have you seen Cursorās forums? Itās fair to criticize and the Community Managers, as far as I can remember, have not silenced anyone for criticizing Bubble. @fede.bubble is too awesome in the first place.
From my experience a lot of stability issues come from Bubble delivering fixes for tech debt. Josh and Emmanuel bootstrapped and personally developed Bubble for years before getting seeded and expanding the team. From my own experienceā¦that comes with A LOT of tech debt. Iām still paying for it in one of my apps. Albeit Iām still a bootstrapping solo dev.
Issues also tend to arise during pushes for core system updates and big features (please be the property editor next. Please Please Please. And donāt mess it up please please please).
Another often overlooked point is that most of us are in the shared cluster. Just my hypothesis, I think a lot of their own dev branches are interwoven with shared cluster resources so the tendency for issues to arise in shared cluster are more frequent. Not an excuse but just a thought.
Every SaaS has issues, and yes, tech debt is real, no argument there. The difference is that Bubble is no longer a scrappy, bootstrapped two-person startup. After more than a decade, millions of dollars in funding, and a full team, the platform still struggles with recurring stability problems and outdated integrations. At this point, it should be embarrassing for Bubble itself.
On moderation: I share the optimism that posts like this will stay up. Still, my last one on the exact same topic was removed, even though it was constructive and backed by Bubbleās own promises. Unfortunately, when criticism crosses a line that makes Bubble uncomfortable, it sometimes gets taken down.
And thatās the core issue. Bubble speaks like a leader but often acts like itās still patching things together behind the scenes. Meanwhile, smaller competitors with a fraction of the resources are moving faster, delivering more, and actually listening to their users.
We all want Bubble to succeed. But the road to success requires focus, and focus means having the discipline to say no.
People think focus means saying yes to the thing youāve got to focus on. But thatās not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.
-Steve Jobs
if you are referring to your first version of āFeatures Bubble Promised ( Bubble Archive)ā then you know the reason the first was taken down was the lack of proactive suggestions or actionable feedback.
Iām perfectly fine with users complaining but it has to be in a way that gives the team a path to resolution or at least some visibility into whatās wrong and why it is important.
Otherwise it just becomes noise and I canāt take that to the team to try and get it fixed
When a post is made about the stability of Bubble, there is an entire team in the background currently working on it.
I would imagine the foundation that Bubble is built on is quite large, and updating while keeping everyone online is quite a task.
I feel strongly they are moving in the right direction, stability seems to be moving in the right direction but random outages are inevitable. Itās in their best interest to keep the platform stable, and I can only imagine what the Bubble office / Teams looks like when thereās an issue..
During the most recent issue, neither I or anyone on my apps noticed any issues, and it happened to be on the day where I was launching a new app being heavily used with over 200 users. I was very happy the Bubble team could find and fix the issue without any downtime or outage.
I feel this trend will continue and our experience will get even better.
The original post that was removed wasnāt lacking suggestions. It was simply uncomfortable because it quoted Bubbleās founders making promises that still havenāt materialized years later. Thatās not noise, thatās accountability.
And letās be real: Bubble doesnāt need me (or anyone else) to āgive the team a pathā. The path already exists. Since you, @fede.bubble, seem to have missed it, let me walk you through it:
There it is, clear as day. Native PDF generation sits near the top, followed by page load and performance improvements. Users have been asking for the same things for years. The only missing step is Bubble actually acting on them.
Hereās the reality: if Bubble is fine with being just an okay platform, then outages, decade-old integrations, and āforever betasā are part of the package. But if Bubble still wants to call itself the best no-code platform, then the bar is higher. The no-code market isnāt 2012 anymore. Back then, it was a novelty. Today, itās a crowded SaaS space with competitors who are moving faster with far fewer resources.
Also, since youāre here, @fede.bubble, it seems you forgot to reply here. Maybe this time we can skip the disappearing act and actually get a straight answer?
I love Bubble and want to keep using it for years to come, but the lack of action on long-standing user priorities has become a constant source of frustration.
P.S. @emir.ozgun, Iād love to share the original post, it looked a lot like this one, just with the foundersā own quotes that made Bubble, wellā¦ uncomfortable.
He said this, but yeah I donāt see how you can provide actionable feedback on these, you are not Bubble employee after all. So, if we induce that logic, complaining to major things, that we barely know what is going on in the background is subject to censorship ?
I donāt want to hurt Bubble, I am invested I want it to thrive so the best move on the chessboard is to report fede to the team and hope it is just initiatives of fede but not a reflection of Bubbles vision
I can only imagine the layers of complexity behind building and adding new features to the translation layer that Bubble has built. It has conform to best web development practices client and server side while keeping consistency to the language that Bubble has created.
Then thereās uptime and performance maintenance for servers, microservices etc. All of which require monitoring and service levels.
I have my fair share of criticisms of Bubble but I can understand that a few million VC dollars pale in comparison to rising costs in software dev. Especially in the face of demand for AI features.
I remember the team mentioning a while back that this was being looked into, but I havenāt seen any updates recently.
From a user perspective, the current behavior can be tricky ā if someone is mid-flow and gets forced to refresh, they may lose work. Most other platforms Iāve used donāt enforce this so strongly, which makes me wonder what the technical or design challenges are here.
Would it be possible to give app builders the option to suppress the banner (and accept the risks themselves)? That flexibility would go a long way for apps with larger or more frequent user activity.
I know Bubble has to balance reliability, UX, and platform integrity ā but this feels like a limitation that holds back apps at scale. Curious to hear whether this is still on the roadmap, or if thereās more context behind why it hasnāt changed.
(Edited: Passed through the āfrustration filterā via ChatGPT)
This is why you see some sites say there are scheduled updates at specific times and dates. Other than that, they would have to rewrite their hot-reload (edit.. wait, what hot reload functionality? It makes you have to physically refresh before continuingā¦ my bad) functionality which will probably one of the last things they do. To be fair, my other apps (not running on bubble), donāt have that issue because they can still make API requests with an older version of the front-end (like submitting a form), where it will only update on them once they reload the page. Personally, they should make Bubble behave the same way, and have it so only dev mode says changes have been made, but thatās just me.
Bubble Archive)ā then you know the reason the first was taken down was the lack of proactive suggestions or actionable feedback.