To all you experienced Bubblers- Is it realistic to expect that I can build and run a fully functional and complex SaaS business without the help of any full-time developers?
Depends on what it is, and what scale you’re trying to run it at. My partner and I have an education app that reached about 800 users and has remained steady for a year now. We haven’t invested a ton more effort into it, because it works for who it needs to work for, but it’s really low maintenance. Zero developers, about 3 months of once-a-week nights and weekends.
The area where you might run into issues is scalability with complex workflows, but I’m not sure there’s a clear metric on what that looks like for a generic app.
1 Like
Yes, scalability is a good question-
Would the platform be able to handle 000’s users who themselves would have many users?
What do you mean by users who themselves would have users?
My app is for employers to administrate their employees- In theory, I could have many employers(companies) who each have many employees-
Oh, I gotcha. My app is schools, with teachers, with students, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I’d say the complexity of the workflows is going to be the deciding factor. What problem is the app solving?
onboarding, but in a pretty elegant & efficient way with minimal input from busy hr people
Having said that , I have so far structured the app for 1 business - I need to work out how to handle each separate business- I am thinking 1 database per company but then again, not sure if i can do that at this stage?
You can have a separate app for each company (and therefore a separate database). Bubble supports pushing code from a master app to a bunch of others to keep the logic and code in sync, but the databases separate.
So, while it’s possible to have a separate DB for each, this does increase the level of complexity of your app quite a lot. And, it’s typically only done if the data in the database is incredibly sensitive, because you can already do a good job of preventing company A from accessing company B’s data when all of the data is in a single database.
When you talk about scale, it’s fairly complicated and highly dependent on your application.
Also, I’d suggest you think through how many concurrent users you think you’d need to support since this is, in most cases, a more useful way of assessing required scalability. For example, it’s one thing to have a million users who show up once a month for a few minutes, it’s another to have a million users who show up for an hour each day.
@sridharan.s I appreciate your answer- makes things clearer- In the context of my app i would be holding individuals details, with sensitive data (bank details, health, etc…) -
Could you explain how within a single database i could have companies only seeing their employees and vice versa? (ie: how can i attach an employee to a unique company?)
I’m not sure I’d use Bubble for anything requiring bank information or personally identifiable information with regards to health. There aren’t guarantees the creators can make around that, and it’s certainly not HIPAA compliant, so I’d be very, very cautious around those details.
2 Likes
You can put all of the data into a single database, so all of the employees go into a single table, for example. Then, you control access two ways:
- On each page where you show, say, a list of employees to a specific company the the database query to only show employees from the company associated with the user.
- Add a 2nd level of security with database logic that only allows users to view data for employees from their company. This way, even if you make a mistake with the business logic somewhere, it won’t accidentally display data from other employees.
Note, as @potentialthings highlights, Bubble isn’t HIPAA compliant (very few tools are) so you’ll want to be thoughtful about what information you store. And, if you do decide to store data that requires you to be HIPAA compliant, Bubble won’t work for you and, you’ll probably need to design for HIPAA compliance from the start with mostly custom code, which can make your software quite a bit more costly to create since it adds a layer or two of complexity to everything that you do.
Also, a lot of people using Bubble store credit card data through a third party (e.g., stripe) so that they don’t have to try to figure out the security that’s required for that data. In general, anything you can do to simplify your business is good while you’re small / early-stage.
Best of luck!
7 Likes
@sridharan.s and @potentialthings you guys are great- thanks for your comments and pointing me in the right line of thinking- so one more question if i may, would it be possible to build the logic & design with bubble but store data externally …somehow?
1 Like
I suspect there are a multitude of ways to achieve this. Here are 3 from the top of my head:
- You could store most data in Bubble and use a third party database for the sensitive data, and then call that data through Bubble’s API to display it on the UI when / where needed.
- You could use Bubble to create all of the interfaces and pass all of the data to a database on a third party and then call the database on each screen. This seems complex, but likely doable.
- I think Bubble offers integrations with PostgreSQL and MySQL so you could use one of those databases and have it work with Bubble. The one drawback here is that I suspect this would have slower performance than either of the above solutions.
I’m sure there a numerous other solutions as well. As with most of technology, the devil is in the details. So, the right solution really depends on a lot of details specific to your project.
Best,
Scott
5 Likes