I’m an experienced Bubble developer (not a programmer, but I know JS, HTML, and CSS) looking to build a REST API-focused app. While I’ve built plenty of apps with Bubble, this would be my first time creating something centered entirely around providing APIs to external clients.
I’d love to know your thoughts:
Is Bubble a good choice for building a REST API-heavy app?
Are there any limitations I should consider?
If not Bubble, what other platforms/tools would you suggest?
Supabase, Deno or a combination. If you know JS you do not need AI but AI can program for it just fine and it gives you ownership of the code plus 100x the performance at 1000% lower price than you would on Bubble
But if you are familiar with Bubble why not start with Bubble, prove your business model and when proven do it in something else?
the workload usage will be too expensive for any serious rest api intense app
if the apis are not going to be used that much then it is likely fine, but I’d definitely put some strong limits in place
you’d have to do something more than just a filter on an api workflow as well since that would consume wu each evaluation
ie if you had 1000 calls a minute to a workflow you could have a very expensive wu cost even if those calls were evaluated and blocked from running the workflow
supabase is likely the better option
you could still use bubble as the builder and use supabase as the data storage provider // or even just as the api data provider (duplicate the data over to supabase every so often)
Yes, I haven’t proved the concept yet, so I might start with bubble like you mentioned @sem
But if using Supabase is not that difficult, I might start with it. My concept is pretty solid, based on top of an already proved concept, and comes from requests.
Needed pros and cons using 100% bubble for this. Thanks to you I understand that Bubble is not recommended for 1 reason: the cost. But appart from the cost, there’s no other cons. Yes?
I also think it’s not a problem. The expertise I’ve built is the most precious asset. And it is not really the code that bubble uses to run my app, but the algorithm I wrote in JS that I’ve put in my bubble app, or the UX/UI I’ve created for my clients. Maybe I’m missing other elements, but as for my use case, I’m really ok with not owning the code. I own the code I put on top of bubble thought, through custom expressions/server scripts.
Well it depends. If the code is small there is not much lost when you go elsewhere. For most it will take at least weeks to rebuild every detail
Another which is a bit related is staying in charge of your business. If you do not own the code and therefore cannot easily switch to another place, Bubble in essence is controlling your business.
Yes I see what you mean. Yeah for sure I’d like to own my code, but Bubble provides so much more, I’m ok with it, at this stage of my business at least.
