Hey guys,
This is a serious question about the stability of Bubble.
Even though bubble is really extensive and can build (most) web apps, i can’t see many products that really utilize it.
The App Gallery and the Builtwithbuble gallery mostly contain simple website that can be built with Wordpress or even Webflow.
There are also many posts here about bad performance / downtime:
I really love Bubble, and even though i’m a ruby programmer, i find it very useful for not only creating MVPs, but also create mini projects that are easy to deploy and maintain.
BUT, i would really like to see examples of real apps (Especially SaaS) and to hear from you guys if you are happy with the performance of bubble overall.
I’ve seen the apps from Reece (@help) which looks great, but i would really like to see more.
What do you mean by REAL product? What metrics make a product real or not real?
I wonder if that page is up to date.
That’s ZeroQode’s portfolio. It is a good point: it expands your point, but there are probably many more apps that do not show in any of these 2 galleries.
Is there a gallery with all the apps / products built on Bubble? It would be an interesting showcase.
Over my ~2.5 years on Bubble, I’ve seen enough to give me confidence in Bubble as a platform that supports the early stages of an app.
For reliability and performance, this certainly wasn’t Bubble’s best week. However, I found this week to be atypical. (Plus, the forum can create a bit of an echo chamber).
As for limitations of Bubble, I believe the issue is more tied to how well an app was initially built. (Ie. does the app have a solid database architecture, is the page design efficient, is the app overly reliant on conditional logic and filtering, etc.).
For example, Bubble can’t be faulted for not being able to effectively run a 15+ step workflow with conditional logic, updates to lists, that uses APIs, etc. On any platform, this would encounter performance issues. Yet the builder of the app will express frustration that their app is not meeting performance expectations.
No doubt, there are well-constructed apps built on Bubble that run into performance issues - and I don’t mean to trivialize those concerns. But there are also plenty of well built ones not captured on the various galleries. We definitely owe it to Bubble to do a better job of helping them advertise the successful apps built on the platform.
@dan1 Thank you for your reply! i’m happy to hear that you have confidence in bubble.
I’m really into the “micro SaaS” business, as long as i can deploy and manage small apps with bubble with the lower tiers, i’m happy.
Would a small SaaS (100-500 users, maybe 10 pages, up to about 3-5K Data records) could realistically survive on the personal plan / professional plan? I know its a general question, but i don’t understand how bubble works in regards to the server capacity and the plans.
Yes, I fully believe that a SaaS application along the lines of what you described would work well on a Professional plan (My bias towards Professional is because of the data retention and reserved capacity).
The limiters are really what your users will be doing within the app, how many are simultaneously using, etc. But I built a SaaS app along those lines and was happy with overall performance.
One of my small apps has 400 users with 4/5 pages on a personal plan.
It’s not user intensive as you can see in the workflow log. CRUD operations are performed on the admin backend(by 2 users) and the frontend is basically a listing of things with some filters.
I’m also very careful when designing the app and make sure my design is optimised for Bubble. I normally work on monthly batches so:
1st week: New features
2nd week: New features bug fixing
3rd week: Bubble refactoring
4th week: Bubble refactoring bug fixing
So I got a solid monthly agenda to make sure I’m always optimising the app for Bubble and I always catch things that can be designed better.
This is what you can expect. As you can see the max daily CPU has been 2% for 200 views. And this is personal which I believe doesn’t have reserved capacity.
Thats actually not bad for the personal plan, are there any courses or tutorials as to how to optimize it? My apps will probably have more workflows runs though.
Not that I’m aware of. There are some nice posts written by josh on these forums talking about performance. The rest is basically DRY, use custom states where appropriate to avoid unneeded calls to the DB, use styles as much as possible and avoid using single element styling, don’t abuse conditionals in workflows and/or elements and use wisely the terminate workflow if you don’t need anymore to keep running. I also have some JS paired with elements naming convention that allows me to take DRY a bit further.
