Loss of Major EU Clients Due to US Hosting

Questions
1

Hi everyone,

I’m Robin, a Bubble developer in France for the past 4 years. I’d like to raise a concern that is becoming a real business problem for me, and probably for many advanced Bubble developers.

I’m now being approached by large European organizations (including departments of Deloitte EU, UNICEF, and Disney for instance), and I simply cannot work with them because of one thing:

Bubble’s infrastructure is still hosted in the US, including logs that cannot be disabled or anonymized.

For projects involving personal data — and especially when minors, financial documents, IBANs, contracts, or administrative files are involved — their DPOs will not approve any US-based hosting, even with SCCs in place.

This is now a standard requirement for European public and semi-public entities, NGOs, and many large corporations. As a result, I’m losing high-value clients, and they are leaving Bubble altogether. Several of them have already moved to WeWeb + Xano/Supabase because of EU hosting requirements.

This is not only a direct financial loss for me as a developer, but also for Bubble as a platform.

And just to anticipate the usual answer: “Use the Enterprise plan.” My clients already looked at it. For most European institutions, the Enterprise pricing isn’t competitive compared to EU-hosted alternatives. So instead of upgrading, they simply switch to WeWeb or similar EU-compliant tools.

I’m not talking about theoretical GDPR debates — this is blocking deals in practice. Bubble would easily be my first choice for these clients if this one issue didn’t exist.

My question is simple: How can we realistically work around this issue today, and has Bubble communicated anything about offering EU-based hosting or log anonymization?

Thanks for any insights.

5 Likes
2

I highly doubt it would be anytime within the next 3 years, if then.

The amount of work and cost would be enormous and take a massive effort on a lot of fronts…

and I’m not sure Bubble would consider it worth the effort?

Even though WeWeb offers this, the income WeWeb takes in is nowhere near the profits Bubble makes. Bubble eclipses WeWeb in profits…which is another reason I highly doubt this will come anytime soon.

Just my thoughts on this

4

You’re the one who made the post…so what does that mean?

You could probably use Bubble as a frontend and Supabase or xano as a backend…

although I would think you would maybe use a better frontend than Bubble if that is all you’re using it for?

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5

Hi, unfortunately I don’t think there will be anything about this in a short time, also for the level of investment needed to move some servers in the EU. I’m talking to you as a European, I’m in Italy and I understand the frustration. As for WeWeb I had studied it closely a couple of months ago for other needs, but I can say that it has nothing to do with Bubble on any front.. you only have the advantage of getting around that problem but in my opinion WeWeb really sucks as a platform..

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6

True. Just the cost and time involved would be massive…

plus, it would take at least a full year probably to do.

As I said, WeWeb offers it, but they’re not getting wealthy off of it.

UK and EU have pretty much the same rules; the UK is just a little more forgiving on what they do allow.

I’m in the U.S., but have dealt with apps in other regions and understand a lot of the frustration.

I just can’t see Bubble taking this on with everything else they’re working on right now

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7

Ahaha I thought it was someone else’s… I’m tired.

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8

Been there before. Get some rest :grinning_face:

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9

Of course, using Bubble only as a frontend could be a good option, and I’v made many app this way when needed.

But it’s not even GPDR compliant as the calls are made through proxy and the server can access the input and the output of them.

10

It is GPDR compliant, just not in the cases you’re wanting to use it for

11

Hello !
Thanks for the answer !

Regarding Weweb, I don’t like it neither, but what matters for my client is not that I like it, is that it does what they want. And WeWeb was just one of them, Adalo, Glide, FlutterFlow, AI stuff etc..

I mean I might have lost 50K+€ because of this, and I’m pretty sure many others are having the same issue. If we add all this up, are you sure it’s that unrelevant for Bubble as a company ?

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12

Yes for sure ! But I think that this happen to many many Bubble devs. Talking about me, this year, it made me lose 3 biiiiiiiig clients. I mean, in Europe, it is not possible to make an app RGPD compliant when you need anything more than an adress and a first name. I can’t be the only one facing this right ?

13

Sounds like you’re good at Bubble.

Bubble apps are used all the time in the EU. It’s just the clients you have that make it complicated.

I’m sure you can still get clients…just focus on the ones that don’t require the strict rules :grinning_face:

14

Yes I mean for now sure I’m not struggling with clients. But is it a great things to invest my whole life on a tool that creates apps that cant scale in my continent ?

With AI, other tools are becoming huge competitors when it comes to “small clients”, in my activity, bubble’s advantage is that I can create big and complex apps. And this is something hard to do in Europe currently because high level of GDPR is often mandatory.

15

They can all afford dedicated Bubble instance (and probably want to). Dedicated instance can be hosted in EU.

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17

No, I don’t think it’s irrelevant, but if they don’t have after all these have thought about this implementation I think there are also corporate reasons. You would earn 50k, but probably at bubble you would pay anyway 39 dollars a month for the basic plan.. so I think that on their part doing the math in the pocket there is still no economic convenience in making this investment (and especially in paying people who then do the work in practice)..

19

Yes it is true that I have no idea what would be the cost of all of this. But when it’s setup, I can’t understand why it’s that more profitable in the US than in Europe.

Also my clients and I will be more than happy to pay double/triple the price. Dedicated server are waaay more than just GPDR compliance, we are talking of tens of thousands $ per year.

20

I’m starting to get frustrated with this whole conversation…

Disney and UNICEF, etc. have already spent 10s of thousands on an app.

Now you’re saying they’re coming to you to build an app on Bubble.

This all just makes no sense.

I was trying to be polite…but now I’m so confused, and I wonder if you are too?

Can you explain why if they already have an app they need an app on Bubble?

4 Likes
21

I thought like this also, but I think it is because we are in this ecosystem. Yes they can afford it, but do they want to pay for it ? In my case it was 3 “NO”.

They went to agencies who sold them a WebApp/Supabase or FlutterFlow/Firebase ecosystem. The app was more expensive to make, but then, they don’t have this 4 digits numbers to pay each month ! Big difference !

22

???

Yes I’m 1000% serious, they need Dashboards for internal processes. It is not critical operation so they have “low” budget for this and don’t even know if it will be succesfull. So they come to me.
In big companies, they have a lot of needs and projects, everything is not “mainstream”. I worked with Dott Europe for example.

For me it was just a nice chat aha, I’m sorry it’s frustrating you :confused:

3 Likes
23

As others have pointed out, the only way to this on Bubble at the moment is with a enterprise dedicated plan.
The team is definitely aware of these frustrations from EU builders, but there are no short-term plans to address this. Longer term, the platform team at bubble has been substantially upgrading our infrastructure this year, and my sense is that having main clusters in other regions will eventually be a byproduct of these upgrades. But no timeline for now, sorry

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