Low on budget unable to settle overages bill

Need help
1

Hi all,

I just started on starter plan and unexpectedly rack up 500k++ wu due to uploading of csv to db. Can I wait till few rounds of billing cycle till the overages are cleared? Now I’m in a fixed of not knowing how to proceed from here as I have disabled the overages and can’t work on my dev.

Need some advise.

Thanks
Jeff

2

I would ask support. In some cases they will refund the WU’s. Just remember that if they do it will probably not be done again. So if you continue to develope on Bubble you should study hard on WU, what actions you pay for, how much, how to optimize your app so you do not burn WU’s etc etc.

At least one thing you should avoid at all costs is working with lots of data. So pushing a large CSV to Bubble will cost you but also heavy data operations like deleting 10.000 rows, exporting 5000, showing 1000 data entries, etc.

You have to learn to think the Bubble way. Most databases operations that are dirt cheap for a database and the preferred way of doing it are very expensive in Bubble

1 Like
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Appreciate the tips @sem almost want to give up …

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question is then: how to import 5000 records without paying a ridiculousky high price? any suggestion ?

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I don’t think there is any way you can do it without paying. It is just the way Bubble decided to price their platform. That’s also the difficult for people new to Bubble to understand as it is so weird. Even more so for people with a coding background coming to Bubble. Running Postgres database in a $1 monthly hosting plan wil let you import those 5000 records in a few seconds. On Bubble it will take minutes and cost you a lot.

I think there are two areas where Bubble is strong and makes sense:

  1. Get an mvp out quickly and regard the outrages monthly fees for simple things like data handling as cheap compared to hiring devs to build your mvp
  2. Running a b2b Saas app without a freemium model that customers are paying at least $5 a month for. In that case you can run the business with a profit
  3. Spending more than $3500 per month on Bubble such that you can think about a dedicated server from Bubble. I believe there are no WU’s anymore you need to pay for and you have more database access.
  4. You are fine with not owning the code and Bubble deciding what to do or not to do with your app and in return you also can stop thinking about the operational side of running an app

When it becomes less clear is:

  1. Free hobby projects
  2. B2C (because of often lower fees per month)
  3. Freemium models as in general it means 95% free and those 5% paying will not bring in enough money to cover the costs. Perhaps it works out with dedicated though but I do not have experience with it.
  4. Revenue of around $50.000 since you can as of today build the software cheap with AI and it will perform much better saving you so much dollars that you can easily hire a dev or operational people
  5. You want to own your code and be in control of the app itself.
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Thanks for your detailled answer. I was actually wondering if let say sending the csv of a client on another server and import using API calls would be cheaper. Same for exports: Is it cheaper to call for the wanted data from outside.
And I completely resonate with your vision on what Google is good for and what not. I come from the filemaker world where each user costs a fortune per month so its easy for me to grap these concepts. But I’m still unconfortable with the “surprise” factor of how much an app will cost per month per user per usage… I’ll figure it out along the way

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How you add the data to the db does matter much I believe. With thousands of records and many more fields you simply get the WU cost one way or the other.

If you would use an external db to call the csv data only when you need it you would basically spread the WU load and depending on usage you would not hit the included allowance.

We started like that as well. We had everything in Bubble, then our most heavy data processing in Supabase and then almost everything except authorization. The later mainly because at this stage we do not want users to force updating their login credentials and everything works as it is.

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