New user here! Hats off to everyone involved in creating this awesome no code app.
I’m really excited to start building applications in Bubble, but I’m concerned about spending time creating websites/apps and being locked into “the bubble”. It’s always concerning that a new company may close shop, or be bought out by some entity that decides to roll the product into their own systems, and then I have no way to migrate my code/data to somewhere else.
Do you have any plans to allow for exporting out code and data from the apps/websites we develop? I can see where there may need to be a cost associated with this since, ideally, you would like people to stay on the platform to make money, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who may be hesitant to spend hundreds of hours developing on the platform without some assurance that all that time will not be lost due to things that are out of our control.
That’s a very legitimate question. You can read in our FAQ our commitment to enabling people to migrate off us if something happens to Bubble (section ‘Data Ownership and Exporting’). Essentially:
Bubble apps can only be run on the Bubble platform; there’s no way of exporting your application as code. If you decide to move off the Bubble platform, you’ll have to rebuild the application logic, although we can help you export the design. We’ll do our best to help you leave if you want to. Our goal, though, is for Bubble to grow with your app; via our javascript and API integrations, you’ll never hit a hard limit of the system, and we plan to keep our pricing competitive with the cost of building out your own engineering team and infrastructure.
Finally, we want to make sure you feel secure about building on the Bubble platform, so, although we plan to be around for a very long time, here’s our guarantee: if we ever for some reason have to close down shop, we will release the Bubble source code under an open-source license so that you can set up your own Bubble server and keep your app running.
In terms of exporting data, you can already export as as CSV/Excel, and we recently opened an API which lets you get all your data out in a programmatic way if needed.
@emmanuel avoiding vendor lockdown is a big startups/CTOs topic and your answer helps mitigating that fear.
About your statement here anyway :
it should be great if you could provide a way to automate the extraction of the logic workflow in a chart like a flowchart.
It can potentially be selled as an add on service eventually, to the increase the exit barrier. The important should be you to declare the export cost transparently at the beginning.
Hi How can I initiate the process to export my design website? I understand that I cannot take the backend but that is okay, we would like to just export the front end.
Hey, exporting to CSV/EXCEL means that only text data gets exported, or does that also include the images? Or is there another way to export the entire database so that images are also included…?
It’s always concerning that a new company may close shop, or be bought out by some entity that decides to roll the product into their own systems, and then I have no way to migrate my code/data to somewhere else.