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…?
Now in 2026 migration of code/data out of Bubble is very doable . At my Minimum Code we have done this a few times now.
The frontend rebuilds fast with AI coding tools like Claude Code, as long as you hand it your design styles. Backend logic needs to be described properly, but it also goes well.
The data migration is harder: you either pull data through the Data API or export CSVs and re-import into the new database. That step is error prone, and you need script to relink records across tables.
Quality is good if the rebuild is supervised and properly tested. It is not a one-click job, but way less work then it used to be
That said, for many apps makes sense only in a few cases:
you need hosting outside the US
the enterprise plan is too expensive
you are at genuinely high scale and have very high WU cost
you have a hard requirement Bubble does not serve well, eg. very strong SEO
you have features which require extensive custom code anyway, so easier to code fully then to use custom bubble plugins
Also, a large share of the “Bubble cannot do this” problems we get asked to fix turn out to be poor development, not platform limits. Worth checking that first before doing a migration. And if you do a migration, make sure to not carry over tech debt or features that don’t make sense. Use the opportunity to improve your app.
Fun fact: we have also done the reverse, migrate from code to Bubble! But it’s less common these days
I did a few test with Claude using the Bubble app export file. This sound very interesting way to migrate. This file contain your design, styles, DB structure, backend logic. The main downside is if you use plugins. But Claude was able to identify some library used by theses plugins and proposed to use them.
I didn’t completed the process. The goal was mostly to see what Claude can understand from this file. So I don’t have a real idea of the result. I guess Buildprint could do that
Think Bubble will realize, if they haven’t already, that ability to migrate (in both directions) will be a good thing for them. Lovable, Claude Design, etc. is proof that locking developers into a platform is no longer a viable product strategy in the no-code/low-code space.
That also means they’ll realize that it’s not viable to only offer two options: Shared cluster for ~$150/mo or dedicated for $10k+/quarter.
Honestly in my experience just using the .bubble file won’t give great results. You need to break it down int small pieces for Claude with clear instructions and build step by step styles, pages, tables, workflows, options sets etc
You can use the file when doing some planning but would not tell Claude to build directly with file as input
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.
