This is going to be fun… One of my largest apps! @manasi just saw this app on the NYC meeting and looking forward to the webinar or to schedule a zoom call to see how I can optimize the app, or just face it that this app is doing quite the volume.
Positive Notes: 1) I was supper happy to know that the Production plan is going to have the pricing lowered, which is great, since I mentioned to @emmanuel on Oct, 2022 NYC meeting how I want to start deploying sub-apps via Bubble API programmatically and not manually. Looking forward to people no longer debating if ‘Bubble is scalable’.
2) API connector included on the Free plan is going to be great to a lot of people dabbling into building something, more than just UI/UX.
Now the debate starts: Upgrade to new tier to have upcoming larger user base not having the app traffic throttled or stay have the company budget staying on the Professional plan for the next several months.
I might get bashed for saying this but I think it’s time for some reality to kick in:
Bubble isn’t going to revert this like they did last time, it’s time to find a way to move forward (hopefully with figuring out how to optimize our applications). We have 18 months to get everything together.
@johnny Well they might revert if the paying customers count lowers heavily… which I hope does not happen but could certainly see it happen at this point
I agree. I also think that the “Workload” metric seems to be more accurately pricing my actual cost to bubble better than when they tried to charge per “Workflow” on the last pricing update.
I do think there is room for more transparency on what’s costing what.
Holy crap! My price just went from $126 / month to $800 / month!!!
Apparently my system uses 3 million of something called a work unit over which I do not know the definition or have a lot of control over because it is Bubble that determines the complexity of how many work units it takes to do EVERYTHING!
Not only are you killing business, you completely removed any responsibility for Bubble to build a performant app. If Bubble makes the application more complex it increases work units and gets more money! What a scam!
I think a lot more time, thinking, and community input went into this. Enough so that this one is here to stay.
I have a hobby-ish side project that I run (https://oocradio.com/ ), and it comes in at about 3 million WU’s a month. That’s fun. Yes, I am frustrated that I have to spend time going back and redoing work that is done, but I am also slightly excited to learn about where I can improve my “code” and my process. How can I make a smoother experience?
I’ve been developing for years in Bubble, and I am kinda excited to learn how to “optimize” better, and how to build better apps.
I have the largest WhatsApp group of Bubble developers in Brazil, the discussion and debate about Bubble’s new plans did not leave one of the group happy and satisfied, polls were taken, everyone voted against it and the debate there does not stop.
I believe that you can take into account not only the feedback from us Brazilians, but from all those who do not agree with this change.
After reading the many posts from those that are seeing millions of workload units in their app logs I was extremely anxious checking the stats for my own app this morning. To my relief, my last 30 days number was only about 70,000 so it seems that I will be able to continue using Bubble for the foreseeable future.
That said, my app is a very low volume private portal for my business with about 30 active users (most of which only log in once a month), so if my app is already using 70,000 workload units, I don’t see how the new Bubble pricing model will be feasible for any apps that are public-facing.
When Bubble announced their original pricing changes focused on database records they drastically underestimated the records that we actually had in our apps, and based on the initial reactions being posted here today it seems they may have made a similar mistake underestimating workload units this time.
I would appreciate Bubble publishing a histogram of all our apps showing the typical dispersion of app workload intensity. Perhaps those of you posting screenshots of your million+ workload units are in the 0.01% of apps, but it seems to me that the workload quotas in the new pricing plans are just way too low!
For my app, over 80% of my workload units are coming from fetching data, with a large portion of that tied to a single search underlying a text label on my app index page that displays a simple count of documents for the user. There is probably optimization that I can do in this case to bring down my workload units dramatically, but for a no-code platform like Bubble, I don’t think a simple fetch/count of database records should be something I need to fret about. And my fear with this new pricing model is that I will now have to question every single piece of functionality in terms of workload units instead of how important it will be for my users. From a server/resource standpoint, surely this type of search/count operation is much less heavy on the AWS infrastructure than other operations, so why are they all consuming 1 workload unit? Hopefully Bubble can take some of today’s feedback into consideration and fine-tune the new pricing plans accordingly.
On another note, there doesn’t seem to be any information on the storage amounts included in the new pricing plans (other than a mention in passing in the pricing FAQ of $3 / 100 GB for additional storage). Can someone at Bubble please provide those details? It is an important consideration for my app.
A good point to make, @draked123! A handful of us did get input and had our thoughts and concerns heard from Bubble. They made improvements based on suggestions and then came back and presented us with what they came up with.
Performance in Bubble is terrible, but there is a good reason. Abstracting all of the complexity of true code takes layers. Lots of them. Which unfortunately drives up CPU time. The insanity of this approach is that improving the system to reduce that complexity is no longer an incentive for Bubble. If we thought Bubble was already slow in bringing about improvements wait until the developers suggest improving something like workflows on a list which also represents a reduction in the overages they get to charge each month. Nobody is going to hurry to put that into production.
If this is the case, myself and many included, will be leaving Bubble. We will be unable to learn and scale our apps. Sad as Bubble was fantastic no code utility for many of us learning and trying to launch MVPs quickly, they are now pushing out their target market.
I am so furious rn (as many others) and sorry if these messages are harsh but some things I do not like about this price change are:
The way it is communicated. It is clear that for certain mature apps there will be a disproportionate increase in prices. I would have appreciated this mentioned in the original post.
This kind of price increase should be compensated with a comparable improved performance of bubble overall. How can you increase the price in such a way when the google score of an empty bubble page is still ridiculously low?
Bubble is no-code. I barely know what AWS is. I don’t wanna know. This whole thing now adds stress to my build and I do not like it.
It just seems weird. Why would you declare a price change happening in 18 months? It screams that it is not a “friendly” change. It scares people away.
@emmanuel honestly this change will make countless APPs unfeasible.
Next week we’ll look into other options, as what bubble did was increase costs 10X out of nowhere… that’s unreal.
I was always a person who recommended Bubble to all my friends, but after this I won’t do that anymore.
Good afternoon!!
Sending this message just to expose what I and many devs are thinking about the new price update…
The issue is not even the change, it is how we are accounting for the WU … for example:
Calls via api will become impossible to do inside the bubble… the integrations are gone!
For those who have WhatsApp integrated into the bubble… it’s gone too! External database? It’s over…
Anyway… we hope you do something about it!
If it stays that way, unfortunately many will migrate to other platforms like FlutterFlow…
https://oocradio.com/ ), and it comes in at about 3 million WU’s a month. That’s fun. Yes, I am frustrated that I have to spend time going back and redoing work that is done, but I am also slightly excited to learn about where I can improve my “code” and my process. How can I make a smoother experience?
he’s been typing for a while 
