My app that consumed a max of 50% capacity on personal plan would now consume this workload monthly:
This is more than 50% of workload tier 5 ($1,499 month)!
So, in my app’s case: Personal plan ($29 month) ≈ Workload Tier 5. ($1,499 month)
My app is 90% backend workflows handling data and api integrations, since it is a chatbot that uses WhatsApp to share data that was uploaded through the web app.
Important fact: my app is not even live yet! This 11m workloads I have consumed only by running tests as a single user. I can’t imagine the workload consumption if it had multiple live users. I’ve done lots of optimizations that improved my capacity usage. However, even if I manage to do the mentioned “new” optimizations, I don’t think this pricing will ever be viable.
I think that Bubble should find a way to collect this valuable feedback from users before launching there new pricing models and even before building them. Probably they did, as they have proven to be feedback oriented in the past, but clearly they did not asked to enough people with enough different app types or they are just choosing to ignore those people with those app types, like myself. I really hope they can change this.
Suggestion for the Bubble team: Find the answer to this question for each one of the apps in bubble: “How much will the bill increase for this app comparing the previous pricing to the new one?”.
That’s the true purest customer empathy question that you need to ask yourself when changing the pricing structure. You can even do that programmatically. Then, find a solution for excessive increases.
I believe that auto scaling and not just killing workflows because of capacity limitations is very important and I love it, but the new pricing structure should definitely be reviewed.
As someone who has been building in bubble full time and recommending it to almost everyone I know for the past 3.5 years, THIS IS A VERY SAD MOMENT AND I HOPE YOU CAN LISTEN TO US AND FIND A SOLUTION.
You are currently paying about $130 on professional correct?
If you needed to get to 1.713 million monthly Work Loads the price below should get you a price.
So you would choose the following. Growth plan ($134) + Tier 2 ($99)(This gets you to 1m workloads) + Overages ($105) (750k over at 14 cents per 1,000 workloads)
As one of these “fanboys” you are referring to, you’re wrong.
Personally, I’m just saying everyone is freaking out too soon. This is 18 months away, and gives plenty of time to figure out how these WUs work. I’m sure Bubble team will look at these and potentially re-evaluate WUs. Forgive me for having a little faith in the team of people who built the product, to begin with.
Personally, I just agree that a price increase is much needed for Bubble. They provide a powerful tool, more so than really any competitor, and haven’t upped prices in 3 years, while still building and upgrading their systems, and hiring more and more staff. They have overhead too.
Keith, and every comment really after, did a good job explaining, at least to me, how this raises issues. Almost every other post before that complaining was just saying “omg run from bubble end of the world doomsday” - Not quite constructive feedback. The last hour or so though, seems to be a great conversation, and one that’s needed.
After reading the more well-versed and put together arguments, I have to agree that some more considerations should really be made by the Bubble team. They did get community feedback from a select group of individuals from what I understand, but after reading responses here, perhaps that should’ve been a bit more open.
I just wanted to respond to the comment about us “fan-boys” - Which I would gladly call myself a part of. I’d prefer the term supporter though, for future reference
No Brazil você simplesmente acabou com o bubble, uma pena. Tenho varios apps no bubble nenhum conseguira se pagar. Vamos ver se no fluter da certo. fui Bubble.
I’m not comfortable with the amount of people saying, “You have 18 months to optimize your app” Or “Get with bubble on optimization.”
A good/decent programmer will (or at least, should) focus on Optimization. Unless your app had to be finished in record time, I highly doubt all of the app showcased here are built janky as heck with tons of optimizations needed.
I’ve spent a lot of time since my first post combing through my app to see if there is any fat I can trim off, but at this point I would be trimming functionality which is the very last thing I want to do at this point. My app has never exceeded 5% CPU usage in it’s current state, so It blows my mind that I, like a lot of you, are looking at going to the $1499 a month plan.
Like @johnny Said, this 100% wont be reversed, as I doubt Bubble would have taken the time to create videos, documentation and tools just to go back on this decision. I do have a lot of questions. Would outsourcing my database save on WU’s? But if I go to the trouble of doing that, why not just start from scratch on a different platform? And if it doesn’t… ?
You should use the overages in your calculations to price for 11.675 million workloads a month on the starter plan.
So you would choose the following. Starter ($32) + Tier 4 ($599)(This gets you to 6.175m workloads) + Overages ($533.6) (5.5m over at 10 cents per 1,000 workloads)
The more I’ve thought on this, it seems like this is a return to the old pre-2017 Bubble “pay for workflows” pricing model… just worded differently w/ more flexibility. Us old timers here will remember that before July of 2017, there were plans that capped the amount of workflows to be run (to be fair, only server side workflows). You had to be very efficient with workflows… because you had a cap… Sound familiar? The forum was flooded with “how do I optimize these workflows to do more with less”.
It smells like “workload” is a rebranded way of saying “how many workflows have been run this month”. Would make sense. Perhaps they have a “weight per workflow” that gets run and that equals a workload unit.
We’ve come full circle. Reading back on the major July 2017 pricing change to capacity was pretty interesting – Capacity solved a lot of problems we were having with “workflow pricing”. Simplified it - Made it easier to comprehend. Gave us developers more focus on building vs. spending all day “optimizing”. To be fair, this is a complicated problem – And it’s a problem that has been here since the beginning of Bubble. And God knows I don’t have the answer.
Not an argument for or against… Just a fun little nostalgia trip for an old timer here.
The way around that is to do a “Make changes to a thing…” as the first action where you do your search but don’t actually specify any fields to change. This will return your searched record without making any changes and make it available as “Result of Step One” to reference in subsequent steps without having to re-run the search.
No, Its not a stupid question. if you need to display data to users, then how would this happen? Also i did a check now and even the search in the fuzzy auto complete plugin counts as a workload unit.
Still almost no users : To imagine what the app does with so few workflows, just imagine you want to launch a restaurant in 3 months. Currently, you have no customers, but you’re just trying to cook meals and taste it you and 2 fellow chiefs, and having it tasted by 2 family members + 10 other persons (key users).
Workload usage is already 50% the one the starter plan. So when you open the restaurant, with the first 20 clients you’re already dead. Beacause you expected to stay on Personal plan until you reach maybe 1000 users, of which x% will be paying to upgrade to Professional Plan, then upgrade again later. But now, you’re already KO before starting.
Fetching data is the main part of work usage here : potentially rg pagination not done, relying on the fact that Bubble will not fetch all the data, but will load more on scroll (basic expectation, but not working may be). We’ll fix that!
I have a simple application, only 3 active users, it generates almost 2.5kk (two and a half million) “Workload usage” monthly.
currently paid
29.00 month
145.00 in my currency
With the new billing model I would pay:
331.00 month - 11x (not viable)
more than 1,655 months (not viable)
MORE THAN 11 TIMES THE CURRENT AMOUNT
Please review this! It doesn’t seem fair for us to berate users to prevent page reloads. It doesn’t seem fair that we are forced to create an entire application on a single page, as the editor consumes all the browser’s memory, causing slowdowns and impairing the agility, organization and maintenance of the application.
This new form of charging does not seem to be linked to an idea of common sense and proportionality.
Invest in partnerships with communities, not forgetting the Bubble community that does not speak English as a native language. Try to work on the idea of optimization with each community leader.
Just a sharing some info: I do this optimization technique lots of times in my app. Yet, my $29 month bill is now converting to a $1100+ month bill. Without being live yet.
What exactly is a workload unit, and what exactly in my app is consuming them?
The change in pricing model seems fair, but we need transparency around what’s actually consuming workload units and how to optimize our apps.
Are we really that inefficient?
I think it’s a bit simplistic to say that those consuming large amounts of WU (which seems to be the majority of people in this thread) have not learned how to optimize their apps.
Bubble’s limitations often create the need to do silly, inefficient workarounds
Workload units are not clearly defined yet, so how can you say for sure that these apps are being inefficient?
Good luck, agencies
Even if it’s possible to optimize our apps by 50% or more (doubtful in many cases), this costs developer time. So the pitch to my clients is: “Hey, pay me thousands over the next few months to see if I can possibly optimize your app enough so you don’t have to pay $500+ more per month”. For agencies who recommended Bubble to clients, there will be plenty of uncomfortable conversations very soon.
I was hopeful Bubble would come up with a workable plan after the last pricing fiasco, but this is looking like yet another fiasco.
@w.fly, AFAICT that’s precisely what it is. Look at what I posted above if you haven’t seen it yet. And the model makes no sense, especially since Bubble doesn’t natively support iteration on the front end. (This isn’t the problem with my app. With my app, it’s just a thing that frequently needs to ping an API endpoint server-to-server. The remote server charges me $0.00 to $0.03 per month for that.)
The forum was flooded with “how do I optimize these workflows to do more with less”.
