Hi all,
Happy to share a new tool that shipped today: Cost Estimator
In the words of the team:
This estimator is designed for the newcomer to Bubble who is trying to understand “how much will this project cost to build? Can I afford to build on Bubble with workload?”
Give it a spin!
Honestly, I think you should remove this ASAP. Just seem to provide false estimate cost that doesn’t make sense actually. Selected social network, heavy use, starter plan and it give (including plugins social network) 62-78$ a month.
This is not what we see from App WU metrics actually so I’m pretty sure this is misrepresentation. And imagine Bubblers that start and may not optimize their WU consumption…
However, I really think that the result should be what we should pay 
so maybe just lower Cost of WU instead ?
I like the idea here, but I agree it gets confusing when you see something like this:
And then in reality you would need to buy WUs as $29/month add on
I think the problem is
This estimate is based on average costs of existing Bubble apps in their first year. Your exactly monthly costs may vary.
Which app exactly do you consider? There’s a lot of people that probably start and app but it’s not really live or active. Not sure that you are selecting the correct app to estimate cost.
This is so misleading it’s actually screaming bait and switch money grab, investor idea? No one who actually uses bubble or understands WU would think this is a good idea. 
Maybe put an “estimates only accurate when developed by a partner agency” warning but to be fair I’ve seen gold tier agency apps put out that are worse than a complete bubble novice so unless bubble actually requires agencies meet some level of minimum build quality/security that wouldn’t make sense either.
To be fair I don’t really know what ‘10k to 100k user or data interactions per week’ means. What is a data interaction?
Additionally, how are there no questions related to number of users? Surely the cost would be number of users * number of data interactions?
Whilst I do really appreciate the thought of it and being able to direct clients to a source that’ll estimate it - I equally worry that they’ll be in for a nasty surprise or be upset when the WU isn’t remotely close to what they were estimated.
Can I think of a better way to calculate it? No, but that is exactly the problem with system 
I could imagine from Bubble perspective that is a Create, Delete or Modify action, and likely does not consider fetching data since that would be impossible to estimate given we are charged for each character returned from every field on the data type.
Bubble might have taken the liberty of allowing the user to take the number of data interactions estimates and do the math for number of users on their own…that way the reality, which likely fails to live up to estimate, could be explained away; but I don’t know, it is hard enough to try and get inside the head of somebody who is normally logical and rational, I couldn’t possibly get inside of the Bubble head.
Yes, but not upfront prior to the app having been built. It seems like the intention of the tool is to increase user conversion as people are probably and rightfully skeptical of the true costs and so do not start their project. With this tool, they get an unrealistically low estimate, so they start the project. But once the project is complete, or even during the build process, my suggestion to Bubble was to give us a tool to see ‘what does this workflow cost to run’ type of metric as well as ‘what does this page cost to load’ and ‘what does this search cost to retrieve the data’.
With the types of tools I suggested, the app owner, will be able to price their product better and be more inline with what it costs to operate.
Video Sharing Platform like Youtube with videos and comments
hahahahahhaha OK, was this coded by a Politician?
“This estimate is based on average costs of existing Bubble apps in their first year. Your exact monthly costs may vary.”
Most bubble apps in their first year
Video hosting alone would cost far more than that with bubbles insane up charge on storage 
The cost estimator seems wildly low. Put in something like an AI chat app or AI image generation app.
Both of these with 10-100k users will be in the millions of WUs and yet the estimator has the cost less than 100 bucks a month. This is dangerously inaccurate and misleading.
I agree. Bubble seems to be so disconnected from real world requirements of applications.
Applications need to run a lot of workflows to register user, receive payments, make invoices, have reminders, send push notifications, staff workflow management, Data upload and validation system etc. And then each screen have so many data points to query and show on the basis of context etc. Then people don’t behave the way we expect. They would randomly refresh pages, there would be random visits and what not.
All of these are WU guzzlers.
Making a plan with ideal conditions and with assumptions of functionality to be only be what is visible in the front-end screens is way too simplistic and inaccurate way of looking at things.
Back to the drawing board @fede.bubble
I’m pretty sure this is both an SEO play and onboarding strategy into the AI tool.
Should Bubble attempt to make this estimator more accurate/realistic? Sure. But I don’t think there is some dire need to remove it entirely.
Telling people their app will cost 10x or more less than reality is quite unethical. If they were to fix it to provide far more accurate representations it would be awesome but it still wouldn’t account for build quality or WU optimization.
Imagine joining and spending months of time learning and building bc bubbles cost estimator told you your app would be 9-11/mo or 62/mo for a video hosting platform just to launch at $29/mo and be at 200-500mo with under 20 users and have to scrap everything you built or just pay it bc you got bait and switched by bubble.
Their target for this is inexperienced people which makes it even less ethical.
We’re on the same page. The solution would literally be changing some numbers to provide more conservative estimates.
I don’t think Bubble even knows how much their platform costs. WU calculation has been a disaster from the start. I’ve experienced it first hand.
I do not think this tool will be a viable option as not all subscriptions, “estimated” WU’s, and overall efficiency will not be put into consideration.
This could lead to issues where people rely on said price and complain later when things aren’t working their way.
Agreed. That’s why it’s an “estimation” and not a “this is exactly how much your app will cost”.
Even if the calculation somehow took every aspect of development into consideration, Bubble can change it’s pricing model at any time (as we’ve seen).
Estimations should have relatively low expectations. The tool should include wider ranges of estimation. So instead of Bubble displaying something specific like $62-$78 / month, a more appropriate display would be <$100 / month.
I think this is a great idea…
if we could also lock that price in.
Unfortunately, this does little to really let anyone know what they’ll be charged each month.
So, in reality, what does this accomplish?
again shows that some people at bubble do not understand users or the product.
90% of startups fail. this will also be the case with bubble developed apps
hence the cost estimator calculator of a social media app should look at the 10% of apps that make it past year 2 and take their WUs. or WUs per active user.
in the pricing thread 2 years ago I calculated how a freemium model with 2% paid users is no longer viable in bubble due to the huge markup on CRUD operations bubble charges.
the calculator seems to ignore this.
Here the calculation again
" 1 typical user session 30 WU. This is a highly optimized & very simple app. (my tiplister site)
30 Sessions per month at 30 WU for 100 users = 90k WU = $29 / month plan. No problem. Would also pay 60.
1k users = 900k WU = $200 / month plan.
10k users = $933 / month. Unaffordable for me without VC
