Yes, that’s right. Generally (though not always), if a process is WU efficient, it entails that it is also fairly performant (compared to a non-WU efficient logic)
I understand that…
but, you should also consider their point.
And, also consider the new pricing policy makes you fix things that were using a lot of WUs.
You can fix it probably with help from experienced Bubblers.
But, I don’t see the need or purpose blaming Bubble.
well a 10X increase in price is not the norm. this is much less a problem for new users. when your plans are going from 250/mo to 1500/mo due to THEIR changes i think it is ok to be a little upset.
I can understand…
I’ve also said on here somewhere I think the new pricing model is nutty.
I can understand your frustration.
I wish they would come up with a better pricing concept…
but, in the meantime, I guess we’ll have to figure this whole thing out.
Don’t know if it will lose them customers because I don’t have access to that data.
Maybe they’re doing good with the new pricing thing…I don’t know.
Hi Ryan8,
Thanks for sharing this with us. Your case is quite a cautionary tale everyone needs to be aware of. We have grown to love Bubble and have been working a lot with it. Your workflow screenshot is another cautionary tale of a maintenance nightmare. I am already exhausted just looking at it! As an experienced software developer for the past twenty years, working in this environment sometimes feels like a leap of faith. So, we’ve developed an in-house tool to dissect it and lay it all out in markdown files. This way, we have a way to share and discuss the problems. We are launching a beta program. We think your project will be an excellent test, and you can benefit from having a document. You can probably use it to help with migrating to other tools down the road. I know you use a Mac, but if you have a virtual PC running, try our beta for us.
Thanks
Suri M.
i will check this out too
Recently Bubble showed the popup in my client app, suggesting a WU cost of around $1,100 a month…they were grandfathered in when Bubble made the WU pricing change 17 months ago, so we knew this change would take place and last month I made some changes to how the app functions. The cost of the app on the grandfathered plan was $142 USD/month and is going down on the WU plan to $134 USD/month.
Not all apps are going to be impacted by the price scheme change in the same way as not all apps require the same functionality.
Based on that screen shot of the backend processes, you may want to consider moving your backend to a 3rd party backend. @GH5T @eli @vnihoul77 or @jared.gibb might be able to help get you started on that.
Start migrating to Xano
Bubble is not and doesn’t position itself to be an economic place to do bulk data processing.
Use the right tool at the right time for the job …. Use the workflow usage pie charts to tell what you need to move elsewhere. No drama.
and we’ve all had 18 months notice of this change …
That’s a nifty looking app! We can see that a lot of effort was put into it. You also got the attention of a lot of people who can help you out. I wish you all the best.
Though it does sound like you purposefully chose to ignore the switch to WU. As others pointed out, Bubble already made more than enough announcements and provided just enough (not enough but just enough) tools to gauge your apps’ WU and potential costs.
Could be beneficial but there are more cost-effective scenarios for his use-case that would be more efficient.
We had a simiar AI image gen app, looks like yours has a lot more interesting edit functionality! It is possible to optimize though, we took the app from over 6 million WUs to less than 100k monthly. It did involve learning about a whole new backend and structure but it is possible.
Agree that the new pricing sucks but they have given enough time for people to be aware of it. Not sure having the conference on the crossover day is a good idea though as I am sure there will still be a few people caught out / not super happy come October 1st.
Let’s see, the WU logs and calculator are still half broken since the announcement all those months ago so I can’t see it ending well for some users who don’t check forums regularly.
I’ll be happy to send the details to the team if you don’t mind sharing what’s broken
yes i was aware of the change BUT not aware of how it actually would affect my cost
does anyone know if bubble dings your for publishing the APP?
thank you yes i worked on it for a long time lol PLUS the industry changes faster then i can keep up
From the looks of it you should rebuild a number of backend workflows as Python APIs you selfhost (on something like Render or Heroku). I do this all the time and it’s almost always far faster and cheaper to run (and develop) than trying to bake the same logic into Bubble… especially if you’re regularly updating many items in your DB. For example, I once hired a (good) Bubble dev who spent 20 hours trying to build an airtable integration that could perform special groupbys/rankings all via backend workflows… It was a mess of like 16 workflows all with 2 to 8 steps in them… and it was sloooow. I had him stop developing and coded the same thing up in Python in roughly 2 hours. It was maybe 20x faster than what he’d made and cost basically nothing (like $10 a month but more like $0 since I already had the server in place for running other background tasks/only had to add an endpoint). Lot’s of AI stuff plays nicely with Python… hopefully you can sort this all out
App looks great! So there’s that haha.
We run a platform that houses dashboards and other administerial functions for ~ 120 Shopify stores, which I too built back in 2022 on the legacy model. Once bubble transitioned over to displaying (but importantly not charging for) wf units, it highlighted just how inefficient my operations were, when previously I’d had no idea.
Our wf unit usage sat at upwards of 4m/month, which eclipses any new plan available. I worked it out as costing us a couple thousand pounds each month with overages (up from legacy production £600), which was obviously a huge problem.
For months I was dreading the change, unable to see how I could possibly make it that much more efficient, but funny story… for a humungous application, with only me working on it and pretty high stakes financially if I mess up, it took me one solid week (admittedly working until 2-3am every day) to reduce our monthly wf unit usage from 4 million plus, down to about 300k.
I guess what I’m trying to say is all hope is not lost! You’ve delivered a great client-facing product from the looks of it, and that is by far the hardest part.
What new pricing?
I HATE AIRTABLE! Just saying.
I’d love to learn how to take advantage of your python suggestion, but how would I find out what scenarios it would benefit?
Thanks for the suggestion.