[New Thread] More context on our changes to pricing - FAQs answered

opropriofabiano · 2023-04-08T22:39:09.224Z

Don’t come and interview me. That they had done this before. Trust has been broken. Now it’s time to get out of Bubble quickly.

royjay · 2023-04-08T22:58:36.690Z

A possible solution is to split an app’s charges. A monthly product fee to Bubble for the use of the Bubble product and a compute fee equal to the AWS workload fees with a reasonable markup.

osman · 2023-04-08T23:01:47.718Z

My business model would have relied high volume and low profit margins. This made the announcement pretty grim reading.

Thank you to everyone who’s helped me on this forum, to develop an app which will probably never be released but I think my time has come to move on. This community was so helpful and non judgemental when I was an absolute noob so thank you!

rudibakken · 2023-04-08T23:57:06.466Z

Count me in!

yusaney1 · 2023-04-08T23:58:15.541Z

You need to raise your prices. We understand that. A company needs to be profitable. No one is discussing that. You have come twice in the past with wrong pricing models.

This time you have done interviews and “listened” to the community, and you come with this pricing…is crazy nonsense.
IMO, Bubble, as a company, should not try to take a % of your cake no matter what. This pricing is the opposite of being flexible and open to everyone.

This is my last post about these pricing threads. I’m just tired of this. You guys are NOT listening to your community, and I don’t know why I should waste my time with the community when clearly the team doesn’t care about it.

High computing costs? Make it everyone connects their AWS/gcloud/Azure accounts and BUY directly with these companies the computing power each app needs. This is very cheap!! We are in 2023, not 1998!!

Do you need to make money from computing power? Okay, charge us what each app costs to bubble + 20% or 30% of that computing cost + fixed price for using the editor.

Plenty of competitors using this formula, where each user hosts their own app, and they pay a fee for using the platform technology to develop and update the apps.

What is Bubble offering to the market against platforms like Wrappler or Flutterflow? These two platforms allow you to download and host your source code. You actually OWN your business, and they have very competitive pricing, not to mention the native solutions, a solid front end, a robust backend, super customizable, and very flexible to use external databases.

Why should I pay +$1500/month to Bubble for using, let’s talk the truth, a regular front-end builder and NOW with a very LIMITED backend??

The only reason to use Bubble was the pricing, which was cheap, and the backend had limitless flexibility to do whatever you wanted to do. The lack of technology compared to its competitors and the native solutions that Bubble doesn’t has was compensated by reasonable pricing and a good backend.

I can no longer see positive reasons for using Bubble against any of the options mentioned.

Why Bubble has to increase its pricing by x2 x3 x5 x10 x100? There are plenty of ways to charge a reasonable amount +20% +30% +40% of each app computing power, which should be incredibly cheap + fixed rate for using the editor. I can’t understand why this formula won’t work for Bubble.

To Bubble’s eyes, it should not matter if my business makes $5000 or $5,000,000 MRR. Bubble should charge me by my app utilization which is the computing power used by the app (where you can add a commission) and a fixed rate for using Bubble services.

But this pricing, these limits, the current stage of Bubble itself as an “app”/web builder, the WU limits, and looking at other competitors, good luck.

keith · 2023-04-09T00:08:14.743Z

Apparently, @yusaney1, Bubble needs not just an extra 20 or 30% because they’re marking up external API calls by 1,000,000% and lambda function execution by somewhere between 600,000% and 4.7 million %.

jonah.deleseleuc · 2023-04-09T00:19:06.014Z

My biggest gripe with the pricing changes is that it’s all fine and dandy to want to optimize things, but that should be a two way street.

There are bugs and very weird ways of doing things in bubble that I’ve had to live with for a while because that’s just how it’s been. The plug-in editor has been a mess for years now. Scheduled events use predefined frequencies instead of dynamic ones. Customs events don’t return values (yet). Bulk data processing simply fails for no reason sometimes.

These are all examples of un optimized things bubble hasn’t fixed for a long time, but there are many more.

This update feels like they are dumping the issue of optimization on us and are not too worried about their own faults.

Edit: I forgot to add… the 0.1 to 3 WU is a lie. It’s just demonstratively not the case, and there are numerous posts confirming the case

cho · 2023-04-09T00:26:09.446Z

This is our fault.

We’ve allowed and fostered Emmanuel and Josh to become this cocky and arrogant.

We as a community allowed them to become that by not forcing them to do better, they weren’t forced to give us code, they weren’t forced to give us better loading speed so now, they feel indestructible.

This may lead to their demise.

They think that the we, the users are given to them, they never had to work hard to get users, I’m part of the crowd who came from their producthunt post 8 years ago, and through our recommendations more and more users joined.

But a new day is coming for them, we’re not silly gooses with open wallets, we signed up for the deal.

The deal was good, but now we have only one smart choice, GO AWAY.

We must transition to platforms with no vendor lock-in.

There are many platforms that will even give you code and is similar to bubble.

They don’t recognize that they’ll loose us, yet.

So now what you dear user need to do, is to find your alternative be it Wappler, FlutterFlow or Noodl or something else.

Stop worrying about WU, it doesn’t matter, you should leave the sinking ship while there are boats you can freely step on that will take you to shore.

The storm is about to get a lot stronger in the bubble sea.

So do it not tomorrow, but today.

keith · 2023-04-09T00:27:26.509Z

jonah.deleseleuc:

Bulk data processing simply fails for no reason sometimes.

That’s not unknown or mysterious, you just capped out. The “pricing” update was the fix for that (having dynamic capacity). But the price for everything is off by at least a factor of 10.

stuart4 · 2023-04-09T00:38:35.185Z

I guess quoting for dev work becomes a game of pick a number any number, I mean you can pick your rate to build but trying to let the client know about ongoing costs… tough.

There are some potential legal implications for your client taking over and it suddenly costing them thousands more then the original plan… they are going to be pissed, you’ll loose work have a bad rep and all that goes with it.

I actually have a quote for some work approved but I probably wont build the project now too risky.

‘Overages’ … so predictable

The cost of living crisis hits the rich too! The Vc team have told Bubble: ‘sort out the pricing and you are in-charge this isn’t a democracy - if they don’t like it they can leave (the users), we want our return!’.

Its sad as I have really liked using Bubble for the last year.

rafaelalmeidahoficia · 2023-04-09T00:51:37.233Z

Hei @emmanuel

Communication is (and always will be) the greatest weapon to delight your customers.

We know that Bubble doesn’t have the slightest expertise in this.

After 2 days of being bombarded, you have not been able to implement an agile corrective measure (which the moment demands).

Clearly there was no Plan B, and with that, the way out was to reply “in a comment” (instead of a thread of its own) that they will “still” make “adjustments to any issues”.

It is unfortunate that a company with so many clients does not have professional marketing and communication.

emmanuel:

The overall structure and direction of this new pricing will not be changing…

That phrase shows how completely out of place you are in your own community.

They made a mistake in the first change announcement last year, they made a mistake on the second attempt, they made a mistake in yesterday’s statement and they just made a mistake now with that comment.

As long as you don’t listen to your customers, who helped (and are still here to help) you to be great disconnected decisions will always be made.

The foundation of trust has been broken and if the next announcement isn’t pleasing to the majority of users, you’re declaring THE END OF THE BUBBLE!

If all that highbrow noise from the community hasn’t made you see that, nothing else will!

I’m here from BRAZIL hoping that things will get back on track, as there is a big cloud of doubts and discrepancies over you from now on!

Your unfortunate decisions are making our business journeys around here very difficult!

Sarah_Esteve · 2023-04-09T01:29:53.428Z

I don’t have any popcorn to eat. Must refill at the store.

I feel like after a breakup.

Waiting to see if things are going better in the next days.

I’m ok with the direction of the new pricing model, but need to

understand how I can optimize my apps
feel that it will not take days to optimize (who will pay this time I’ll spend ? I never read something about optimization from Bubble, if I had know, I had done things right from start and no need to redo things that already took time)
be reassured I can work on dev without counting how much it will cost to try this or this and test it
be sure simple operations will not costs my clients a kidney
need for Bubble to make the comitment to not increase the price more than xx% each year for existing apps. So people can stay without fear, and new comers can decide to enter with the current price for new comers.

I was an entrepreneur for many years and I know running a business is hard. To be honest, I think the order things have been done is not the right one.

I still believe the Bubble team will review things with the objective of being fair for everyone.

I’m tired of reading this blog post, but I can t stay away from it… Bubble has been my daily routine almost all days since 3 years and I just love it. I found there incredible people helping each other without counting their time, answer to people questions by writing responses, doing 1-1 calls, building plugins, share business and I can t imagine my life without it. I don t want.

Guys, let’s see what they propose and what’s next. Don’t leave. I love our community. So much energy, friendship and support. I want to give Bubble a chance. I want to give us a chance. They have nothing to win to see all of us leaving.

And Bubble investors, if you read me, you already know software business cannot become profitable with the magic of just increase price by 10 or more. A unicorn can only born with the adoption and love of billion people.

@emmanuel I’m ready for investing in Bubble like many of us in 2024 when you will need money. Annoucing 2.500.000 bubblers, so if each one put some thousand or hundred bucks, you will not need to call any other investor. We will be your roundtable, but for that we need to make money with Bubble, and it will be possible if we can sell Bubble to our clients and spread the world this is the best nocode tool for building all size webapps at a fair cost. As I already told you, we are your first salespeople. The force arms of your business. Marketing will not bring as much as clients as we will. No one is bying a software after clicking an ad. They will only by recommandation. So cut Google ads and make wu cost 10x time under. You will save money

With love and positive mind for what it worth

fernando.ribeiro · 2023-04-09T01:42:52.665Z

Hi Emmanuel!
When you say that the pricing structure will not change, it means that you are not listening to the community. we are all dissatisfied and understand that the increase is necessary, but dialogue and transparency are lacking… we need to find a middle ground

Landowski · 2023-04-09T01:46:41.504Z

That guy looks like a little boy lost in the park. Just yesterday he was advocating for changes, answering on Bubble’s behalf, and today he’s whining about how nothing seems to be like Bubble said it would be…

strategicrhythm · 2023-04-09T03:05:57.074Z

The overall structure and direction of this new pricing will not be changing.

So, although this proposal may not make sense anymore, I would like to speak up as a Japanese who truly loves bubbles.

If the purpose of the price change is to make bubble more profitable, why not change the fee paid to Stripe to be paid to bubble?

For example, bubble could partner with visa or master and develop an official plugin for payment, and bubble would receive the commission.

I would gladly switch to bubble’s official plugin at least if I can pay the fees I pay to stripe to bubble.

The fast-growing stripe has several other services that earn significant revenue, and shopify and epicgames have built similar revenue models. I think there are big clues in those to increase bubble’s profitability.

With the advent of innovative AI, I think it is worthwhile for bubble to seriously consider committing to the payment business, as the competition between platforms is expected to become more and more intense in the future.

bryan3 · 2023-04-09T03:18:45.225Z

Forget the $2000/month markup many of us heavy users would have stomached, forget the $10,000 investment in an open source replacement (or VC replacement, ha)

I’d easily pay the $2000+ for the tool someone makes that takes my Bubble App Export .bubble file and translates it through an LLM for output to FlutterFlow. A tool like this may easily hit the 80% mark of migration. THERE’s your next startup, go!

keith · 2023-04-09T03:25:05.291Z

Get real. Not-exactly-live Bubbling with @keith: Transcript - @keith teaches GPT-4 to write Bubble element plugins

dee · 2023-04-09T04:39:16.601Z

Couldn’t have said it better.

Atomily · 2023-04-09T04:41:21.410Z

Just realized a silver lining for bubble developers. It’s a bit selfish, but one of the reasons I like bubble is because the learning curve is inherently steep meaning that the barrier to entry is high. Even if they lower the new fees, can you imagine being a first time user researching a new no code tool and stumbling on bubble’s pricing page? Experienced bubblers will have a hard time learning the new pricing system and they know all the terminology and how things work. A new user will be completely overwhelmed with uncertainty and that’s where drop offs happen. If you have to teach people how much their app is going to cost, you know your pricing model is off. Not even a calculator can solve this.

Simple and transparent pricing has been proven to convert time and time again.

AndyP · 2023-04-09T04:41:54.280Z

@emmanuel ,

We appreciate the response here and would like to make it clear that nobody cares about the structure or direction of your pricing model. We get it - you probably have VCs or other advisors who have set this ship into motion and from the community’s perspective, it doesn’t affect us whatsoever.

The problem is the pricing you are charging in that model and we want to make that very clear. For my apps pulling and manipulating under 100 database entries in one of my apps, it will cost me ~$1,650 a month excluding tax under your proposed model.

We also have an issue with a black box on the units you are using. There is no transparency. We honestly don’t care if you mark up some of your backend host’s bandwith either. Its just the extreme amount you are doing it at. Its basically gouging. Honestly if you just simplified and used standard bandwith figures, nobody would care whatsoever if you charged higher amounts than that on Azure and AWS.

If you’re targeting a 15% increase, fine. Just don’t charge 15,000%.

At this point I don’t even know if I can keep posting. Its probably easier to take 2 weeks and master another no-code platform.