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

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

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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…

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Exactly, what you are planning to do is what many of us are starting to organize. Since we did not get any answers or clarity over the weekend, there is no alternative but to start the process of looking for other tools and organizing the migration.

In my case, as a Bubble developer I started to investigate alternatives and see if some clients’ projects fit the new platforms.

The loss of confidence at this point is the big problem, because even if they decide to go ahead with the change, nobody knows when the next problem will be.

This happens when things are done wrong from the start.

Why we all want Bubble to update the prices to be sustainable in the long term and to define a clear business model, this way we will not have surprises ahead like the current ones.

The issue is that in this model they defined, they made a mistake in the values and assigned arbitrary values to the WU without any kind of support and without preparing the community beforehand.

If it is true what they say, that talking to hundreds of Devs, it cannot be that not even they were warned of the error in the calculations.

I assume that they only consulted with the big “influencers” of the industry, but not with many other developers that we are excellent, but we do not have the exposure that they have.

I imagine that since they put all of them in the acceptance pool, they thought that the rest of the community would follow them, but this is not the case.

So today, I think that the lack of trust should not only extend to Bubble, it should also reach all the “experts” who endorsed this plan, supported it and defended it, because they are accomplices of what is happening and necessary accomplices that despite knowing that what they were supporting was a mistake, they decided to do it.

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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.

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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!

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

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Couldn’t have said it better.

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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.

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@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.

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Open Letter to the Bubble Team:

A Concerned Plugin Developer’s Plea for Fair Pricing on Lambda Functions and External API Calls

Dear Bubble Team and fellow plugin developers,

My name is Keith Crosley, creator of popular Bubble plugins such as List Shifter, List Popper and Friends, and many more (you probably owe me money: donate generously right now at GRUPZ: Karma-Ware Plugins for Bubble).

I’m writing to express my concerns about the recent pricing changes to lambda function executions and external API calls on the Bubble platform and to seek support from my fellow plugin developers.

As many of you know, Bubble has decided to modify their pricing model, which now results in a staggering 4.7 million percent markup on AWS lambda function execution costs and an alarming one-million-percent markup on external API calls. This change has a significant impact on plugin developers like myself, as well as end users who rely on these plugins and API calls to enhance their applications.

For instance, one of my own apps will soon consumee nearly $300/month in capacity on the Bubble side, while the Google Cloud Function those API calls actually process costs me somewhere between nothing ($0.00) and three cents ($0.03) per month. This discrepancy highlights the severity of the issue at hand.

While I understand that platforms need to generate revenue to sustain and grow their operations, I believe that such excessive markups on commodity compute and API calls are unjustifiable and harmful to the Bubble community. They discourage innovation, create barriers to entry for new developers and users, and ultimately hinder the growth and success of the very ecosystem we all contribute to and depend on.

This is why I am reaching out to the Bubble team, urging them to reconsider this pricing model and adopt a more fair and transparent approach that benefits all stakeholders involved. I’m also calling on my fellow plugin developers to join me in this effort. United, we can make a difference.

Together, we can propose alternative pricing models that balance the need for revenue generation with the fair treatment of developers and users. By fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment, we can ensure that Bubble remains a thriving platform for innovation and creativity, where developers and users alike can flourish.

We could also just nuke our plugins, screw everybody, and call it a day. That’s still an option. However…

If you share my concerns and wish to join the cause, please reply to this thread, share your thoughts, and help us create a collective voice that can influence positive change. We owe it to ourselves and our users to advocate for a fair and sustainable pricing model that allows us all to succeed.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and working together to make the Bubble platform even better, before we take the step of deleting our plugins. (But, like I say, that option is entirely on the table.)

Sincerely,

Keith Crosley
Creator of List Shifter, List Popper and Friends, and more

P.S. Oh, and just one more thing. I can’t help but find it a tad ironic that a platform built to empower creators and democratize development is now putting up such ludicrously high barriers to entry with these markups. I mean, really, 4.7 million percent on lambda functions and one million percent on API calls? You’d think we were funding a mission to Mars or something, not running server-side actions and making API calls! But hey, let’s make the Bubble platform a shining beacon of fairness and innovation, not a case study in price gouging. So, come on, fellow plugin developers, let’s give 'em a gentle nudge in the right direction, shall we? :wink:

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I work with startups that have VC-backing and let me tell you they all switch out of Bubble into code. At least the professional ones. Vendor lock-in is a huge deal.

Why do you need to lock-in @bubble? The best no-code product would allow coding. Why would you fight against what would make the best possible product? It’d be better to have a collaboration between coders and no-coders. No-code developers can’t really progress their career with ceilings. I don’t hold much leverage as a developer if I’m only building the throw-away product.

Please give us a code editor and let us export the source code!

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After a few days and a lot of beers and consideration, I’m still at a total loss.

Years ago, I started working at a small software company that did Hotel/Restaurant/Casino PMS/POS. Online booking, rate tables on rate tables on rate tables, yield management, email confirmations, text confirmations, for reasons I will never understand; facial recognition. The application started in the 1980’s, in a room at a local hotel built on Providex, similar to Microsoft Business Basic (Or so I’m told).

In the early 2010’s, we started gaining traction and by the end of the 2010’s we started landing some very huge contracts, some I never thought we would possibly make past installation because Sales people constantly sold features that weren’t in the system yet (we’ve all been there right?).

We still to this day have some of our clients from the 1980’s. Their database goes back to day 1. In the mid 2010’s, we launched our first cloud server and to date, we have 50 extremely large clients all on our cloud system on top of the numerous clients on their own dedicated/local servers.

Since our software started in the 1980’s, is still on the same codebase (Updated of course) as you can imagine it’s quite beefy and, in some cases, astronomically large. We have the pleasure of hosting the world’s largest conference center who only takes reservations 4 weeks out of the year, their online booking gets absolutely hammered the second it goes live but we always beef up the resources right before hand and have very little issues.

Over the years our pricing model has not changed. We have our annual support agreement, cloud server costs (if they choose that route), and credit card processing fee’s since we are our own processing company. We keep it affordable, base our prices on what our customers can afford and make adjustments, when necessary, that’s how we have had such great client retention.

Every day is something completely different. The seasons change and business changes drastically. If we were to ever change our pricing model to charge by the action / “work unit”, every single client would leave us as there is no simple way to predict how much software they would be using month to month and honestly, I wouldn’t blame them one bit.

What I have built in Bubble is very similar to what I described above, just in a different sector, and for this very reason I can no longer move forward with bubble. Each client, each day, each hour is totally different from the last and there’s absolutely no way to predict how much would be used in a given month ever. Bubble’s pricing structure and usage was the very reason I selected it when looking for a no-code source, expecting prices to go up eventually but never the method in which what they based prices off of.

In a way, it’s a very powerful lesson learned. When going to business for yourself, always bet on yourself. Take the time to learn, host things on your own terms and you should be just fine.

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Guys, let’s be practical, they read the comments and the frustration that exists on all the networks, they understood what they understood, I personally think that all the mess that happened is nothing compared to the mess that will happen when all the users who did not read about the model change -‏ will understand how much they have to pay for their developments (which is the absolute majority of the users)

They stay with this model, I’m 100% sure that they probably didn’t have many choices, they need to earn more and earn more in THIS model - like many of the automation platforms.

Let’s give them help, we’re all entrepreneurs here, creative, with connections, who can help ourselves For all this story and to make everyone happy, including Bubble investors, Bubble team and especially us, let’s give solutions instead of continuing to complain!

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Josh is that you

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If you understood how Bubble works, you wouldn’t ask such questions. Why it is that I can answer such questions with authority vs Bubble reps is beyond me. But just know that all you can export from Bubble is pseudocode because Bubble is just a wrapper on JS, HTML, CSS. That you (and others here) don’t understand this makes me very very angry and evokes very negative feelings. Go learn web development and then come back here with your nuanced critique.

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Well put @keith

if the key plugin providers pull their plunging from the platform, oh boy.
But I also occurred to me that they may give you an VIP offer so you can continue to offer your plugins.

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I’ll reveal more later but you might be the subject of a social experiment. Not that my missive was insincere.

Bubble have create a massive barrier to entry for new comers with this pricing. The whole argument is the app developer will optimize their app but problem with that idea is most of people who use bubble are non-tech developers.

I am building an right now now and there is only one active user (me) and I have already hit 250k limit.

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One thing is to change the plan for new apps. Fine. But to radically change pricing for existing apps without thinking that these apps may include both a supplier (agency) and a client (consumer) that has fixed long term agreements (including PRICE) is something I am not happy about.

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I don’t understand how Bubble works. I only understand how to use Bubble. I’m just a guy that found a platform that was targeted toward non-technical people.

Also, the way you phrased your comment sounds condescending. Maybe just write “Bubble can’t do it because of X.” instead of “If you understood how Bubble works…”

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