We’re trying to keep up with the community guidelines and prevent attacks from getting personal. It’s a tough balance to walk. Bringing specific people into question rather than the company itself feels like it’s one of those borderline things that doesn’t help. Apologies if it seems like we’re trying to stifle the discussion, we’re just trying to keep things from getting personal.
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sitting down to do 1 on 1 with customer to optimize. that is cost a lot of time. as well.
it also worries me that a VP of marketing has not be browsiner and interacting but that his not primary task of a typical VP role but however at a company like bubble it is. because the forum is great source of customer understanding. also this post at the beginning of this thread. the response was unfortunate. a simple statement from CEO’s account - "answer Tuesday AM ", would been much more helpful.
it is a bit like some people don’t understand the business and product.
I have the same question. I have explored numerous no-code alternatives but have consistently returned to Bubble due to its feature-rich offerings and ease of use. It has allowed me to quickly build out basic functionality for app ideas presented to me within a weekend.
This situation is perplexing, as Bubble seemingly has a strong product, yet the recent proposed price plans appear to be jeopardizing its success.
I am curious to know if there are any genuine no-code alternatives available, excluding low-code options, that can compete with Bubble in terms of functionality and user experience.
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I know this isn’t on you, you’re stuck managing it but can we get legit answers from the owners and not a damage control marketeer who obviously has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about who just joined the public community 4 hours ago posting clearly misleading and incorrect data. An empty page load and single record creation is 30x what this post claims 
It’s very clear the bubble team is either not present or panicking behind the scenes trying to clean this up but in the end of the day all of these users have businesses to run and need real answers and prolonging it and putting a marketeer on the response isn’t the answer that builds confidence for anyone on the platform.
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If I could make that happen, I would haha. I’m not affiliated with Bubble at all…I’m just a community moderator trying to keep things moving along here.
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Oh Bubble…
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Watching Bubble implode (to the detriment of so many devs, unfortunately)
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Impedir uma edição ou até mesmo um repost traduzido é manter o forum fluido?
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@keith 's replying suspense >>>
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I’m checking out Flutterflow right now. It looks like a great alternative so far, though of course there’s a learning curve as there was when I first started using Bubble.
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This. Don’t make it personal. Don’t make up random stuff because Crunchbase is wrong. That makes nobody look good.
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@rico.trevisan and @casheets123: I am out of zingers with respect to this one. And @tatiana.a, it’s good to see you here. I believe we’ve met in person, have we not?
Now, Bubble’s business is Bubble’s business and they can make whatever decisions they want. But a whole bunch of people – smart people, who also happen to be Bubble customers – have pointed out some serious flaws in the new pricing model. @gaimed is one of these. And nobody from Bubble is responding in a realistic way.
I was very measured in my first post on this topic yesterday, where I pointed out that it would seem that one of my existing apps (the one that does embeddable VR calendars) would more than double in price, to something like $433/mo (maybe more, Bubble should really just have a calculator where you can put in your "WU"s and it spits out what the right plan + WU add-ons is, because honestly I can’t figure it out). Anyway, that app performs flawlessly right now on a Professional plan with 2 extra units of capacity right now.
Is it worth continuing to operate that app on Bubble at that new price? Probably not. So that’s just an economic consideration, right? Hey, I can vote with my feet if the price is too steep. Seems simple.
But the problem is this: Let’s take that new price, where the increase over what I pay now is at least $250/month. What am I getting for that?
Well, the WU chart tells me that two backend workflows (that are absolutely necessary for the core functionality of the app) account for pretty much all of the app costs. One (about a third of total WU usage) is basically a license check (are you paying me? If so, anyone can see the calendar I will render for you. Are you not? Only you can see the calendar, nobody else can.).
The second one is an API call, whereby I fetch and parse the iCal feeds that are connected to the calendar so that it is accurate whenever it is shown. The call is of course made from Bubble, which pings an endpoint that I run in Google Cloud Functions. That function then returns the calendar data to Bubble in a form that Bubble can work with.
That workflow is responsible for about 66% of the app’s WU usage. OK then, let’s assume my new cost is $433/month. The cost for this workflow is about $285/month.
Is that reasonable? Well, there’s a 1:1 correspondence from this workflow to calls to my GCF endpoint, right? This endpoint, by the way, does a pretty significant amount of work and runs in a container that isn’t the base one, I pay a little extra for extra CPU and extra memory, because some of these iCal files can be pretty large and there can be multiple iCals connected to a single calendar and we parse and process all of them at once.
OK, so how much does that GCF endpoint cost me per month? It costs me somewhere between nothing, zero, zilch, nada and $0.03 each month.
For the sake of argument, let’s say it costs me 3 cents per month, every month. Of course, Google has huge economies of scale and I must expect that Bubble can’t price their end of the API call in quite the same way… however…
$285/0.03 (the amount of uplift Bubble charges me over what Google charges me) is 9,500. That’s nearly 4 orders of magnitude more.
This is ridiculous, of course, because the cost on Bubble’s side must be somewhere close to what it costs me in Google, even if their data storage or whatnot is “inefficient”. Let’s say that Bubble’s actual cost due to doing things poorly over in AWS or whatever is 10x. That’s entirely possible.
OK, so all of those API calls are incurring Bubble $0.30 per month. So the net profit from those marked up API calls is $284.70.
This is, of course, insane. One might even say usurious. What should or would I reasonably pay? Well, a 10X markup would be 3 bucks. Sure, I’d pay that. A 100X markup feels pretty freaking extreme, but it would only be $30, so I might pay that.
(In fact, I’d definitely pay that because, @tatiana.a, just yesterday I decommissioned 3 legacy Personal apps that were costing me $48 bucks a month for several years and they weren’t even doing anything. So I could absorb a $30 price hike and still have saved myself money. But also note: Bubble’s MRR from me just took a $48 reduction. This is all because of the new pricing. I advise other Bubblers to do the same.)
But there is no f**king way that that’s worth $285 to me and since it’s gonna scale linearly if and when my app grows, I can’t grow the app.
Others here are seeing exactly the same thing. And it basically makes Bubble infeasible as a platform for… well… anything.
So, Bubble’s user base is not gonna grow, I can no longer recommend using Bubble for anything other than just goofing around, and continuing to be involved with Bubble is just sort of stupid and ridiculous. This is unfortunate, because I really believe in the concept and I’ve spent countless hours of my time trying to make Bubble better.
I don’t really talk about my feelings, but let me share them this once: I am literally sickened and heartbroken by these changes. And, I am actually feeling like I don’t want to enable Bubble to be better anymore, because of the ridiculous costs. It’s kind of unethical for me to help people build apps on this platform at these sorts of markups. And some of my things are probably only going to hurt people because I bet SSA usage is ridiculously overpriced and bulk data creation (which I have made much easier and I demoed this recently) is insanely overpriced.
So, I really think I’m taking my toys away and going home. That’s where I’m at. I literally couldn’t get anything done yesterday over this. Maybe I’m not the most emotionally resilient person. But I want it to be known that I am personally hurt, sadenned and upset to see this.
One more thing: For those who are posting here with these silly ideas that the WU charts are being misinterpreted, please get a grip. People like me are reading this right.
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Yeah, Ive seen Flutterflow come up quite a bit, but at just a quick glance it does not seem near as powerful as Bubble, but maybe I’m missing something.
Now, we just even cannot use the hybrid option (Bubble + Custom Database + Lambda / Firebase or any other) since it eats tons of WU.
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If Bubble gave us this, but not as an API connector but as an open system - they would double / triple customers even at a 2x to 5x rate increase.
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I think the overall assessment of us is pretty similar.
I’m in favor of bubble pricing everything it adds value to accordingly.
But I’m also in favor of bubble focusing on the things that make it particularly unique.
Pure computer power does not make bubble unique. It’s the editor combined with the logic of how simple applications can be created. And this by users who previously had little or no idea about programming.
This system makes bubble unique. For me, this uniqueness should be rewarded. But if you now price things that other companies offer in the same way, only cheaper, the focus is set wrong.
With the current announcement, a total price is difficult to calculate because you can never know exactly how intensively a user will use their app. You can only roughly estimate it. Thus, the focus of users will be on “optimized app creation”.
But is bubble really the right tool for creating optimized applications? I would define it as a tool for “anyone who has an idea for an application, can implement it without programming knowledge” and especially other services, such as taking care of a backend, databases or other. And here lies the added value that bubble offers.
I’ll just compare Bubble with the platform Airbnb and hope that the comparison is not lame.
Airbnb takes an average of 15-20% of all revenues.
This is easy to calculate and a host knows exactly what price he has to advertise for in order to achieve the desired return.
Why can airbnb take 15-20% fees and still be the most booked platform, although if booked via their own homepage, 0% (without payment fees) would apply?
This is the question of added value. The added value lies in 2 areas: 1. awareness of the platform and thus trust in the security of the platform.
2. protection in case of complications
So the 15% is for 1. advertising and 2. hedging.
If there was a platform that was just as well known and offered the same security, but for 5%, wouldn’t everyone advertise their house on this other platform?
And now for the important question, to compare the similarity of our view:
What would happen if Airbnb charged a fee per visit to the profile? I think the answer is obvious. The total price would not be calculable for anyone and I don’t think the platform would continue to be used.
In summary, my idea behind all these long texts: I am for a calculable pricing that focuses on the added value that bubble has with this ingenious created system for many. So exactly the area that all the proposed alternatives here do not offer.
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This… so much this!
I can’t get my head around the “this is fine” people going on about “18 months window”, “maybe the decimal is in the wrong place”, and “How do I create a workflow on page load” people.
This is it… bubble is no longer a viable platform for anything, STOP whatever it is you’re developing at this time, take a day or two to just clear your head, then spend a week finding a new platform that you think can work for you long term and put all that energy into learning whatever platform you chose. If that means postponing your launch with 6 months, or launching that new feature, so be it. You simply can not justify any further development hours on the Bubble platform.
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Exactly VC money kills the thrill!
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This… exactly this… every word of it
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