Well I guess I’m in the top 10% of astronomical price raises, finally in the top at SOMETHING.
I have already emailed my clients to let them know that all development work has stopped until we can find a reasonable alternative. I know I could take the time to restructure my app, trim features out to fit the new scheme but I’ve already built my app once, I don’t want to do it again but here we are.
Oh well. I’m bummed.
@keith thank you very much for this post. it say’s it all - enough said.
your calculation and reasoning, is really all bubble would need to withdraw this.
i seriously wonder, even if bubble would cancel these changes and apologise, would their customer trust them??
I have been using Bubble for about 6 months and am just starting to get the hang of it to the point where I feel like it is finally possible to create all the business ideas I have dreamt about. Hearing about this new pricing model is extremely discouraging and I cannot believe the blatant oversight of the CEO and leadership team to make these rash decisions. I hope that they come to their senses, because I do not want to have to start to learn a new framework.
Also, quick question - I am building an app that requires GPS updates every 5 seconds. How much would this cost me per month? 
@emmanuel @tatiana.a
Damn look at Elon here with updates every 5 seconds
@tatiana.a The biggest issue I see here is the impact to development and building applications. It is one thing to charge on some live WU but the dev WU can often be HUGE while trying to figure out how to get the app to actually work. I cant see having to constantly email support every time I try a new feature or work on something that I am building for the first time.
There should be a 10-20x more cap on WU for development or it is going to make building apps to costly to developers.
Bubble.io has become absolutely unviable. My application is not even online, I practically didn’t enter it this month and 1200WU have already been accounted for!!!
How much time and money wasted learning this tool.
Choosing now another way to publish my app.
Goodbye Bubble.io.
Beautifully put Keith. I feel the same way. Disappointed. Sickened. Angry. Pissed off to the core.
I had high hopes for Bubble as the ultimate empowering platform. I thought it would empower any entrepreneur to build and monetize and have a source of income no matter their background.
I first became suspect of their commitment to this mission of empowering entrepreneurs last year. I pinged them to see if they could sponsor / donate, or help me out with a non-profit to teach bubble to kids from poor communities. I figured if I can teach kids to Bubble and monetize it, they might help their communities in turn. I was met with zero—ZERO—interest in this idea. I might have been offered a measly discount of sorts, but obviously, it wouldn’t have worked for kids of this background.
The f*cking short sightedness of that! I couldn’t believe how little support they were willing to offer me for this program. Imagine the possible success stories that could have come out of this! But no, Bubble’s sights are set elsewhere.
Now with this insane pricing hike, things really makes sense. This is Bubble’s culture as a company. There’s something toxic happening from within. And obviously, at these prices, offering Bubble as a tool to help poor kids escape poverty is out of the question.
I’m committed to finding other tools to replace Bubble and really hope some startup comes along within the next 18mo that will eat this paltry lunch.
Out of curiosity bubble is effectively a community ran platform, most apps couldn’t exist without the support of plug-in devs & template developers & Many new startups use template bases.
Bubbles core isn’t strong enough without community at the current state.
It’s pretty bold of them to be making moves that outrage their entire community when most of their success relies on community driven work. What made them think this was a good idea?
For me, it’s beyond whether or not they choose to update this. It’s not the first time Bubble has done this, and it will certainly not be the last.
I’ll save the long sappy post, but I have been loyal to Bubble for over 7 years, and enough is enough. I’m sure the longer you stick around you’ll see what others are seeing.
OMG BUBBLE TURN THIS THROTTLING OFF
Edit: Ok, enough internet for me today. Going to detail my car.
Fair enough. I didn’t post her name originally, the reason I posted was that a few of us noticed someone post her details next to Emmanuel’s & Josh’s names and it flashed on and off within 10 seconds which seemed really odd. @andrewgassen then explained why he’d removed that post which was fair enough.
Omg yes SOC2, it’s been a long time promise that keeps getting delayed. Literally turning away clients because they don’t have it.
You observed your WU count, that will be 10WU please.
my girlfriends asked me is the pro / cons of this.
con: i have to move my project
pro: i have moved everything
We need the autoscaling option. That’s very important. That was a very very good idea to start working on that pricing model.
But setting up such a price for it - that’s terrible.
Alternative solutions after a while:
Same. I’ve built for the past 5 years and I’ve recruited plenty of people to the platform. Even if they change this pricing scheme, I’m out.
And yes… what the … is up with throttling of the thread. Reminds me of a company I once worked at who simply revoked everyone’s entry card during lunch hour when they folded… just didn’t want to deal with the fall out.
Has anyone used / would recommend a WeWeb and Xano combination?
I am angry.
I have many critiques about how this whole pricing announcement was handled, despite the year of research and preparation that went into it.
I feel like I was swindled when I was assured that for most people the pricing increases wouldn’t be too significant. I trusted them and felt safe offering support to help them defend the decision to increase prices from $29 to $32 plus maybe some overages.
I did believe that it was reasonable to raise prices a little, but obviously not this much. I still believe directionally they were right (charging by some form of usage plus overages and increased base plans), but I think the WU calculations are way off. Probably by a factor of about 1,000.
If we take the words of Emmanuel and Tatiana, over what we’re seeing in the dashboard as truth, then, it’s clear that the dashboard calculations are just wrong. Both of these things can’t be true at the same time, actions can’t both be between .1 and 3 WU and simultaneously 30+. I wish we knew which one was correct.
I don’t think we’re going to hear anything today or this weekend from the team. I wish they would say something, but I don’t really think they will. But, I also don’t think they’ll never respond here again.
So, I want to give them a chance to respond to this. While their silence may be appalling today, it’s what they do next that matters the most.
See post Reasonable Alternatives to Bubble it’s super helpful
It looks like external API calls are going to be one of the most expensive WU actions.
How can I optimize away API calls? (Yet keep my app interesting)
I could combine all data types into 1 call (not best practice)… but if the amount of data returned is also considered in the calculation then it is simply not feasible to continue.
I’ve spent the past year building my own custom API and Postgres backend for parsing and calculating many gigs of financial/stock data (something that would not be feasible for Bubble’s backend). On my backend, I’m aggregating real-time stock data from multiple sources and performing my own calculations and trading backtests. I was drawn to Bubble because of the easy integration. I’m doing all of the real hard work outside of Bubble on my own hardware.
My plan was to use Bubble to perform layout/presentation/user management and very basic lightweight logic. I’m only a month into UI development. Based on the WU usage I’m seeing even with just me developing it, it’s not going to be feasible with active users.
For me 1 page view of my core charting page = 318 WU’s. It’s simply 4 unique API calls and some conditional display of the data. I’m sure every event such an adding unique data points to charts is also counted.
Today I unfortunately have to start “plan B” which means looking for an alternative, or just writing it in ReactJS and calling it a day. This is so annoying. Bubble has wasted my time.
Today’s “FAQ answered” post is insufficient and insulting in its vagueness. Nothing substantive has been answered, other than “you must optimize”. Sure. That along with executive leadership radio-silence, delayed SOC 2 compliance (this can be accomplished in 3 months), 10 minute throttling of forum posts, later throttled to 15 minutes, banning/censorship of long-time customers that are simply voicing their shocked opinions, trust is hanging on a thread.
I hope we can all take the weekend to breathe. We’ve all invested a lot of time in Bubble (most much more than me). It’s not too late for Bubble to correct this, but if weeks go by… this week will be a major stain in Bubble’s history. The core/committed user base will eventually move on.
Startups with compounding mistakes erode trust over time. Each future iteration becomes exponentially negative. This will not be forgotten. I’ll be watching.
