Building anything with such a small number of WUs per pricing-plan simply doesn’t make sense, regardless of financial capability. I believe that the smart individual who measured and came up with the WU usage statistic on Bubble may not have considered the fact that only about 10% of all apps on the platform are actual businesses.
Im just very disappointed and heartbroken.
Regarding the new pricing policy, there is no power vacuum. If this pricing policy and metrics are not revised, some other service will take Bubble’s position as a reference for no code applications.
See this simple analogy, for you to understand the absurdity of this new charging model:
You want to rent a car.
In reaons of your need of safety, comfort, speed, all the best in one case, you chose a luxury Mercedes. The contract does not expire, while you use it, each month you also pay - for the same product, with the same qualities and, importantly, there is no mileage charge - because you need freedom.
From here your journey begins.
You’re halfway there and the car stops!
Immediately an agent calls you and says:
- Hello, we have changed the rules of your rental. We really hope that you feel good about this, because here, we are having a wonderful idea.
This agent goes on to say:
- Well, we want to let you know that, yes!!! You can drive as much as you like, but once you reach 100 km (Let’s call it Work load) you have to pay us more! But, look, paying…it’s all right, you can digest as much as you want. But, just one detail, for every 1 km, you will only have to pay 10% of the total amount of your lease. And that’s wonderful! Yeah, that way you have more kilometers!!!
- Besides that. We want you to know that your business is important to us. That’s why. We’ve removed it to give you another awesome feature that we’ll explain to you at some point. But, it will be advantageous (for us). However, you will need to pay a small fee to get the comfort you were looking for.
- And, it’s okay if you don’t want to have that Mercedes you wanted. We can let you use only its carcass. It will be almost equal, and you can do this for another 18 months. With a small addition of 10%. But, remember, you also can no longer digest the mileage you wanted. All this is for your good!!! Have a good trip …and, don’t forget trust on Us! We care about you
And here, of course, ends a journey with the client who does not feel that this is a fair, ethical process. However, a cruel way to harm people’s lives in an abusive way.
My friends, this is what Bubble is offering to all of us.
I do not complain about the price increase, but it is abusive. In addition to coming together with the loss of freedom with a cruel speech that everything is fine!
We are no longer the owners of our own solution: Do you understand that?
My two takeaways from the whole thing:
It’s disrespectful of @emmanuel and @josh, both to the Bubble community and @tatiana.a, to send her in as the proverbial messenger that gets metaphorically shot by the said community. She had never used the forum before and she only joined the company in Apr 2022—in other words, a month after Emmanuel’s and Josh’s mea culpae concerning the initial pricing proposal that caused the uproar. Emmanuel, Josh - you guys are better than this. You are the founders of a product we all passionately love and you should own important decisions. Your current radio silence is counterproductive and just alienates more users with each passing minute.
It seems to me that Bubble made a decision to throw most bootstrapped founders using its platform under the truck and move upmarket to the greener pastures of venture-backed startups. Having worked in Silicon Valley, I know the latter are not even remotely as price-sensitive as most Bubblers here who are and have been voicing their opinions (myself included), because an extra thousand or two a month is just a drop in the bucket when the company’s combined monthly SaaS bill is $50-100k.
Who are they? Everyone DM them it. Ill tell you what, people might think VC’s are bad, but the opposite. They only care about 1 thing, which is money. And this pricing, is undisputably, suicide. Appgyver for example, which I never used, but was VC funded, they didnt charge customers anything until something crazy like 1M in revenue.
Anyway, VCs rock, and honestly, if some of them stepped in and helped with this, it would benefit the community.
I don’t even want to make modifications to my app lol, I just feel like I’m gonna make things worse. Then have to change it in a few weeks when we maybe figure out what actually is a WU and how it is calculated.
1482 messages on both threads, and all we got was a generic PR message.
I sent the link of both pricing threads as a tip to TechCrunch. I feel like this issue needs more exposure and needs a larger community discussion. This forum is fine, but we’re talking people’s livelihoods. The response has been unreal.
Does anyone know any prominent tech bloggers?
If I am understanding “WU” calculations correctly… [What contributes to workload? - Bubble Docs]
This opens up all Bubble-built applications to nefarious actors. Whether they be your competitors, bots, or a viral moment. Every page load and every action on your application will cost x$'s.
Will “WU’s” be segmented and blocked smartly by IP Address? If not, I don’t see how one targeted attack could not put a business into a money hole.
Will we have to rate limit users and limit how often they can input information in an input field because autobinding contributes to “WU?”
Rate limit button clicks in case they’re connected to a workflow?
Good man. I messaged all their VCs on twitter too lol
it’s a complete mess!
there are so many ways for nefarious actors or novice builders to blow their credit card limit!
No way anyone would be stupid enough to have the overreach feature on, so you’re running a website that may be on for a month at a time or a day a month, you have no idea. Great business model!
My app as an example: More context on our changes to pricing - #424 by jordanryankennedy_as
Another case study from Glideapps pricing -
Seems like Bubble is looking to be similar to Glide where they target high-end businesses. At the same time, they are not able to subsidize new users as much. However, the goal(as shown from the reactions so far) is to identify that sweet spot where new users can still develop something sustainable while not overusing resources that should rightfully be reserved for paying users.
Ultimately, the damage is done. I no longer feel comfortable investing in this platform. And that’s coming from someone who has built 6+ apps on Bubble in the past couple of years.
Oh, @ihsanzainal84 is typing. I sincerely am looking forward to the message!
It’s normal for this size of company to have someone other than the CEO handle outbound communications on these types of changes.
I hope they buy very nice cars and houses.
That being said, I prefer the old pricing plan.
If 83% would see less than a $50/mo. change and 92% would see less than a $250/mo. change, why not address the 17% and 92% and charge them accordingly?
I see two things in this situation that are useful to me.
First, I got a great motivation to improve my coding skills in these 18 months so that I can minimize the use of no-code in the future.
Second, it’s a great lesson that in no way should I use a platform without the ability to export an application. Because one day management can go bonkers and you can’t do anything about it. You lose your time learning and creating projects.
Without a doubt the red flags were already a year ago. After they rolled back the previous price change idea, I believed that maybe they had figured something out and believed that the new system would be more adequate. It was a mistake, I should have started preparing for the platform change already then.
