Thanks @emmanuel for appreciating how unsettling the last 48 hours have been for people who have staked their livelihoods on Bubble.
As well as being scared about the future, many of us continue to recognise how one of the reasons we love Bubble is how engaged you, Josh and the team are with the community.
There are no âdifferent pointsâ Emmanuel, I am sorry. There is a big elephant in the room that you are failing to address. 99% of your customers are appalled by the new pricing change and many of them (including the veterans) also put in doubt the structure. Nevertheless, you dismiss all that with a single sentence. Do you even take into consideration the data and other peopleâs opinions? How and why did the bubble team came up with this pricing policy? These are all questions that imo you would have to answer at this point.
All this has been PR disaster and your subsequent actions have failed to give any assurance to the community. I personally am exhausted. I wonât comment any more here. Thank you.
Thanks for responding
In case anyone is wondering what an SSA costs to execute, I put that over here:
The concept of usage-based pricing is excellent. Many major players in the market follow this model, such as:
Zapier and n8n, which charge for the number of workflows; Make, which charges for executed actions; AWS, which uses âexecution timeâ; and Cloudflare, which charges based on invocations. This approach works well.
Additionally, some companies build on top of these services, like Vercel, which uses Cloudflare and charges five times more while providing a fantastic developer experience.
However, Bubble recently introduced Workload Units (WUs), a black box algorithm that is not transparent, and users do not understand how it is measured. Tests have indicated that the same actions do not consistently produce the same WUs, even under identical conditions. I understand that Bubble needs to charge a premium on top of AWS but saying something would cost 0.5-3 WU while its 5-25 WU is just not right.
This lack of transparency means that users must completely trust Bubble, which has become difficult due to discrepancies between the VP of Marketingâs statements and the actual WUs observed by users within Bubble. Even if Bubble decided to increase WUs tenfold for all plans, this trust issue would remain.
While it is possible to measure and trust metrics like the number of Zapier calls, Make actions, or Cloudflare invocations, trusting a black box algorithm like WUs is challenging.
To regain user trust, I would recommend that Bubble hire an external auditor to monitor and verify how WUs are measured. This would ensure transparency and honesty in WU calculations, helping to rebuild the trust that has been lost.
We are already in the beginning of Q2. So itâs very important for us to know if we may or may not see noticeable improvements in bulk data operations speed and workload consumption.
From May 1st we will have a dilemma:
From my point of view new pricing model should not be rolled out until Bubble team fixes all that stuff with bulk operations and other WU expensive things (as it has been mentioned for a lot of times here - in some cases we have to make expensive WFs cause there is no other options in vanilla Bubble). While Bubble is working hard to deliver this - we are playing with workload and trying to optimise our apps.
Only when Bubble will introduce promised noticeable improvements - new pricing model should be released for new apps and XX-months legacy period for existing apps should be announced.
Their terms of service is a bit of a non-starter:
This was one of Bubbleâs strengths, they claim in their terms if Bubble was to become insolvent, theyâd release the code as open source (or make available)
Thing is⌠youâll go belly up before they do haha
Not sure this code would be helpful outside of the bubble editorâŚ
The whole platform/editor would become open source.
@emmanuel jumping back in to say that this is even more disgusting.
Queue my rant:
The fact that you guys had over a YEAR to plan, research, and develop something that would work was supposed to be your sole focus for the future of Bubble, and you still have not been able to deliver.
The industry standard for price increases is not 20x. Itâs been currently 5-10% (which is fine, and Iâm sure most would agree).
Thereâs no excuse for not being ready for game day. The fact that the metrics are completely off. The fact that there was no calculator or equivalent to truly understand what the cost increase was or how itâll affect apps. The fact that you had a VP of marketing cover smoke for you while you and your team took the weekend off, is just wrong.
I hope you guys get your shit together, clean house, rethink your morals/values/mission statement, and maybe, just maybe, you can retain some of your user base going forward.
I say all this as a passionate (now former) Bubbler who had all the best for Bubble. Who preached Bubble to others and my company!!! You should be ashamed. Iâm not sure how this doesnât go against the Fair Act. Perhaps arbitration is needed.
Regardless if you fix the metrics, your trust is just completely lost with your COMMUNITY BUILT PLATFORM.
Hey @gaimed while I agree with the spirit of what youâre saying, what Iâm finding in general is that itâs not so much how WUs are calculated, itâs that the markup over the commodity price in insane.
The app Iâve been talking about (and similar apps that make calls to API endpoints) seems to be pretty consistent in the WUs it generates for those calls, but the billed price is outrageous (something that costs 3 pennies per month on the GCF side, Bubble wants to charge me about $300 for). Thatâs a non-starter.
Similarly, my findings about SSAs are even worse. A 45,000X markup on an AWS Lambda execution. Uh, no. Just no.
Bubble has raised 100M$ : bankrupcy is not planned in a near future 
(Except if every clients fly away)
I would be ok paying what they say it should cost (10x less than what its costing looking at real apps).
That would be like 1000x more expensive than aws. I personally would be ok with that. But 45000x is a bit to much.
The usage based direction isnât the issue, nor is it the certain parts that cost too much. Itâs the LOW WU that makes even more simple apps 2-30x in price when they werenât breaking 10% capacity. Itâs the fact that using external databases from the looks of it wonât be possible under the pricing model except for those with funding, which anyone with funding shouldnât build on bubble after the multiple times trust has been broken with the whole community.
No one had an issue with a price increase but to these levels is unheard of from most large scale apps. Itâs caused distrust in the no code community as a whole.
Bubble is a private venture with funding however community driven in many ways. Countless apps wouldnât exist if plugin builders & template builders werenât around to help people overcome bubbles lack of functionality & jumpstart their apps. I donât quite understand how bubble can ethically or even from a business standpoint make a move that so greatly effects the entire community that the platform is built on.
The price hikes to the extent displayed in the forum that are many multiples above any competition of bubbles makes MVP builders, bootstrapped startups, and any non funded startup near impossible for them to launch here and if Iâm not mistaken from the beginning bubbles mission has been to create a product for those people.
That was last yearâs solution⌠They said theyâd listen to their user base, they didnât. I was invited to answer a few of the initial surveys on what needs to be done like your sayingâŚ
Even the surveys were aiming at a specific point. I had to find places (fields not really used for feedback) to actually say what I thought because from the beginning they had only one possible outcome in mind.
I am curious to see some numbers from other users.
Right now, our app is on the professional plan ($129/mo)
This is our WU chart
So now weâre looking at paying $600/mo+ and weâre still growing. We burned through nearly $300 of WU in one day
Another one from @levon for an app they just launched!
Open DevTools, go to Network tab, and flick âFrech/XHRâ on the third row down to filter out other things. In the list, look for âget_daily_compute_usageâ and âget_workload_usage_breakdownâ, then click on Response tab to see the data
If bubble is indeed marking up compute cost by 10000x to 100000x they are going to lose.
Itâs so obvious.
If you want to capture the revenue of the big winners, you canât offer them this a huge opportunity to switch to AWS once the concept is validated.
Really odd leadership with every announcement and update. At this point itâs hard to feel confident in the bubble leadership, even if the pricing is updated. The tool itself is phenomenal but it will become a commodity if Bubble has erratic management that will exponentially increase pricing for existing apps on a momentâs notice.
Itâs not so long until you can give GPT5 a list of workflow options, conditional design options, etc, and spit out a Bubble competitor.
Bubbleâs key innovation is its modular design but thatâs exactly why a 10,000x markup on compute can never work for them. People can and will move away, and the biggest winners will have the highest incentive to do so.
Still going ahead with this goofy pricing, implies you ARENâT listening to community feedback.
