They have figured that they can lose X percent of the customer, and aquire new and better customers. I understand how that makes sense.
This happens more often than one thinks.
Not sure if their break-even analysis includes 90% of their user base leaving though
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Iām not sure what has been worse. The flawed pricing strategy or the unbelievably bad handling of the fallout.
Iām all for Bubble increasing their prices. I think it is currently under-priced for the value it provides. However, the new pricing feels like a lose-lose for everyone.
The reality of this price change for Bubble is that while their life time value per customer will go up, the number of paying customers will reduce disproportionately. Meaning overall revenue (a metric they presumably want to increase) will go down as current users are priced out and new users are put off. I canāt see a scenario where this pricing decision makes good business-sense for Bubble. There isnāt an alternative user base waiting in the wings ready to start handing their money over to Bubble.
According to the email from Bubble, the principles of the new pricing approach are clarity, predictability and flexibility. It achieves none of these principles, in fact the opposite: nobody has clarity on what is going on, the nature of a WU makes it inherently unpredictable and the new pricing structure constrains you to a business model that requires your customers minimise their engagement with your app.
This brings me to wonder about the effectiveness of the Bubble leadership team. How could something so poorly thought through get released publicly? Even after the same thing happened one year ago? And given the controversy it caused last time, it was released in the run-up to a holiday weekend. To do it once could be regarded as unfortunate, to do it twice looks like carelessness.
This weekend has been a masterclass in how not to do crisis management. Maybe there is bug in the WU calculator. Maybe their isnāt and the prices are going to stay broadly the same. Whatever the outcome is, leaving your customers in limbo, many of which have livelihoods on the line, over a long weekend is pretty unforgivable. What started as a smoldering fire on Thursday has turned into an inferno, in large part due to the absence of Bubble leadership to try and put it out.
This weekend has done serious and unnecessary damage to Bubbleās brand and itās handling has caused me to lose faith in itās leadership. I hope the next few days will prove me wrong.
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Dear Bubble. not your pricing policy will destroy all you worked for. Not talking to your customers will.
Bye 
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Yea, it is crazy gap, actually it is so crazy that Iām certain that bubble will change and adjust the calculations because this cannot continue, if they do Not change calculation, that will be unfortunate decision and the bubble business will fail in less than 18 months, and most users will move to an alternative tool.
For example, Itās been less than 10 days since I started developing an app for a client which I have not deployed to live yet since creation, and in this 10 days I have consumed 77,310 Wu so far, even I stopped working on it temporarily until the pricing fiasco clears out.
From the analytics below, I came up with few conclusions:
- No API workflows used on the app.
- The DB has around 30 records for testing purposes.
- The app not yet deployed to Live yet and somehow has consumed 13,440 Wu on the Live usage
. - In 10 days I have consumed more than %50 of the Starter Plan (175K Wu) just for development, me alone on a page which is basically a nested table that loads the 30 records
.
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Also, when you say a 53 million WU went to 3 million, was it consuming 53m WU because there was a bug in the workflow that kept it
running in an infinite loop and you fixed it with a conditional?
Otherwise, do you mean 53m monthly WU went down to 3m monthly WU? In that case, How can you know it went down to 3 million monthly WU if we have less than a week with the WU metrics? I guess you would need to test your fix for month in order to know if it really had that WU decrease effect in a monthly basis.
I just want to know because if what you changed wasnāt only fixing an infinite loop, your info can be very helpful. Please let us know.
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I have very similiar results. Mine is a dashboard with a tiny database (200 rows), 100k+ WUs, 3/4 just fetching data. Iām thinking about how to āoptimizeā it, thinking, thinkingā¦ itās a dashboard, it needs to fetch data. 
I guess i could embed some BI solution into Bubble, but come on.
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I was just thinking about that app today. It was mentioned by Bubble as a premium example of what can come out of great no-coders in this community
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bubble is allowed to do what
ever they want.
But letting people hang like this for so long is just bad . I mean OMG this has been /is terrible. Now I just feel sad.
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The crazy thing I canāt get my head around is that we will go with āalmostā no restrictions on actions in our apps, to having to worry about each button click, sign up, log in page refresh, and Iām not even talking about API callsā¦
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I wanted to go back in time!
This pricing change doesnāt apply to dedicated servers, yet
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1 - Knowing which actions and API calls have the highest server consumption doesnāt mean that the billing method should be based on this. Bubble could have very well launched these metrics years ago without needing to change the pricing metric. One thing doesnāt justify the other. Itās just a tool that displays which workflows are causing higher consumption, and it could have been implemented a long time ago, having nothing to do with the abusive price increase.
2 - Bubble has always charged for server consumption throughout these years. Consumption hasnāt changed in the applications, but with this new metric, the prices have increased significantlyā¦ What is the logic for this? If they have always charged for server usage? Did they increase their profit by 10,000% overnight?
3 - We have 18 months to analyze and hope that Bubble will improve and become fairerā¦ but what about new applications starting in May? So, are you admitting that this is entirely unfair? How am I going to disregard the WU for new apps starting next month?
4 - OutSystems charges $1500, but it has always done soā¦ Itās different from charging $29, attracting millions of customers, and then abusively increasing the price by 4,000% to 10,000%, even though server costs remain the same.
5 - Hundreds of applications have always used 3% to 5% of the server capacity, and with the new prices, they will pay 10 times more. So, they have criminally increased their profit tenfold?
6 - This is the end of Bubble. Over 90% of the community will leave in the coming months. There are dozens of alternatives, such as: Flutterflow (where you can have the source code), WeWeb, Dittofi, Wappler, Glide, Bildrā¦ and many others. Weāre only here because redoing years of work is very complicated. But weāll do it with pleasure! Because we know that in a year, Bubble will no longer be alive!
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In my case, price increased 40x
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Already created my account on Flutterflow. This can be the end of Bubble due to the most redic ridiculous pricing change I have ever seen. Been here now about Ā±3 months, got 4 paying apps on Bubble, but know will move here before it is getting even more worse. Thanks for the trust Bubble.
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Same here, never tried any other alternative before, as Bubble seemed perfect (still is modulo new pricing). Since announcement, I tried FlutterFlow, Bildr, Noodl and WeWeb!
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Really bizarre findings when digging around in those logs. I mean, what on earth is this? Pages that donāt exist, blog?wordpress?2019? none of these pages ever existed in my app. Granted this only adds up to 100 WU or so, but x30 days = 3000 WU a month. Iām being charged for this? eh?.
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Thanks Bubble!!! I found another option much, much better!!! Great idea kicked your customers!!! Iām just outraged at having lost 3 years betting on a platform that doesnāt respect its customers and act extremely unintelligently and negligently, I believe that arrogance has gone to the foundersā heads! It is unfortunate that human beings are caught by base instincts.
It makes no sense to invest in a platform that, instead of encouraging the use of applications, restricts end users with costs that are absolutely incompatible with the market.
Naturally, they should create a way to charge for consumption, as many Players do, but they made a mistake approximately 100 times!!! Ridiculous!!!
Success to the other bubblers in finding a serious alternative that allows the growth of their solutions with the right partners!
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Our ERP generates 54M WFUs/mo. Without expansion and some optimizations, I guesstimate we could get that down to the low 40s.
The dedicated plan might make sense for us and we could swing it, but Iād be looking over my shoulder for the impending price adjustments.
Also, I donāt want to pay that much. Iād rather pay a flutterflow dev for changes to progress my app vs. a platform to improve theirs.
I think youāre correct, but not quite to enterprise level. I think semi-enterprise an up is more like it. Based on the client examples Bubble gave in their reasoning for the new pricing, it feels like theyāre doing a āclawbackā of the time they saved me developing my app. They got me this far, now I owe them or else.
Also, if the Plugin devs take their toys and go home, iām hosed! I paid for those so I didnāt have to do lower level dev.
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