[New Thread] More context on our changes to pricing - FAQs answered

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1501

Agreed @andrewgassen, and sorry to hear it was a rough week. Being a mod can really suck.

On the topic of where are the apps that aren’t impacted, while my production app that does calendar stuff is wildly overpriced in the new model, one of my plugin test apps might still fit on a starter plan, depending upon what I’m doing/testing in a given time frame (it’s easy to make it burn 10s of thousands of WUs in a very short timeframe.

Anyway, I think folks who may think they’re not negatively impacted might just not have done the math yet. I note that I did about 20 minutes of fiddling with my silly “drag & drop” Sinatra gallery demo (used for my videos about Floppy’s drag/drop RG feature). This is basically an Airbnb-style picture gallery manager like a lot of social or marketplace or photo/creative/portfolio apps might have.

Just messing around with it for about 20 minutes: Loading the page, logging in, uploading 2 new Sinatras (1024 x 1024 images) via the image uploader, selecting a couple of different galleries, making 2 or three new galleries (which is a thing that’s just a list of object references to Sinatra things in my database), adding “fun facts” (a text field on the Sinatra thing) to the 2 new Sinatras, fixing a little bug in a popup and reloading the page, dragging and dropping my Sinatras around (which is entirely front-end so shouldn’t – and doesn’t seem to – have any WU cost)…

Well, that consumed 204 WUs. At the “Growth” plan pricing for WUs, that’s literally $0.11 – eleven cents! Yowza. (So, at the base Growth plan price, just 406 user-hours per month of such activity would blow through the base price and go into overage territory beyond that.)

These sorts of simple very-typical-Bubble interactions are similar to any activity in a Bubble app and seem pretty pricey, though there’s no precise way to compute how much the raw compute “should” cost for this, as we can with API calls and SSA executions.

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“Sinatra pie” :point_up:

If anyone wants to go play around with that page, feel free (I’d like to see other consumption):

https://list-shifter-dev-test.bubbleapps.io/version-test/make_sinatras_resp?debug_mode=true

Aside: If you’re interested in this sort of feature, here’s my explanation of how it works using Floppy and part 2 here.

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1502

But isn’t this how Bubble has always worked and why it’s always been so useful, because it can grow with you from an idea all the way through to a revenue-generating business? The new model changes nothing, only makes it worse for the early stages of that growth process by costing too much too soon.

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1503

@andrewgassen Funny shield icon = enemy :clown_face:

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1504

Not entirely, from my perspective, you had to purchase additional plans with features you didn’t want or need in order to unlock capacity. With this model, you just buy the workload units. I don’t have to upgrade to other plans, I can just let the app go.

Maybe the old model could’ve handled this by letting you buy an unlimited amount of additional capacity on any plan, but that wasn’t an option, and we didn’t have the option to let it consume as much as it needed then bill me later.

Edited to add: my opinions on this literally don’t matter lol, so I’m not gonna spend too much time defending. If bubble comes back with a workable adjustment, great! If not, I’ll worry about it then.

1505

I had an entire roadmap of what I wanted to get done this year by quarter, and with the new version control I was able to pack in the giant projects separately, I was getting excited about the future of bubble.

But since the pricing announcement, I haven’t touched a single thing. Not one control, not one text input. Nothing. I have absolutely no motivation to do anything until there’s an announcement. The only thing I’ve managed to do is compare other no code solutions.

I really hope we hear something soon so I can make plans.

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1506

You’re not alone.

Edit:
Well I did go to cancel my account, but found that if I did I lost access immediately rather than giving me the time I paid for…

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1507

I’m just gonna say the uncomfortable thing out loud. WU pricing is going to fail. Full stop.

Even if they re-calibrate the WU formula (that they can CHANGE anytime without any notice FWIW) it’s just not going to be CLEAR enough for people about to build in the platform. If it’s a big “conversation” about what it MIGHT cost … sorry … that’s a monster fail.

People need simple pricing tiers - up to X users - storage up to X gig, etc. Those are pretty easy to figure out. But if say “up to X WU’s” then of course … what is a WU?

And how do I “estimate” BEFORE I build - how many WUs my app will use?

You can mess around with these levers all day long but you still have the same problem … IT IS NOT SIMPLE TO FORECAST. Bubble is huge, 2M users and TONS of developers in the community. Pretty great product with the ability to get better. One of the reasons people LOVE bubble so much is … they already know it and there is such a huge community to help. But it only takes a hit minute for tons of those folks to go and evangelize another platform. Bubble has the biggest lead and largest no-code developer user base - hands down, That’s why it’s so great!!

They need to raise prices - cool. Raise the prices. I seriously think there would be VERY little churn if they just 3X’d the current prices.

Anyway you slice it - if it’s not black and white what it will cost to build on the platform … it’s gonna really cost Bubble.

I’m sorry - but I can’t see how ANY “WU” strategy will succeed in the short or long term. Unless it is very easy to figure out what your app (that isn’t built yet) will cost when it scales

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1509

Vastly more. Top add on is only 20M WU and it’s $1499

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1510

Beautifully written. I especially like the “Impact” statements

1511

$34,000

I have a calculator in google sheets.

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1512

I’ve seen something similar before with a no code gaming company (who seemed to be changing the landscape of gaming creation and was now contending with the other giants such as unreal engine and unity). The CEO increased their prices dramatically a large percentage of the community voiced their opinions early on.

The company moved forward with pricing and feature changes the community didn’t want.

In less than a years time there was a new CEO who through mass marketing was reaching out to all of the users they lost (a new face for a new company), unfortunately the company fell by the wayside.

Don’t get me wrong they still exist but the success rate they once seen will probably never happen again.

This may never happen with bubble but you never know I write this only because it feels familiar.

Unity on the other hand (one of the other gaming companies) thrives with their community in which we can all learn a lot from. The numbers are astonishing.

Take care,
Mike

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1514

hi all just my two cents whatever its worth as a product manager for 10+ years.

Let’s all hope the workflow units gets brought down to earth. That said, I fundamentally don’t disagree with the objective of the new pricing, they have a tricky situation to align incentives and avoid perverse ones. I think they do have the right to succeed if we succeed, but beyond that they should be incentivized to help us make our apps more complex over time not less so.

The workflow bar over next several years should be set low enough that costs are for all practical purposes fixed or feel fixed for 90% of customers. But beyond that, customers should be encouraged to add workflows and increase usage over time that add value to the app. This also aligns best with what bubble’s goal should be which is to promote its platform as a solution for an app’s entire lifecycle from MVP to enterprise scale.

@josh @emmanuel

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1515

Users in DB do not always mean sales for a company.

I’m against the idea where owners having to pay for just people signing up. Otherwise owners should require a credit card in the signup (every time I see it a credit card required to sign up I immediately close that site). This would be the same as having an X visits limit/month.

I’m not necessarily against the WU idea, it’s just wrong numbers. With the current pricing, 100M would cost ~9K, which right now cost $500-700

Plans should have at least WU’s x 10

As said multiple times already, a serious company won’t increase their pricing by +50% from day to night, or the way Bubble did. The only reason I could see doing this is to prepare the company to sell it.

Like someone said if +85% of the apps should only see +$50 increase in their pricing (where I really don’t trust these numbers), why don’t just increase the pricing for everyone by 20% 30% 40%?

Why don’t just charge computing costs + 20%, 30%, 40% + fixed fee for using Bubble?

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1516

I’d like to see something for individuals, hobbyists, and small organizations with less than X amount of revenue or funds raised in the last 12 months for the free plan then another structure if you make more than that for plus (with extra features for $399, and even more features for pro $2,040 as an example these number are fake but a income structured approach to pay for what you get and everyone wins.

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1519

Last post from me on this topic.

I noticed the free plan doesn’t have the ability to see these metrics so it makes me wonder how those bubble users would know what to expect based on workflow usage prior to upgrading?

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1520

It would be impossible for them to design specific things. If they would want to carry with WU as they are, they should make it so advantageous that we wouldn’t have to worry about it. If the free plan started with a 1m WU, maybe, we would’ve said, okay, it’s not much, but still, it’s a good start. They should either think about some other way to monetize better, or increase by order of magnitude the WUs.

I posted about Cloudflare earlier, and by curiosity I checked their pricing (ex. below), when I read it, it’s generous enough that I don’t feel anxious at all.

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1522

I agree, but if you I think about it, if you have 10k users and have 0 business you better close shop. Means the business or product not attractive. Unless you are trying to replicate facebook or open free community, that would be a different story😅

I dont think bubble will change how the plans structure (Wu) as they said, i hope bubble 10x the Wu, but we are just brainstorming here.

I would spread users for the plans like this:

Plan 1: 5k user
Plan 2: 15k user
Plan 3: 50k
Plan 4: +100k

I think that would be acceptable. I suggested these metrics because bubble needs at least two metrics for plans. One for infrastructure usage (workflows) and one for scalability(users).

1524

This new pricing plan is extremely unfair, as it offers a meager amount of WU, which is far too small. It’s disheartening to see my trust in this service being called into question yet again, reminiscent of the issue I had with Bubble. Unless there is a change in this policy, I will have no choice but to explore other options, even if it means migrating through code, during the 18 months.

1525

Folks! Bubble gave us 18 months to migrate the projects out from here. They are a mother.

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1526

@ualdir I think you might be missing a word there at the end.

Maybe “Figure”?
Maybe “Fortune”?

1 Like