Not everyone (and I’d imagine a large chunk) don’t define “scale” in their business with number of users.
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I’m creating a ftp game via bubble. If I end up with 50k users, instead of being proud of myself for creating something great and growing it while maybe getting a few subscribers and transitioning that into $, I’d have to close up shop because I wouldn’t be able to afford it. I wouldn’t be able to afford 100 users at these prices.
I was so exciting to post a showcase of my bubble app because I think it’s truly unique on the site (there really isn’t much for actual, full games on here that I’ve seen) but now I feel like a moron for trying to do something out of the ordinary. There is no feasible way for me to keep my game going with this system.
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WU x10 is not nearly enough. Apps based on api integrations, webhooks and recursive workflows like mine had 40x increase in bill.
My app is not even live, only 1 testing user.
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I know, mine too. That’s why I said at least
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That is terrible. So sorry you experienced that behaviour. This forum is overwhelming positive so I am sure you know your views are respected and efforts appreciated.
There is a tiny element of bad behaviour on this forum, even from brilliant people who seem to have behavioural issues, and we should call it out when that happens.
Like you, although devo at this fiasco, I truly hope a positive step back will come from Bubble HQ.
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In case team at Bubble is still listening, I would chime in with my few cents.
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I feel Bubble must have two components of the fee. One should be platform fee which is for the features they are building etc. Other one should be for the usage.
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And with so many limitations in Bubble with respect to performance, Bubble should not be adding a lot of margin on “usage and performance” because we are forced to work around Bubble’s limitations. So Bubble ought to fix a good majority of those issues before premium on “performance and usage charges” are brought in
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When performance and usage based charges are introduced, have a very clear way for us to estimate and track usages of various actions
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And for the usage, it should be a fair premium on the charges borne by Bubble. Say 20% margin?
In case they need to know, here is a list of my thoughts on performance limitations in Bubble.
- No good and easy way to work on lists and iterate through lists
- No way to have temporary variables in workflows
- No way to have return value of workflows
- No way to have duplicate elements in lists (so can’t store shopping cart maps in local custom variable, but have to create a data entry for this)
- Recursive workflows require long lists to be passed to workflows. Will long lists cause higher workload? No way to prevent this.
- No way to take bulk actions on items without running recursive workflows.
- Not even possible to bulk import or delete records easily and without consuming workload units
- Repeating group data refresh has issues and we have to come up with workarounds of multiple calls to counter it to some extent.
- Workflows require lot of searches to be done again and again due to small variations as there is no good way to store and reuse the results or point to a mother search and reuse it partly etc.
- No good way to search with OR or such composite conditions
- No way to search with a constraint where a list field has an intersection with a given list
- No good way to search on second/third level fields (“This data’s field1’s field > 10” kind of thing)
- No way to search where a field of data type can be compared to another field of data type or its some computed value
- No way to store data-mappings in DB as a field. It is required so often. Because of this new tables need to be created/managed
- We need to keep our tables flat instead of normalised as the searches become very extensive/expensive and often impossible. But this means that individual tables become fat. Now since they become fat, even small operations over there simply cause a lot of workload.
- There is no way to get only certain fields from search and thereby reduce the workload.
- Since there is no way to do a simple forking of if-else logics, we need to keep repeating same condition in multiple actions resulting in more workload being used. And all of those steps consume workloads even if they would actually not get executed at all if it was normal if-else fork.
- Since there is no assurance of workflow steps to run in sequence, we have to do a lot of extra processing of “if result of this step was not empty or if it was empty then if that was true…” to make things run in sequence. All this increasing workload.
- No easy way to get just the count of a certain search or a particular data type
- There is no option to do a “create new or update existing”
- There is no way to “Update only changed fields” in case there is an edit form and I want to update the thing changed by user where user has changed only few fields. I still need to write full “make changes to thing…” with all the values in the form
- There is no way of doing a “function call”. So if we want to keep our app modular, we need to do a various “call this api which will call another api” etc and that increases the load. We can use custom event if it is all within backend, but from front-end there is no way to call a custom event within backend. So I need to create an API call excessively for sure.
- No clean way of assuring atomicity of operations.
By the way, I am on professional plan and consumed 66M workflows last month 
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This is a pretty good summary @mghatiya of everything I’ve been harping at Bubble about for years and fixing where I can. (But AGAIN, basically Bubble has mispriced all of this shtuff [WUs] in the new model.) Thanks for reminding me about what I think is Clown Town (
) about Bubble!
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One other thing which remains unclear in all this catastrophe of an announcement. How does it work with annual billing. If I do annual billing for the legacy and then 12 months on, my plan renews, do I get dumped off the legacy pricing after 12 months or does my renewal happen again for 12 months or does that renewal after 12 months magically become 6 months. That is all a bit unclear. Just a lack of details all around with this botched announcement and silence.
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Oh yeah… also… BWAHAHAHAHAAAA. No fu**ing way Bubble’s coming back with that.
But yeah, surely Bubble knows what my app costs to run in AWS and that would in fact be a completely reasonable uplift (anywhere between 20 and 50 percent over raw AWS cost on dynamic) but since the Mayors of Clown Town came back first with a computation of a 4.7 million percent uplift on SSA executions and an approximately infinite uplift on outbound API calls when all I was excitedly waiting for was a reasonably marked up pricing model that allowed dynamic cap, I’m not holding my breath.
(@mghatiya if you’re not familiar with me, I’m not laughing at you I’m laughing at the Mayors of Clown Town.)
The point is: It’s entirely obvious now that (1) real apps on Bubble are already wildly profitable on a cost-to-execute basis, (2) the free apps tier might be a loss-leader nightmare [but that’s not my problem], and (3) my app never goes over old cap so wtf would a new pricing model impact me at all and (4) if the new model didn’t try to rock the boat I wouldn’t have to do any math and I wouldn’t be rocking the boat either and (5) what a bunch of morons.
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Are you sure . . .
Great list. This are things that must be fixed
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Haven’t seen that but it’s not impossible I suppose. Contact support with a bug report.
The image you posted is about the cdn prices, if you want to build an app on cloudflare you need to check their page and workers offer
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I think they are improving on Workflow units.
My WUs for the last two days are lower than for the previous periods by a factor of around 2X:
Wishful thinking? I hope not!
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@christo1 Good catch, I guess I will keep an eye on the release page.
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@emmanuel @josh
Please don’t let us down today!
Surprise us for good!!
Like this post so they will see it 
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Now I’m paying $600+/month. Based on the new pricing, I’ll be paying $60K+/month. 10,000% increase LOL.
Time to learn some coding 
P.S.
@tatiana.a When you say “92% of apps would see less than a $250/month change”, have you considered that the vast majority of apps are NOT even active? I myself have dozens of apps that I created just for testing purposes. I suspect the vast majority of REAL active apps are gonna see a significant hike in prices. And many of them will start to look for scalable alternatives.
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it is killing me that developing on bubble has become similar to riding a taxi in rush hour
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