I’ve noted with interest a rather heated debate on here this morning about your support model. As someone close to launching an app which many small businesses will depend on 24/7 for their own success, this topic is becoming very important to me, and I feel the need for clarity before I go live.
Here are my questions:
(1) Can you point me to a document which defines the current level of support I can expect from Bubble, especially with regard to bug fixes.
(2) When I encounter a bug which is damaging my client’s business, I will need to get an urgent response and fix from Bubble. I am happy to pay for a higher level of support to get this. Do you have such a support product, with guarantees or clear intentions about the time taken to fix issues? If not, can creating such a product be a priority for you during this year? Could such a support product be available to purchase separately from your current “plans” (Personal, Professional etc)?
I currently feel quite unsafe basing my entire business and the business of my clients around a product where I do not know the answers to these questions.
With the majority of my forum posts, I won’t get a solution (but I will sometimes and am VERY thankful for the help).
With the majority of my bug reports, support tells me they won’t fix the issue any time soon (but they will sometimes, and I appreciate that they do respond quickly).
Most important, I’ve learned that having someone who’s good at Bubble to help me when I run into big trouble (for me, it’s @romanmg) is highly valuable. I basically think of her as my paid Bubble support
I think the only document for this is on the pricing page. Apps on the team and professional plans get priority email support (although no clarification and definition on priority timing).
Personally, I don’t think users should try to change a companies roadmap. The founders know best about the way to guide and grow their company. For now, the support issue is a growing pain since Bubble is a relatively new company, but I’m sure in time they will expand their support system.
Personally, I’ve seen Bubble handle critical bugs very quickly. But think of the thousands of Bubble customers. If the developers had to focus on every small bug reported, they’d never have time to focus on expanding their services and features.
Hey @Nocodify, thanks for your input.
Yes, the only document I can find right now is the pricing page.
On the roadmap, I think we see things differently… my view is a company really needs to listen to the customer’s needs in order to prioritise their road map, and I sense Bubble are good at that… so for me it is important to speak up and ask for what I need. Maybe my question about the next 3 months was a bit aggressive though… so I’ve edited the post to ask about the possibility for this year.
All the best,
Antony.
The reality is Bubble does listen to user requests, and it does inform their work. I believe they had somewhere north of 100k users as of a blog post I remember reading, so the vast, vast majority of them are not on these forums.
I am a fan of the paid support option, but am nowhere near the scale where I’d actually pay for it. The economics of such a plan are pretty tough to justify unless there’s a solid base of customers ready, willing, and able to purchase it.
Personally, I’m fascinated by how well it works, and everything that can be done with it. There have been minor glitches occasionally, very minor. You can have that with anything. I used to do a lot of work with MS Access. I’d have everything working great, spend literally hours developing something on a major project, then have the VBA corrupt. Sometimes it could be fixed. Usually not. Had to get in the habit of saving backup copies every hour or so in case the corruption happened so I’d only lose that time. Occasionally I’d get on a roll and forget. And that’s with the biggest company out there.
I’ve NEVER lost anything with Bubble. I don’t even experience speed issues.
In a way I wish they charged more. Would raise the barrier to entry, eliminating a lot of the potential competition. LOL.
Support doesn’t come cheap. For any company to hire staff to support phone, chat , email with service level requirements / expectations is very expensive. Often one of the top three expenses on the p&l for a software company has you’re staffing headcount behind the scenes. Bubble has a small team right now and they are doing an amazing job. I think it’s stratgically beneficial to have a Special paid support plan, especially for the lower tier plans. Like an addition add on. For now, if you want their support, upgrade your plan to a night tier. I’m on a dedicated plan and I receive awesome support from the bubble team. However, as a bubbler invested into this platform, I’m conscious of not to take advantage of this support for out of scope items like Ui questions that have been discussed in the forums or something that guru gabby @romanmg can solve.
@philnauta and @gilles, thank you for the kind words! I’m glad I can offer the support needed for your apps – you’re both building some amazing things, and it’s wonderful to be a part of it!
I agree with a lot of what the other posters have said here. Offering solid support for users can be really difficult. In my own experience with paid software, the support is rarely top notch. It’s not the fault of the company, necessarily, but when you have so many users who experience SO many different things (sometimes b/c of a software glitch or bug, but often b/c of user error), it can be nearly impossible to provide high-quality, personalized support. Because of that, I prefer to pay outside experts or consultants who know the software inside and out – I then have someone dedicated to my own, unique needs.
That said, I agree a tiered/paid support system could be really helpful in a lot of cases, depending on your needs. Fortunately, Bubble support has always been prompt, thorough, and caring (which is a rarity with most companies!). I think they’re doing an excellent job. They may or may not have a paid support plan for the future, but I appreciate them not just jumping into anything – they’ve always been very smart, analytical, and strategic with their approaches to changes/updates/etc, and I imagine it’s no different here. The end result is a well-thought plan that’ll best support users, versus something that might just be a bandaid solution.
None of this is to say it’s not frustrating when you’re building an app where your users depend on the platform you’re using. I can completely relate based off experiences with other software platforms.
I’ve always experienced a much higher quality with Bubble, though, and have no doubt their support will be as thorough and responsive as possible.
Hey everyone, thanks so much for your input! I’m pleased to hear all the positive experiences.
I am happy to work out how Bubble works, along with all the great resources already mentioned and acknowledged. I will happily work around a bug or lack of ability to get the job done as I develop. That doesn’t bother me.
What concerns me is when one day in a year’s time, my very complex app suddenly stops working, and my 100s of customer’s business practices grind to a halt. At that point, I will want urgent support to track the problem, find a workaround, and quite possibly get a bug fixed with priority. My nightmare scenario is that I cannot immediately engage with Bubble to do this and I have no idea when a solution will come.
Folks at Bubble (@neerja and @josh), I would really appreciate hearing from you on this topic!
I suspect that when they release the ability to have different test versions i.e. staging, pre-production - production this should mean that a bug never get’s live with a customer. If a bug does go live with customers it should be straight forward to roll back.
Some of those features are already available and some are on the Bubble roadmap.
Chiming in quickly to say that paid support is something we are considering, but for the reasons people are bringing up on the thread, it’s not something we can put a timeline on yet. Making sure people feel they can be comfortable running their businesses on us is something we put a lot of stock in, and that’s something we’re going to be heavily investing in over the next year.
We try to always respond quickly to situations where something was working and then it stops working in a way that is hard for a user to work around, but at our current levels of staffing, we can’t commit to concrete SLAs – we’re still doing it on a best-effort basis.
I do suggest Dedicated plans for businesses that are production critical: one of the features on dedicated is the ability to control timing of updates to the Bubble code, and the ability to test their apps on the main environment so they can confirm that updates don’t break anything critical before upgrading.
Thanks soooo much for your reply! I really feel heard and that you take my issue seriously. I understand where you are at right now on your growth path as a company and I’m really delighted to hear that these support issues are an important part of your plan for the coming year. I’m really happy to work with you on your existing support model in the meantime.
I see the advantages of dedicated, but it will be a couple of years before I have a customer base large enough to be able to afford that… and I want to be sure I will be able to give my growing customer base the tender loving care they need in the meantime to get me to that point!
I’m so excited about what Bubble is offering as a company and your support of your customers through posts like you just made. I’m looking forward to us all growing together on this journey!
