Thanks for the hold… But to be honest… Trust has taking a tremendous hit today… I’m actually still physically shaking by all the hours i’ve put, the clients i’ve convinced and seeing all that going by the window by changing the rules when the game is started…
I can see many people, including me and our organization, googling “bubble alternatives” today… Really, I can’t even grasp the size of the betrayal we felt today.
Well, THAT was wild ride. Thanks SO much for listening and giving a care. We know that you don’t want to become a heartless giant. Thanks for proving it.
(A thought I was in the middle of when I saw this new thread):
Could we have some explanation of just how much trouble the issue of lots of database items is causing? Without it this felt like it came out of nowhere.
But with some time to think, I bet there’s some pretty substantial reason why you guys reacted so strongly on this.
…What’s up? What are the rest of us not privy to that inspired such a drastic change…??
Could we get an infographic or something…? ^.^
That is why I’m still skeptical about the new announcement…
I love Bubble, sure this shook me pretty hard today but I like that they’ve responded fairly quickly and I’m happy to give them the benefit of the doubt, they’ve earned that. I still believe even if a little less than before.
We will have a better night 
I’m glad the proposed changes were put on hold. There was major panic for just about every user I think. I think we will still be reeling for a while though.
No app would be viable on the proposed changes. It wouldn’t even be an MVP building platform anymore let alone have serious long term apps remain on Bubble. I have been a loyal advocate that Bubble is a viable prospect to scale and keep serious apps on long term but not now.
The worst thing hit here is the confidence/trust. And once that goes it’s VERY hard to get back. Just the mere fact that anyone at Bubble thought this was even remotely a good idea?? And it seems like there’s been a lot of things happen in a lot of aspects of Bubble that have chipped away confidence lately.
It has highlighted to me that Bubble is actually quite a large risk exposure to my business whereas I felt it was a huge asset before. I’m definitely seriously considering alternatives.
My thoughts on pricing:
*Keep the current pricing model, add a couple of dollars a month if you need to.
*Look at ‘add-ons’ as people have suggested as a way of upselling and allowing people to customised pricing further depending on their needs (additional collaborators, additional capacity units, etc etc)
*Overages are very overdue - it should NEVER break an app if you go over, you should just be charged extra and notified.
*Reducing the pricing of additional storage is also long overdue. This means the need for integrating with external storage.
Thanks for the response @emmanuel. It’s clear as usual that you do listen to your community, and I think everyone appreciates the fact that this discussion can be had at all. While I was as surprised by this message as anyone, I still think the continued discussion and your response is very much in line with the transparency we’ve seen in the past.
I also think your previous response changed the tone of the conversation in a more productive way and several users have made good suggestions on how an alternative price structure could look.
I’ll still share my five cents on what occurred today though, as I think this runs deeper than simply a miscalculation on the specifics of the plan.
From a communication standpoint, I think this should have been done in a different way. I honestly found it obvious that this would be a hugely unpopular change the second I read your initial post, and was not at all surprised to see that the comments were flooded with negative responses to the point where the forum crashed. My thoughts were that you were either simply prepared (for internal reasons unknown to us) to weather the storm and push through a predictably unpopular decision no matter what, or that you genuinely (but surprisingly) were caught off guard at just how negative the feedback was. With your later posts, where you show more openness to listen and alter the decision based on the feedback, I can’t help but think that communicating it both via the forum and through an email newsletter was a mistake. A change this massive obviously deserved more research.
The reason I say this is that I think you underestimate just how much reputational damage you can do by appearing so unpredictable: you’re giving the impression that the rug can be pulled out from under long-time users from one day to the next. I’ve given this same feedback to your customer support team a few times actually: you’re always transparent, helpful and positive but I’m sometimes taken aback at how casually you approach issues that are of huge consequence to your User’s projects and the relationship they have with their clients. Bubble has come a long way in being taken seriously as a long-term application building framework, but missteps like this are a step back. I’ve already received a handful of emails from clients concerned about the change, and I’m not too happy that this was simply pushed out with no warning whatsoever - the fact that an agency and its clients receives this message at the same time does not exactly put us in a flattering position.
I think this message has put some major concerns into the minds of your Users as to what kind of limitations or price increases are introduced next - and rightly so. I say this as a long-time and loyal proponent who has stayed quiet or defended more or less every one of your previous decisions over the years. Even I am starting to feel uncomfortable at just how much trust we’re placing in one platform that’s now giving the impression that it can radically change overnight. I’m not principally against your lock-in strategy (I don’t think we would have Bubble without it), but it’s a source of concern when it’s coupled with frequent and unpredictable changes to its fundamental structure and pricing. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration that you made a serious dent in the trust of a lot of Users today.
I won’t comment too much on the plan itself as you’ve already addressed that the change won’t go through as initially sketched out… suffice to say that I too agree that the numbers seem both arbitrary and absurdly low and places terrible incentives on developers to find hacky ways of circumventing the limitations. There are plenty of good arguments already, so I’ll leave it at that.
Still, I think you should take seriously that this has caused a fairly unhealthy stir in the community that has rattled many long-time users and their clients. I can’t help but question exactly what kind of process was behind this change in the first place? Was the universally negative response really unexpected? It almost beggars belief to be honest.
While I appreciate your response, it also feels like we’ve been here before, more than once. I really wish these kinds of processes were not made as public and sudden as this. I think this deserves a proper post mortem and not just an adjustment to the plan.
“Move fast and break stuff” may work for Facebook, but it’s not gonna cut it for a platform like Bubble.
Thank you !
We are aware that the price of Bubble is incredibly low. I think this is something to think about with the community as we believe that no-code is the future of software development, more accessible and inclusive, and bubble is one of the leaders in this movement.
I think this episode has reminded us that Bubble is a proprietary tool and that it should be a paid service that matches its use.
We are willing to pay more for this service and help you grow! But without penalising any of the users. Bigger companies (like us) are willing to pay more to allow smaller ones to continue using Bubble without cutting into your business model.
There must be a metric like “paying” users to be found without impacting the service of smaller ones. Like hubspot and its 5000 active users limit…
hi, as several people have posted, I ask you to also reconsider your opinion on adapting price to daily or monthly active users.
This again makes app building super hard to manage.
You can no longer built out a SaaS product and invest in marketing, or bootstrap with a great free product (like so many startups did and continue to do) but must pay more than 100 per month as soon as you have X users. Unaffordable for so many students! [Look at age of YC founders and ask yourself if all of them have even 100 per month available)
Same with a potential step towards API limits. This destroys innovation.
You profit by being the platform most open to innovation.
Microsoft did well by never capturing a high % of the value it offered to businesses. [Excel could charge 1k per month but has it ever?]
Same with Coca cola machines, Stripe, Google, Pinterest, etc.
You win because every no-coder can use you due to your flexibility. So make that easy!
@emmanuel I’m a software engineer, I’m in Brazil, and we actually have 3 apps, and 3 for the next 2 months. It was very frustrating to see how the change was being made. Congratulations on the break, let’s find the path that is fair, and that we can climb together on this journey. @renatoasse is our spokesperson, being the main name in our country, please listen to what he says and we know that we can find a really viable solution.
Thank you @emmanuel! Please keep in mind the little guys who dream big. The initially proposed pricing change would crush them.
Exactly my sentiments.
This also baffles me.
I second this. I know some people don’t like the idea of it, but anyone with a serious business is going to be fine with an overage system if it increases stability. +1 to overages with existing model rather than completely changing it on it’s head.
Same here. 
This perfectly encapsulates what I’ve been feeling. Thanks for the clear and honest write up
Perfect commentary on all the sensations we feel today.
+1. thank you @petter
@emmanuel Though I think there is a very small chance anything will change. In order to regain trust in essence we’d need lower prices or sth to see a serious effort towards valuing the community and their efforts of bringing clients on here, otherwise I won’t see myself and clients apps on Bubble for when the new prices roll out 2023.
Thank you for hearing us! It must have been brutal day at Bubble. Here is my official feedback for your consideration.
Bubble’s core value proposition is that it empowers people. Don’t stray from that by adding all sorts of restrictions. Especially on DB Things (like seriously…not cool). Yes, the specifics on the changes were horribly restrictive to the point that a new business would not succeed under it. However, the very notion of restrictions completely ruin the very thing you are selling us…empowerment.
I understand you need to raise prices, but please do not take away the unlimited potential Bubble brings to people. Key word…unlimited. At least make the top tier unlimited DB Things.
Today was an epic wake up call as I just spent months finishing my project and we are literally just getting going. My partners and I have livelihoods bet on our business, and the idea of our service provider (Bubble) arbitrarily killing it before it started nearly gave me an aneurysm. We’ve already decided to start hand coding our app the old fashioned way, pulling off a switch out, and leaving Bubble before the model took effect. Our long term plans might change based on what Bubble does next. However, at minimum, we will have an alternative built and ready to deploy at a moments notice.
We as creators, put a massive amount of trust in Bubble to not give us and our businesses the screw job. Today Bubble burnt that trust badly.
We live in the data age, I can’t believe this fact passed the approval of the engineering team, amateur thing,
me having more accesses or having billions of records in the database doesn’t mean I’m earning more for it, depending on the business model. Even with the reversal, my company is abandoning this fantastic tool, because it has become insecure about its future.
