Pricing interim update

Announcements
1

Hi all,

We wanted to follow up on our last post about the pricing path forward.

Since we wrote that, we have:

  • Gone through all the pricing feedback on this forum in each of the pricing-related threads, as well as emails and Slack feedback groups
  • Conducted 1:1 interviews with 44 Bubble users, including agencies, instructors, and long-time users
  • Sent out a survey to ~300 additional users we haven’t been able to schedule time with

Most of the conversations so far have been focused on understanding how you all think about the various possible pricing structures in the abstract. We started here because we wanted to ensure we have a deep qualitative understanding about how different groups of users view the value that Bubble provides to them and what they consider fair and reasonable to charge on.

The next stage is for us to take that feedback, build concrete models with actual numbers, and then do another round of interviews to make sure that those numbers work for people in practice. This stage is going to carry over into next week. We expect to be able to give you another update by the weekend of April 2nd. (EDIT: now looking like the 4th or the 5th, probably)

What we can say so far is that capping DB things on paid plans is off the table; the feedback has been unambiguous and none of the new models we are considering would involve that. We are also hearing that there are things we could do to make our pricing better even without any changes to what we charge on, such as giving users a choice whether they would prefer to pay overages on capacity or to have it capped, instead of capping it automatically like we do today.

We will keep you posted as we learn more, and as we said in our previous post, we are committed to finding pricing that works for the community. We also want to reassure you that while we are working as quickly as possible to get to a pricing model in order to resolve the uncertainty about where our pricing will land, we will do the actual rollout thoughtfully and with very clear communication to avoid any sudden changes or surprises. We understand that agencies need time to talk to their clients, and business owners need time to understand and adapt to any changes to their cost structure. We have not been perfect in this regard, but after speaking with you all, we are learning how we can best improve our communication going forward. Moreover, we are grateful for the many businesses and agencies that have spent countless hours advocating for no code and Bubble to their clients.

Thank you so much to everyone who has given us feedback, whether in person, on the forum, or through other mediums. The level of engagement and passion from the community has been incredible and is very helpful to us as we work through this.

Thanks,

Josh and Emmanuel

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Was a great interview with Rachel yesterday.
Did a good jobs.

Would be interesting if you may aldo share all ideas and tell us why you decided for what and why.

:slight_smile:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamrau

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4

Thanks for the update.

As much as I wanted an immediate resolution I think waiting and analyzing was the correct path forward.

We’ll stay tuned

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5

Thanks for the update and great news with data limitations and potential auto scaling!

However, Respectfully, isn’t 300 surveyed users out of the as of Jan 2022 over 1M users and 700k active apps a very small user group for a survey? It’s going to provide a very small insight to how those power users feel yet neglect newer/mid users opinion. From speaking to some people a lot of power users themselves haven’t received the survey.

I’m sure you guys got a ton of insight from the comments left but for a company of bubbles size I’d presume a mere 300 people sent a Google form survey after a quarter of your user base or more was prepared to go to competition isn’t what some would consider accepting community input or doing due diligence.

You guys have kind of set a precedence at this point and not only made many users worried about legal actions from clients, debatably went against your core values listed in the 100m funding blog, and showed the market and your competitors exactly where bubbles weak spot is and what they need to do to start taking your customers.

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6

Thanks for the follow up.

Here’s my 2cents : Transform what has been seen as your weakness (closed platform, tied, etc) as your biggest strenght.

My news feed is currently flooded with articles about open source stacks (npm, gits, etc.) are being used by devs to harm servers and softwares around the world (malicious code, some completely deleted, etc.), some are even saying it’s the next biggest concern in the dev&server admin world.

Bubble could address these concerns by positioning themselves as the “secure dev environment with managed security, scalability, etc → with an awesome community and tool editor”.

I know i said it in other threads, but mark my word, open source nocode/lowcode solutions are becoming more and more competitive and interesting, Bubble NEEDS to position itself in the market by being the perfect solution for the dev/business that wants a tool and doesn’t want to find out afterward the burden of managing infrastructures. My view : Bubble needs to offer “container-like” hosting for our apps and charge us to maintain these containers + the editing tools licenses. To me, it’s the only way Bubble will still be here in the next “many” years AND more important : It’s the best way to keep attracting devs that will make great plugins that will attract even more clients.

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7

I think, another thing that needs to be addressed is the “frequency” of price changes.

Bubble used to increase almost every 2 years.

Will there be price changes every 2 years? I think, price changing every 2 years will cause a negative effect to our clients.

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Normally you should raise your prices every year by 2-5%

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9

Great news and great work.

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Since I started using bubble a few years ago, I’ve always been wary of how you are at bubble’s mercy. But it has simply been the cost of admission, and something to deal with later.

However, this debacle shows how this really is not a tenable platform for scaling a business.
In fact, I have had two offers for two different apps, both times the deal fell through after the conversation came to what stack is being used for the application. Even after me playing up Bubble’s strengths, when the potential buyer understood the risks inherent in buying an application relying on a 3rd platform, they backed out.

Last summer I was approached for a big project which is still ongoing and partly released. Since I have a stake in the project, I will suggest that we halt the road map for new functions and as soon as it’s viable we will look into the cost of moving to an open platform or full stack if the revenue projections allow for it.

Bubble is still amazing for rapid prototyping. But I just cannot see how we we can justify continuing the +12 month road map while knowing (at least strongly feeling) that we will have to pay for the dev all again in the future.

If someone can make that justification for me, please, please do, I would love to stay.

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11

Great to hear you’re not limiting DB rows. This would have meant the end for nearly all of our projects going forward.

That said I do hope you will keep the platform accessible to everyone as I do recall this was your initial goal and the main reason why Bubble drew such a large community behind it.

Focus more on enterprise clients, there are enough big players willing to pay $5,000/month or more for dedicated hosting. This will keep the community at ease while knowing you can still grow as a company, by just charging heavily on enterprise.

Great example at appgyver:

How can we afford to do this? Why?

We’ve been around for ten years, and we’ve always provided free plans for smaller organizations and indie developers while focusing on large enterprises as our paying customers. With Composer Pro, we’re just continuing this tradition. We believe that in order to build a global community of visual programmers, everybody needs to have access to the same platform. That’s why.

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Thanks for the update Josh and Emmanuel! Really appreciate this!

However, I only have 1 question.

Why not involve ALL paying active users in the surveys?

Are we not worth your time?

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Dragging a bit now with still massive amounts of uncertainty. I guess what the average user wants to know is if you plan on only supporting enterprise and thus the plans will be going up significantly as you are not so interested in the little guy or if there will always be place for the little guy who runs applications with a low CPU usage and a small (less than 1GB) database without a massive price hike.

You need to determine what you want your customer base to be and let us know. I am still not confident in my future of using Bubble and all of these many threads, whilst they are engaging in the community are not putting those doubts to rest. Would be nice to have some honesty in terms of why the pricing needs to change as it seems obvious from the many statements that you guys are hellbent on making a change despite the many posters who are saying the current pricing works for them and the cloaked comments regarding confusion I simply do not buy.

Still hopeful that something can be thrashed out which allows us to fully focus on getting back to building and being passionate about Bubble but for now, it is another lost week of development due to the uncertainties.

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14

That’s the big lie with economics, making everybody think that constant inflation means growth. Not only this race is unsustainable, but it is loop feedback, checking at the inflation to raise prices increases the inflation, and so on until we all are broke.

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15

Very good news to see that capping DB things is off the table, hope that workflows also get included here.
I think it is a very good step to calm the waters, and keep working in server capacity and overages.

As others are still pointing here, the lock-in situation makes the entrance a big bet, that’s why the pricing concern is higher. The entrance barrier and exit barrier are connected, I think working forward easing the exit barrier (exportation, adopting more code standards. etc.), even if looks anti-intuitive for sales, would also facilitate the entrance and reduce the pricing concern. Though, I know this a very difficult problem to address that requires a lot of work and a long term.

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Thanks for listening to the community. It’s already an advance not to limit things in the database. We hope that the bubble remains accessible to all users.
We look forward to new updates and may be good news.

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17

@josh Thank you for the update and letting me take part in the survey!

Let me just make one point on the survey.

I believe there was one question asking which other (no-code) tools I am using (multi-select) & then right after how much I would be willing to pay for them in total.

The concern I have with drawing conclusions from such questions is:
Let’s say, in case I am using 3 tools for the total price of $100/month then if Bubble covers functionality of all these 3 tools the price for Bubble should at least be $100/month, right?

So simply the sum of all tools functionality must be worth at least the sum of all tool’s price tags.

I think this conclusion is wrong because it neglects the fact that in case one of these tools raises their price point you can easily switch one out for a cheaper alternative whereas with just one (e.g. Bubble) you are kind of stuck in case prices change.

Of course you can bet on being able to gradually move your app to a different no-code software (or code) but who am I to trust a service to let me gradually move.

So this brings me to my final point, actually if all functionality is included inside one platform it must be cheaper to cover the risk of not being able to just swap out tools or functionality or to gradually move.

You can also view it as a discount for trust into continuously managing all resource of one app at once.

Hope this is useful while evaluating the survey.

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@jukoen do you mean that the cost of bubble should be lower to account for the risk we take to rely on just one platform to run most of our startup?

Agreed.
Also MS Office is quite cheap because when a business buys it, it is choosing to forego the alternatives and that requires extra incentive.

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19

@josh @emmanuel

Please enable auto scale today, regardless of the new pricing.

This feature is very important for many users . No one is going to dislike this (allow people to be charged by the overage)

When the server goes down it bring a lot of problems and losses

Best

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While doing your research i’d hope that you will spend enough time thinking what “Bubble is”.

  1. Is it a nocode, visual programming platform
  2. Is it just a SaaS

If it is the former, you need to be very kind and generous and focus on a long term gameplan (read WhatsApp). If it is the later, monthly sale targets may be your priority and will end up alienating a large chunk.

There is an overlap between the two but playing one against the other with pricing is going to be detrimental if not done right. This is an episode that’s going to occur every 1-2 years if the vision is not very clear.

The founders’ Vision is the real question here.

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