Yes exactly and Bubble in their survey indicated they might think differently.
That’s why I raised my concern here.
I was fortunate enough to be included in the forms survey. As someone that’s been involved at Senior / Exec level decision making process for many years, I feel the survey mostly failed to hit the mark. At least they now know who we think their competitors are.
@josh Before changing current products please consider alternate monetization ideas.
- Devs need at least a professional plan to build do anything serious. Having a well thought out dev plan will bring entrepreneurs back.
- Cost jumps between plans are big. Add the ability for clients to add higher tier features to lower tears at a fee.
- Look at current application limits. ie. SQL 200 record limit per call. While there are workarounds people pay for convenience…
- Scheduled boosts. Some apps have things like dayend / monthend processes. It would be nice to boost resources only during these times.
- Workflow boosts. Instead of a capacity boost perhaps one might want to boost just a specific workflow.
Yup, I am feeling the same way. The 2nd page especially seemed like self promotion and not anything to do with pricing feedback. Also found it strange it was a Google survey and not Bubble’s own technology…
I would find a slight increase in pricing to be acceptable, but I was not given the impression after the survey that this will be the case. It seemed more like they were trying to figure out how much can they gouge us before we leave somewhere else and to where we would go. This whole experience has really been disappointing.
Looks that Bubble are desperate to raise the prices, instead of creating new values for us clients.This is not a good approach, this will not be a good one for any sides.
Thanks for listening to the community! This is why we stay. I’ve turned down investors that wanted me to get a dedicated development team outside Bubble and I turned them down. You helped make my career and I’ll stick with you guys as long as you stay good to us.
I love the bubble team’s new approach on giving us an option to pay a fixed price per unique user. I want to specialize in social medias & video sharing apps, so paying a fixed price per unique user will work great for me because it will make business planning far easier because I’ll know the exact amount to charge users to be in profit.
When bubble started it made a promise to make it accessible for anyone around the world, that does not include paying per unique user @jamar.sloss so let’s not encourage this modal 
Bubble pays AWS for capacity, we should be allowed to do the same. They can charge whatever they want per user on Enterprise clients.
I don’t get what you’re saying 
Not all unique users are created equal. You may have a user that uploads thousands of photos and sends tens of thousands of messages daily while another user may upload 1 photo and not message anyone. Would you want to pay for having a unique user that essentially doesn’t use your system?
I’ll let users host their own media by creating an input function that gets a string from a user & saves it as a variable that I will use to display user media. As far as user retention, it will be my responsibility to make sure I build great apps that keep users engaged daily.
The problem with that premise is you are assuming all users and their actions are similar across all the millions of apps in Bubble.
As stated in my earlier post Bubble is to general a platform that kind of a pricing.
The question is whether Bubble is competing with code based development framework like ReactNative, Flutter and conventional dev stack
or
Is Bubble competing with the likes of SaaS platform like Salesforce?
That vision is still not clear. Emmanuel and Josh sounds like they are under pressure from their investors to become Salesforce of No-code while their earlier vision tend to incline towards an open platform that they can monetize by charging for the service layer on top of what they pay for AWS. Those are two different roads. There is a big confusion there which is reflected every year in their pricing model.
Personally, i’d be happy to pay for whatever cost my app incurs on AWS and the bubble service margins. Pay as you use for AWS and misc + Bubble charge will be a game changer in the IT industry. The metrics have to defined very clearly.
They can also charge for enterprise level clients.
I agree with this totally. How I perceive Bubble is very important to me. If Bubble is just a generic no-code product, I am not comfortable sticking with it. I want Bubble to be an “Infrastructure” for the most sophisticated apps.
There is no way I can explain my users that my app is hosted on a SaaS. At least my app should be hosted on an IaaS. Please decide the pricing as a Infrastructure provider in mind.
This sums it up perfectly for me. Thank you.
When I got into Bubble, the sales pitch was for Bubble to become “a new web standard”. I can invest in building a business on top of an infrastructure. There is security there. I can build a business on Wordpress, I can even build a business using a word press builder because if the builder goes away, the Wordpress foundation is still there.
But no one in their right mind would invest in a business hinging on a 3rd party with no plausible guarantees of continued operation. The day Bubble goes away, so does your business.
The pricing structure, and the marketing, should reflect this. If Bubble is in fact no more than a “lock in” builder with a backend, it is, at best, a rapid prototyping tool and 5,000 data entries will suffice to showcase a prototype to a handful of people and pass on to a full stack dev team.
What I personally need is a clear understanding of what Bubble is today and aims to be in the future. And guarantees for continued operation in case Bubble as a company goes away. Only when these issues have been completely resolved/clarified is the pricing structure of any interest/concern.
- For those in the community who were not included in the survey, Bubble needs to be practical, hence they will never get to a solution. If they survey all of us they will experience analysis paralysis. (No I was not surveyed or formally asked, but I am ok with that).
- An automatic annual price increase based on the CPI of the headquarter country (the US I believe) is completely reasonable, and should not be up for debate. If Bubble waves this since they have reduced thier cost structures that should be up to them, however all business need to adust this to pay thier people, and overhead. Bubble is a “service” company which suggest human capital is thier most valuable asset. They have to pay well for the best, and that is what we want - the best coder’s so we don’t have to.
- Price adjustments beyound the CPI mentioned above should be based on the new vastly improved improved capablity of Bubble, and optional to the client. Otherwise - Bubble odviously did not get it right in the first place. Of course I (we) expect Bubble to improve over tme and add new features at no increased cost to us - this is Bubble’s cost of remaining competitive.
If Bubble is not very careful going forward some very smart group of people will lanch an Open Source project (that may take some time to create) which will displace or at least erode Bubble’s market share . It would not be the first time - or the last.
Best Regards,
John
Can old users remain on legacy plans when new pricing is introduced? Surely this would be the best solution.
Agree 100%. Bubble must be a foundation that can support highly sophisticated apps. They have a way to go, but it’s the right goal to strive for.
Though I agree with you, if Bubble was to cease operations, they pledged to open source the software so the community could maintain it.
Why does there have to be one pricing stack for every customer? Why not a slider going from “simple pricing” to “complex pricing”. The complex pricing should be similar to Firestore’s methods of charging.
When you are charging less for a 100gb of storage then what is charged for overuse on a few thousand rows in a database that is not reasonable. There is a big difference in “things” sizes depending on what is stored as well as the number of fields.
It should be expected that each user of an app should be using 10 000 “things” as there is potentially many different types of “things” in an app and you need to keep “things” like sales records etc for the life of the app/7 years. People engage in thousands of chats/posts/to dos during normal use over a year of our apps’ typical competitors which often store and provide access to this data long term.
I had given up on changing to firebase but now this pricing change is making my app potentially unprofitable even if I only had paid users. Why not allow a nested database, perhaps NoSQL and front end storage in the browser so the user can just load one large object and sync changes back to the database efficiently, removing the need for searching for each thing in the database (and subscribing to them).
From a profitability perspective of Bubble, custom features/databases for larger clients may be most important as these clients can afford to simply rebuild their app from scratch, fully optimised in code.
These changes happened after the $100MI investment. That probably put pressure on the team, from someone else who does not understand anything about the culture of Bubble and is looking for immediate profit/return on that investment.
What Bubble management has to have in mind is the long-term run. Don’t try to scalp and make an immediate profit. Learn with Bezos. Don’t listen to these people who need immediate profit. Build with passion, care, and love a platform where you’ll have not only your “customers” but a family supporting your ecosystem. That’s the biggest difference.
I’ve never heard about backendless, but I received an email from them making their point on Bubble, and yes, it seems an interesting option.
As an Agency partner, I feel a lot frustrated because I’m trying to put Bubble on enterprises, making the appeal on a more serious way - not only the hobbyist - but on the hands of corporations that I’m helping to simplify their operations, but this makes me feel terrible, and I definitely think that Bubble should make a movement towards corporations. Again, as an Agency, I’m even unable to showcase a solution - or give it to customers without the “built on bubble” banner.
See, I’m already paying a premium, then I’m making it visible to my corporate customers, and, now, apps will increase the price by row? Do you guys think this is fair? What else do you want from us? I’m evaluating whether I renew my Agency plan or not for the end of this year.