Pricing: the path forward from here

Announcements
1

Hi all,

As mentioned in our last post on the subject, we are incredibly sorry for the disruption our pricing announcement made on the community. Please read that post for our thoughts on where we went wrong.

Many of you have expressed relief that we are not planning to roll out the changes we initially proposed, but concern about when and how our pricing will eventually change. We are keenly aware that uncertainty over our future pricing plans is a huge impediment to many of you.

Given that, we would like to get you a definitive answer as swiftly as possible without repeating the mistakes we made initially. Our plan to do this is:

  • A small, cross-functional team representing both the people involved in our original pricing efforts as well as people from other parts of the company are going to drop all their normal responsibilities and spend the next week taking all the ideas that have been shared about pricing so far, and having as many conversations with community members as they have time to do so

  • They will reach out to a wide cross section of Bubble users, including many of the people who have publicly commented, as well as other segments of the community, to conduct additional interviews. We may not have time to have a verbal conversation with everyone contributing feedback, but we are reading every comment posted to the forum on these threads, and will have as many verbal conversations as we can.

  • Next weekend, we will share a status update with an updated ETA for making any further pricing changes. We will continue to post regular updates until we have a finalized pricing model.

Our expectation is that we can accomplish our goal of having predictable, user-friendly pricing that is long-term sustainable without disrupting the business models of our users. We will not roll out new pricing that is unacceptable to the community.

We really appreciate your patience so far, and we’re incredibly grateful for all the feedback and ideas provided!

Thanks,

Josh and Emmanuel

74 Likes
3

Looking forward to this :heart:

Thanks!

1 Like
5

@josh is there any outlook for a self hosted option where we pay for a license key and self host similar to backendless.

I know you guys guarantee (or used to) if bubble ever shuts down it’ll be open source so projects don’t die but what are bubbles thoughts on offering self host with monthly license key so users can have peace of mind and more control?

13 Likes
6

Not exactly. They would have to enable you to run your own Bubble by giving you the entire code of the thing. They can offer guarantees and provide other solutions without becoming food.

If they release Bubble as open source, the first thing that will happen is 10 copycats appearing trying to undercut them in price without investing anything back in the tech, fragmenting the market making it worse for all.

As much as I like open source and decentralization, it is not the answer here, at least not like this. It would have to be done in a very smart manner.

The answer is being able to grow with them and doing so safely.
There are infinite possibilities in the realm of solutions, all we need is that they search for them, both inside and outside the software industry.

22 Likes
7

@josh, this feels like the right, iterative approach to me. Props to you and the team for pivoting, responding to the needs voiced by the community, and mapping out and sharing a plan to do so.

Honestly, having taken a step back and watched this process unfold, your recent actions further build my trust in Bubble. I trust that Bubble will listen to their users and course-correct as needed. You’ve been consistent on that throughout. Thank you for that!

7 Likes
8

Nothing would stop someone from self hosting without paying anything.
Legal action? Guess what, the server hosting it is somewhere with no laws about copyright.
And that is even if it would be possible to detect that server somehow.

9

I like it

1 Like
10

What about containers on services like Azure (and others)? Seems like I can install proprietary softwares in a container (one click install), pay the license and pay the ressources to Microsoft… [really asking here… many proprietary software on there and i don’t think you can see the source… can you?]

2 Likes
11

It can be cracked to work without a license. That’s like as old as the internet :yum:

12

Licensing keys is how a lot of platforms handle it

1 Like
14

I’ll be very interested to see what the new pricing system looks like. Will be curious to see if we will finally get an “entry-level” plan that makes it more affordable for users who are wanting to leverage the awesomeness of Bubble but don’t need a massive number of things/APIs.

I’m thinking specifically of those of us who want to use Bubble for something like a public profile/blog site but don’t have the startup capital to invest $300/year on top of domain costs when you can get in for under $90/year with something like Wordpress.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I WANT to support Bubble and totally believe it’s worth every $ for web apps with current plans; the current plans just don’t really offer something for those of us who aren’t at the point where we have an app or business idea that makes the yearly plans financially feasible.

4 Likes
15

So, if it can be cracked, it is untrustworthy? That is not how it works. Plenty of experts trust Windows, Photoshop and the likes.

Because that is not the deal being offered. You are free to accept it initially or not. Plenty of us accepted it and our lives got way better due to it.
They have their business reasons to do so.

An interesting discussion similar to this is the “commons clause” in semi-open source projects, they add that clause for business reasons and it is super fair, even if others would like to not obey that clause.
Maybe you would be interested in checking the Elastic vs AWS example of this.

You may not like exclusivity contracts, so don’t enter them, but these contracts have their place in the world.

If they ever decide to change this, okay, let the competition and leeching begin, but they will be prepared for it to ensure their own survival and even to thrive in that new scenario.

But think about it, why would they create a negative environment for themselves? They can just improve the deal they offer to us instead of blowing the landscape.

2 Likes
17

Obviously the smart move but for our company we have to now build any of our serious apps with an external backend.
Front ends can be created quickly if something goes wrong but we must be able security around our data.
Sorry guys, will still use bubble but for me this is the second time experiencing this kind of thing in relation to pricing structure and for me that makes it a pattern.
Good job, good platform, I love working on it but we also need to be realistic about what control we do or don’t have.

10 Likes
18

I appreciate the sensitivity to our issues. Very curious to see where the new pricing lands.

19

Not all Open Source licenses are as unrestricted as MIT.
You have AGPL license to precisely avoid what you mention.

What Bubble does is use a huge amount of OS licensed software to build Bubble and I would love to know what does Bubble return to the OS community. I’ve never seen anything published regarding this topic.

1 Like
20

I start by apologizing for my poor, translated English. Please don’t judge me for that.

I need to start by saying that even though Bubble has no intention of using “anchoring marketing strategy” with us, the effects caused by the suggestions of the new plans had the same effect as a “anchoring marketing strategy”.

Exemplifying an “anchoring marketing strategy”:

Consider that you pay $100 a month for your electric bill, and the electric company informs you that soon the values ​​will be readjusted, and you conclude that you will start paying $1000 for your electric bill, absurd, correct?

So what would you do? Would it be a good answer to say that you would contact the electric company to try to negotiate this adjustment? What if you could talk to the electric company and immediately get a 50% discount?

Wow, that would alleviate your despair a little, but it’s still too heavy for your budget… so you ask for a bigger discount… Days later, the electric company returns informing that it has become sensitive to your situation, and now will give you an ultra, great, big and super discount of 70%, and instead of $1000, you will only pay a token amount of $300.

In short, the electric company managed to increase your account by OVER 200%, and you still believe you did a good deal. This is the concept of presenting the hurricane (total chaos) chaos for the customer to accept the storm.

Let’s get to the main topic:

I don’t have the best suggestion to solve this whole question, but I always look for the solutions by attacking the problems, because there we find the answers. Thinking in this way, the models initially intended limited the numbers of access and records created in datasabe, the latter being the biggest aggravating factor.

So, we already know that there are these two concerns for the Bubble team - and when I say “big concern”, I imagine it’s really a big concern, because it was these issues that motivated the absurd suggestion of the new plans. What I mean is that I believe that the size of the absurdity of the suggestion is equal to the size of the Bubble team’s concern with this matter.

  1. Pay for excess rows in the database
    Who here hadn’t been wondering how long Bubble would be able to support unlimited records in the database of each application? Every bag has a bottom, and Bubble was handling this issue as if databases had a static size, so the dynamite exploded.

Do I need to count how many times the name Xanu and other services were mentioned here in the forum as a solution to try to alleviate the chaos that the news of the adjustments in the plans caused?

In suggesting the indecent plans, I think Bubble made it clear that he can no longer afford to support the databases, so my suggestion would be to start thinking about adding the database service as a separate new product.

Bubble offers a database service similar to Xanu, and upon purchase, the editor’s database tab unlocks with the contracted plan’s settings.

Of course, clearly and without a doubt it would be immoral if there were plans offering databases by number of lines instead of sizes per gigabyte or terabyte. Forgive me for saying this, but please, selling database lines seemed very amateurish to me, the impression I got is: there is someone very powerful inside Bubble who doesn’t understand Bubble services, and that person is suggesting absurd things and no one is managing to stop this madman.

I think this will be the future of Bubble, breaking down its services: database, front-and, workflow API, etc. And I see this with good eyes, because there would be several services that complete each other, all in one place.

I think in this way, because currently the plans practiced seem to support some services and unbalance others, and we know that no company lives from loss, at the same time no customer cannot be punished for imprudence of the general administration, or for poorly executed plans, or for lack of of vision of the professionals who are paid to lead the company to the new realities of the market and the needs of its customers.

My suggestion to solve the single access problem follows the same suggestion to solve the database problem.

17 Likes
21

well spoken @tharlesmr

2 Likes
22

So far, I haven’t seen that it can go much beyond a model builder* for a highly sophisticated app, especially if it must be able to operate disconnected from the Internet.

  • This is from the perspective that an “MVP” can actually be put in the hands of end users for real-life usage and not break in most common scenarios.
23

Hit the nail on the head.

It may be more challenging to calculate/predict data usage (GB), but it’s doable. What’s ridiculous is to price by row when a row could be as small as one numeric field or as large as hundreds of text fields, each with thousands of bytes of text, or even more.

My mind is spinning around the questions of what is the real cost of a row or a GB or any other unit of Bubble capacity, and how can the Bubble organization charge profitably based on what it really costs them? Or conversely, what will Bubble Org decide the market will bear for a bag of integrated services irrespective of their cost to Bubble Org? (That question goes to the value side of pricing. What is the value subscribers place on the processing and database services?)

With my limited bandwidth I can’t possibly read and digest every post that’s resulted from Bubble’s careless announcement, but I haven’t seen anything to indicate that Bubble org has thoughtfully considered the cost or the value side of pricing their service. If they have, they certainly haven’t made it clear in what I’ve read.

I want to see Bubble org succeed because I’ve invested more than four years of my spare life in building something useful on top of Bubble. Their survival obviously depends on operating at a profit. But if their determination of what’s profitable is based on what they can get away with charging (based on an unclear sampling of subscribers) rather than a realistic assessment of the value they provide subscribers and their cost to produce it, they are, as you say, amateurish in their approach.

3 Likes