Hi all,
Continuing from our latest pricing update, we have spent the past two weeks doing extensive user research, speaking with almost a hundred users to get their feedback on what matters for them when it comes to how we charge for Bubble, as well as following the continued conversations on the forum, email, twitter, and other venues.
Based on your feedback, we’ve come to the conclusion that our initially-planned pricing model does not present a viable option for our users and we need to go back to the drawing board.
As announced in our last forum post, we’ve decided that we will not introduce a limit on DB things for paid plans. Similarly, we have heard significant and consistent concerns from users about restricting monthly unique visitors. Based on that, we have also decided that we will not introduce any limits on monthly visitors.
Instead of the originally-introduced limits on DB things and visitors, we have decided to work on a model that will offer users the ability to auto-scale on database storage and capacity usage. This is much closer to how our pricing works today, and we expect it to align much better with the needs and preferences of our users.
Because this is very different from what we had planned initially, it will take us some time to figure out the specifics and implement the required product and engineering changes. We want to make sure we get this right and will communicate the details of it once we have done the necessary work to get there, which involves both engineering and continued feedback sessions with users.
As we work on this, we plan to take into account some important lessons we have extracted from the feedback we have received so far:
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Different Bubble use-cases have different needs. We want to make sure that Bubble remains affordable for our current user base, and will do what we can to avoid changes that would price people off of the platform. As mentioned in our last monthly update, our goal is to keep Bubble affordable for entrepreneurs, and to have pricing scale up in a fair and sustainable way for larger companies and enterprises. We plan to extensively benchmark any future changes off of our currently-existing apps to make sure that this is the case.
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Visibility and predictability is important. If we release new pricing, you all need to be able to understand how that pricing would impact your particular app. We plan to build clear metrics and dashboards in advance of any announced pricing so that it will be easy for you to understand exactly what the implications of that pricing is for your app, as well as any tools necessary to manage your costs.
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Even keeping the above two lessons in mind, users need time to transition. You all have plans and commitments, and sudden shifts on our end can be disruptive. After we announce the changes to pricing, there will be a window of at least a month before changes come into effect for new applications, and a window of 18 months that users can remain on their existing paid plans. Our hope and expectation is that auto-scaling (with the ability to cap spend as desired), which has been a repeated ask from the community, is sufficiently attractive that users will choose to switch sooner, but we will make this optional.
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Get user feedback early and often, especially with regards to concrete numbers. We will not announce any new pricing without getting a broad range of user feedback on both the overall structure of the pricing and the specific numbers, to ensure we do not make another mistake where we underestimate the impact that changes would have on the community.
We take extremely seriously the responsibility we have to the Bubble ecosystem to keep it thriving and successful. We understand that migrating off of Bubble is a tremendous amount of work, and although there are no short-term technical measures we can take to change that given how our technology works today, we hope to become a trusted, stable platform comparable to companies like Amazon Web Services, where investing in us is viewed as an extremely low-risk decision. We know that getting there requires continued investment in our technology, in the way we run our business, and in our relationship with the community, and we plan to conduct any future pricing changes in a way that reinforces rather than undermines that confidence.
Thank you for all your trust in us so far. We really, really appreciate it.
Best,
Josh and Emmanuel
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