Hi everyone,
After taking a few days to reflect, I wanted to address some of the topics raised in the different pricing threads. People have been very open about their feelings, which is great, so I want to do the same thing. I’m saying this because some of the points I’m going to make may sound a little direct. Since the beginning of Bubble, we’ve always put transparency at the core of our communication style with our users, and today, it seems more necessary than ever.
Regarding our pricing, we are going to keep the few adjustments we made post-rollout, but we will likely not change it further for the next few months. I now want to see how people actually behave with the new pricing, in particular new users that haven’t seen the old plans. Since we’re enabling users who created an account before August 15, 2019 to pick a legacy plan for 2 years, my guess is that we’ll need 2 or 3 months to start seeing the impact of the new pricing. One thing to note, as a few people requested this: people can now buy perpetual licenses for plugins on a one-time basis for apps on a Hobby plan (for technical reasons, it’s hard to do subscription-based plugins if the app is not already on a plan).
Some people mention that the trust is broken or damaged. I understand our communication made people feel uneasy. To me, trust means that when we commit to something, we stick to it. We have never said that we would never raise prices. But we’ve always grandfathered apps that were already on a paid plan when we changed our pricing, sometimes at our loss (some users are today on a $190/mo plan for 10 apps on a Team plan). If someone sees us doing something that we said we would not do, please flag this to me.
At this early stage of Bubble, trust also means that both our users and the Bubble team agree that we do our best, in good faith, to make it work product-wise, pricing-wise, support-wise. That’s how we’ve been doing this since the beginning 7 years ago: we haven’t planned out exactly how things work, Bubble is too ambitious as a project to be able to do this, but we’re figuring out things as they come and experiment to make Bubble work for most people and most use cases. And what I hope is that our users trust us that we’re making decisions with the goal of making Bubble better for everyone. I know it’s a big ask for people, but this is really our only motivation. I’ll explain why we feel that raising prices is necessary to improve Bubble in a bit. And after a few months, we’ll see where things land; at the end of the day, our business model is such that our interest in the long run are very aligned with the ones of our users. If they don’t do well on Bubble, we won’t either.
Some say Bubble has changed. Believe me, it really hasn’t. The team gets to work every day with the same ambition and the same willingness to empower people. Our success team shares the cool projects they see on our Slack channel and the whole team is excited to read these updates. As we grow, we are starting to structure things a little bit more, and that can lead to some perceived changes. For instance, we don’t push features always as fast as before, but that’s because we’re more cautious with bugs. But we’re not changing our goals or ethos.
Now I’ll try to go through the main pricing-specific points I’ve read in the thread.
-
Our communication was poorly executed. If we were to do it again, I would have posted on the forum to explain the rationale behind the decision. But on the other hand, let’s be honest, announcing a price increase rarely goes well, regardless of how you do it… It was something that we knew would be difficult, but felt it was important enough to bite the bullet and do it.
-
Many have expressed we should have asked the community for input before making the decision. I think this kind of decision needs to be initiated first by the Bubble team and then iterated on based on the feedback we get. Announcing a future price increase and asking for feedback before rolling it out would have led to the same level of stress; it could become very hard to manage. Also, the Bubble team can see things about the business that the community can’t really see, in particular our metrics, and we are comfortable making changes based on the community’s reactions, as we did after a few hours. I also felt more comfortable doing this as we grandfathered every app already on a paid plan so therefore this wouldn’t affect existing subscriptions.
-
This leads me to the actual pricing aspect, in particular for personal plans. To be fully transparent, the average revenue per month per active user is ~$20/mo: this is low, given our cost, and the level of involvement the team has with users. So if we made a pricing mistake, I think it was a few years ago by starting at $16/mo and the more we were waiting to change this the harder it was getting. A few people on the thread acknowledged the fact that we were underpriced. This makes reaching healthy growth, providing better support, education material, and improving the product difficult. This also makes us keeping our free plan difficult. This free plan is very key to our mission, and I want to make sure we build a business that can support it in the long run. It is true that we’ve been profitable for years, but this was done by being very understaffed. This year, we have raised a round that lets us invest in some key things like performance and growth, but we need to sustainably build this company for the very long term. That’s why we had to raise prices eventually, and we don’t want to grow the business on a model that only temporarily works because of outside funding.
-
While the percentage increase between $16 and $29 is really high, the absolute increase ($13/mo) is low compared to the total cost of building a web-based business (hiring people, other SaaS services, marketing, etc.). Does it suck to pay more? Yes. But I don’t think this increase significantly changes how affordable it is to build a Bubble business. I know that this new price can make Bubble more difficult to adopt for some users, like students, and that’s why we have education and non-profit discounts (for users in different geographies, see my next point).
-
Some have expressed that the new prices make Bubble less affordable in some geographies. Here is my view on this.
a) We are a US-based company, in one of the most expensive cities of the world and we need our pricing to be compatible with this. It is very hard to start a company outside a major tech hub because of limited engineering talent; we’re trying to change this for everyone else by making programming easy, but we still have to overcome this ourselves.
b) Some people have said our new pricing was making Bubble impossible to use in some countries because of the exchange rate against the US dollar. Honestly, it is not reasonable to expect us to bear the cost of macroeconomics dynamics that lead to some currencies being low. We are a small startup, we can’t be the ones compensating for this. I lived on three different continents and have been personally impacted by major currency fluctuations. I know the feeling, but Bubble doesn’t have the scale to mitigate this, at least today (again, when we’ll be huge with economies of scale, things will be different, I can’t wait to be there…). This may sound tough, but it is important that we have realistic expectations from both sides. If people expect unreasonable things from us, this won’t lead to good things down the line.
-
Some people said we were different from other companies because of our social mission. I agree. But that doesn’t mean we are a non-profit that can operate unsustainably. If we do, we’ll go out of business and the mission will never be realized. When we’ll be a huge company, I am confident we’ll find ways through economies of scales to make Bubble much more accessible to everyone. But that’s something we can only do when we’re successful, right now, Bubble is still small and growing.
-
Many have recommended we use a different system to scale pricing, other than capacity and features + collaborator bundling. I agree there are a lot of problems with our current capacity context (it’s hard to understand and hard to predict, in particular). We’ll think about different ways, but changing the entire pricing system is a big engineering project. Practically, I think this is something we should address after we solve our current performance issues.
We didn’t communicate well here and this has led to a lot of emotional reactions. I wish I could do it differently, but it is what it is. I’ll just ask for the right to make mistakes sometimes: Josh and I are on our first company, we’ve only announced a pricing change twice, so we haven’t had that many opportunities to practice. For next time, I’ll know better, but I hope people understand that this is part of growing up as entrepreneurs and as an organization. I am aware some trust has been damaged, I hope we can get it back. My way to get it back is to reflect on this for next time, and keep providing value to our users to empower them to grow bigger.
While we know not everyone will agree with us and be happy, we’re trying to minimize the impact of this decision on users who already have a relationship with us, by giving access to old plans for the next 2 years. But we have to do what we think is right for Bubble and its mission. I’m very happy to keep the conversation going here on trust, control and how we should work with our community to build a better company.