Pricing updates and thoughts

Announcements
21

Thanks @josh and @emmanuel
For me I didn’t loose faith in you and Bubble. I found that it was a mistake and was very confident that you realize this and make a new proposal.

Honestly, I always consider every options available on the market. If I want to continue to have client, I need to propose solution that meet their needs and budget. So I need to stay informed of all solutions. And Bubble is on the top of my list most of the time. I think that with this new offer, Bubble should stay on the top of my list and I hope, for a long time.

Thanks you again to listen to community.

22

I’m feeling the love :heart_eyes:

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23

Thanks for this insightful and honest reply. Its great to see some re-adjustments swiftly made after the communities outcry which I believe was all from the heart, filled with passion and I think it shows how much people care about the platform, the tremendous value it brings, the way its has evolved the no-code movement and the community spirit.

The inner workings on Bubble, day to day operations and behind the scenes stuff I’ll never be able to technically comprehend unfortunately, but I can clearly understand and see the innovation and level of devotion you and the team are bringing to the platform.

For the pricing, it sounds like a multitude of variables and a complex equations that are hard to pin down to the right level and cater for all users, as you’ve covered in the post. Maybe as @seanhoots rightly said, this approach to ‘pay for what you use/need’ is the way forward and a fairer end game to keep things rolling
I think for new comers on Bubble, the jump from ‘Personal’ to ‘Professional’ is still a tad high though, just my hot take though.

Please, this is a must and holds benefits for all Bubblers.

This is great and a welcome change, but as @JonL has also pointed out, Personal plans should have this powerhouse feature too. I understand with the Personal plans no collaborators can be added, but there are always crucial points when deployed and working on new features or pages where quick fixes, patches or bugs need to be quickly dealt with, without the trouble of temporally deleting new features, hiding pages or elements and then worrying if the deployed version is quite right. It seems to much of an asset to be left out of any paid plan to be honest.

I personally feel the ‘Personal’ plan (no intentional pun) should have 1 version to alleviate this issue. Then the ‘Professional’ could have 2 or 3 versions, as the sync feature is much needed when 2 collaborators are working on different parts of the site.

As always, cheers

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24

The naming for the pricing plans is misleading for users and for Bubble team.

You would think that personal plans are meant for blog, small apps, marketing website.

I have a complex enterprise app on a personal plan for one client with 700+ users.

I also have created less complex apps on professional plans for some clients.

I need development versions on the first one and not so much on the other ones.

So my “personal plan” app is more complex than my “pro plan” which doesn’t make sense from their pricing plan strategy.

That makes me bring up the topic someone mentioned that it is possible that Bubble team is missing some info on how people use Bubble.

If they really want to simplify pricing plan this is what they need to do.

4 plans:

a) Free
b) Pro (because ALL paying customers are professionals :wink: )
c) Enterprise - Contact us
d) Agency

In Pro you have access to ALL development, deployment and functional features and you have a configurator for collaborators and resource features like resource units, storage space and scheduling options (anything that automatically increases Bubble invoice with their providers). They just need to pass us their cost increase plus a premium.

Bam! 95% of your user base happy.

Bubble just needs to focus on providing us the best performance and the best tools they can build so we can create great Bubble apps.

Because whenever we scale(for each new client, for each capacity increase) they profit.

Putting building and deployment features behind paywalls that are not financially reachable for unscaled apps is a very good ingredient for people to look for alternatives. Because without the tools we create worse apps and with bad apps our user/client base doesn’t grow. And that’s bad for all.

Focusing on our apps and our portfolio of clients growing is a good recipe for long and sustainable business for all of us.

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25

Hi @josh and @emmanuel,

Can you explain why you cannot charge app owners for the volume of customers that visit their app or the number of customer workflows run? Or a combination of these 2 metrics?

Also, I’m interested in why you compared Bubble to Shopify and not to other no-code platforms with workflow logic. I don’t see a commonality between these 2 at all …

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26

This was like that in the past. It’s not a good idea. People didn’t understand well what workflows were being charged and which were not.

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27

I agree. The idea makes sense on paper, but when you have new users who are unfamiliar with the concepts and functions of workflows it could be off putting, along with confusion over which workflows actually get charged and predicting user patterns to calculate costings.

Then on the side of power users it may force workflow events to be condensed in order to maximise efficiency and cut costs, this would then constrain the UX and have knock on effects. Instead of tracking the execution count of workflow events or actions, units of processing would be the best option long term e.g. pay for what you are using for the CPU & RAM in capacity.

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28

I appreciate your response and transparency with your post. The tech world could use more of that. I’m an educator, turned part time developer. I love Bubble and I’m not going anywhere.

The only thing I ask is to increase your feature rollout with the increased pricing. I would love to see a focus on some of the basic elements in the near future. I hope things like native repeating group exports with headers and better calculation options are on the horizon.

I know you are getting a lot of hate, but just know I won’t go anywhere as long as your team stays humble like you are now.

29

There is a long walk between disagreement, being upset and hate, don’t you think?

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30

I guess you are right @JonL. When I post early in the morning, I sometimes use the wrong terminology! Disagreement is the correct term.

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31

@josh Can we get a simple chart that compares all the old legacy plans to the new plans so we can make an educated decision on whether to change? I’d love to get the benefit of another dev version, but currently I pay $129/month (professional + 3 units - so 5 units total). It looks like $129/month on the new pro plan would downgrade me to only 3 units - and cap my ability to add more units at 7. So, what else am I getting on the new pro plan besides adding the one new dev version?

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32

Adding a hotfix version control option on the new professional was the way to go! Also like that you brought back adding capacity for a middle ground between Professional and Production! Those two things definitely make the added cost worth it for me!

33

I would also add that it’d be nice if the Free plan offered all the functionality available (like API Workflows), because otherwise you end up paying for developing an app (on a paying plan) before you even publish it live to customers.

Perhaps Free should be capped on CPU, or number of worflows per minutes, or something else…

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34

I understand the need for the increase of the price, I get it and I appreciate your transparency and humbleness.

But this just doesn’t make sense to me. With this pricing you are signaling to all these small developers who are just want to try this platform and want to validate their ideas that they should be careful before deciding on doing that, that they should have already know what they are building and that their ideas should be good ideas from the start (to some degree).
But this is one of the main goals/advantages of the “no-code movement” that Bubble advocates.

If I’m a non-technical founder, how can I test if Bubble is the right platform for my use case? if I have an idea and I want to test it, I need to launch it and see how people react to it so I can iterate and improve upon it ( so, in this case, the free plan is useless as usually), that will require a great deal of learning Bubble and toying with it. The current price of the Personal plan makes it hard to do so.
And please don’t get me started on how unfair this to the small guys vs the big guys in usage.

I think you are communicating the opposite with this.
You forgot that Bubble comes with a learning curve too, at the old price I wouldn’t mind jumping in and launching a small product while learning and testing then launching the second … etc which allows me to improve my Bubble skills with time and creating better and better products ( positive feedback loop).
But now, I believe you are asking too much from your new customers, in terms of time commitment and price, I would think twice before doing that and I would be careful of what I will launch, that will lead to less time using Bubble, therefore, less time learning it which leads to seeing it as a limited tool.
I hope you guys reconsider this, I can’t see how this will not hurt growth.

Note: I’m talking only about the huge jump in price from Hobby to Personal plans.

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35

I was keeping the bits and pieces together for a non-profit app to launch on professional plan (without bubble blue tag) .The change to the pricing happened without a hint and its a direct hit to the budding amateur no coders like me. My plans of a dream app is now shelved as i need to start begging more for a higher priced plan for a not for profit SaaS app. My app will never lift-off considering the pain of last 8 month building and tomorrow is not guaranteed as bubble will increase the price again…??
:cry:

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36

Bubble has provided a thorough explanation of its decision process going into this change, and they have also responded to the concerns of their users. It sounds like a lot of people are satisfied, but not everyone.

I don’t know how to say this without making some people upset … but reading through the comments has me wondering if maybe some in the community need business advice and a plan for their startup more than they need software development.

Bubble makes the software development part MUCH easier, but this doesn’t mean the business is any easier. The fundamentals of delivering value to your customers and finding the right, meaningful problem to solve - that doesn’t change even if the technology can be built quickly by non-developers. It can be misleading to think that, because you’ve built something you have built a business. Yes, you can test ideas and iterate, but that still comes at a cost - it needs to happen quickly and you need to be close to the problem from the start.

If you read the explanation for this change carefully, you can see a Bubble making sound decisions. There are lessons here for the people who want to be founders. What IS the cost structure of a business and how does it compare to growth? Is it sustainable? Who are its customers and which ones are most valuable? These are questions any startup or small business should ask, including those on this forum who want to realize their plans.

Business can have a mission too, but without a healthy business that will go away.

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37

@josh @emmanuel: My two cents.
After my previous startup hit bottom, Bubble for me is the perfect tool to work in the off hours besides my regular job on a new plan. As non-developer I think that is quite unique, it really gives me a chance to get a breakthrough success without huge upfront investment.

Now that also means my success is very much intertwined with the Bubble success. The more (financial) success Bubble has, the less I have to explain when launching my ‘next big thing’.
Happy to see you guys are working on that balancing act.
Not connecting Bubble to a Capital fueled rocket is sensible but has the risk you guys can get overtaken by other platforms with more capital. You need to get your money from somewhere to be able to scale and win in this market, getting more out of your business makes sense.

Good job.

38

You are not wrong. Actually it is totally true.

Nonetheless each Bubbler has his own background, obligations, financials and available time.

Previous to this decision I feel like everybody(except the CAD/MDT guys) were happy with the pricing scheme and the features they had available.

Then they just lost it.

Bubble team decide to put a core feature behind a huge paywall. Let me remind you that Wappler(main competitor) has just recently released native GIT support as a core feature.

They increased all prices without warning and were not able to handle the PR issue correctly.

Also let me remind you that one of the original reasons to increase prices was to copy their competition.If you are going to give that reason you should make sure that you also provide similar core features.

They backtracked(kudos to them) on some points thanks to the community pressure but still it seems that they actually don’t know a lot about their users.

If I go and check the roadmap I really don’t know what to think. How many of those CORE features will appear behind that paywall?

I lost some trust in Bubble and their roadmap. That much is clear.

But all this was a huge reminder that Bubble owns the tech stack and there is absolutely no guarantee that eventually they just go nuts on their prices and people are left stranded.

Imagine putting thousands of hours in a Bubble project that hits ramen profitability so you decide to quit your 9-5 job and dedicate your life into that project.

Then suddenly Bubble team decides something(could be pricing or not) that renders your business useless. You can extract data…but that’s about it.

At least if they released the editor and infrastructure backend as Open Source(without the PAAS features which is their main source of income) you would still have a chance.

They already decided putting development versioning behind a paywall and I believe that’s a wrong approach. And when your main competitor considers that core features shouldn’t be behind a huge paywall what do you do?

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39

@emmanuel @josh

This is great news to me. As someone who builds a fair amount of smaller apps and is often paying the personal plan, the ability to pay the legacy price for a while longer gives me the ability to try out more things. When one of these sticks I would happily pay for a higher priced plan.

I’m probably seconding what other users have said here but this restores confidence for me. My issue with the increase in the cost of the personal plan is not even that I don’t think bubble is worth it (it’s a great platform), if I had the spare money to pay $60 per month for a couple of side projects I would, but I can’t justify that for side projects that don’t currently generate any revenue - and this point is stronger in non US countries where this amounts to a lot of money for an average person.

Bad founders would have ignored the opinions of their community so I’m so glad you guys have made these changes.

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40

I still think that there is no proper reason for this apart from ‘the others are doing it’ - Bubble was unique for being cheap, user-friendly and easy to build (the latter it still is), but now with a higher price and paying per app (still hate that, revert back to per account please) people will easily be paying out of their out of their nose (for example I have 3 Bubble apps now that I plan to put on the paid plans, and it’s easily going to be over $100). The sudden announcement without warning just added more salt to the wound. Trust me, I love Bubble but think that they are making rash decisions and are starting to forget about the community that made them them. Thanks for the apology, shows you listen - but my point still stands.

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