Pricing updates and thoughts

Announcements
41

This is a very good point.

Bubble is comprised really of a code builder + PAAS.

PAAS is extremely useful for the customers that don’t know how (or can’t be bothered) to set up an infrastructure, but for those who do know (or companies that need certain requirements, such as servers in-house or in certain locations, or high availability, or whatever) PAAS is limiting.

Plus there’s the fact not owning the code is somehow a bit scary, because what would happen with the app if Bubble went bust? I hope they don’t, but what if :slight_smile:

I had this issue with a young company called Scaphold. They built GraphQL as a service, and in their FAQ, to the question ‘what happens if the company goes bust?’ they replied ‘thats not going to happen, we are a YC company.’ Well , they got acquihired by Amazon and the service disappeared. And I lost everything I had done with their service.

Perhaps Bubble could come up with solution like many companies do, providing the code builder for free (or for a one time fee with regular updates, or something like that), like what Discourse currently does for example. Discourse code is open source, so anyone can install it whenever they want. But they charge for the hosting of the forum.

I am not saying that the solution is what Discourse are doing, but if PAAS is expensive, resource consuming to maintain, and a concern for companies not being able to own the code, perhaps Bubble could split the two elements.

Just a thought.

42

@miguel, noted in their manual:

Finally, we want to make sure you feel secure about building on the Bubble platform, so, although we plan to be around for a very long time, here’s our guarantee: if for some reason we ever have to close down shop, we will release the Bubble source code under an open-source license so that you can set up your own Bubble server and keep your app running.

-Bubble Manual - Application & Data Ownership

43

Ok thanks, that at least covers the going bust concern :slight_smile:

But I still think it’d probably be a good idea to split the editor and the PAAS, and allow users to set up their own infrastructure as they see fit.

44

Dear @josh and @emmanuel…

Thank you sooo much for listening to us! Your updates to the pricing policy sound really fair to me and have restored my trust in you guys.

Wow, what a sense of relief!

A few of questions / comments for you:

  1. Is it your intention to keep the legacy pricing available for apps that are already on such a plan beyond the two years, or will legacy priced apps automatically revert to the new pricing structure in two years time?

  2. Would you be willing to consider working with some kind of customer advocacy/user group in the not-too-distant future? I feel a real desire from users to be more involved and heard in decisions as they are being made rather than afterwards… and it would seem that the way pricing situation played out this week indicates it could be a really helpful forum for you guys in informing some of your key strategic decisions…

  3. The pricing issue this week has made many users acutely aware and concerned about how totally dependent we are on you folks… and while your response has been very positive, that dependency has not changed. Any products you can bring out in the future which give the option to reduce the dependency I think will be a very positive step forwards.

All the best,
Antony.

45

That and nothing is more or less the same. It’s just an intention with no legal repercusion.

They could easily change the contents of the manual, delete it, change their minds. Or sell Bubble. Why would the new owners have to respect the noble intentions of the previous ones?

It’s a dead letter or how they say in our mother tongue @miguel “papel mojado”

46

Thanks!

47

I have had a few days to get over the initial shock and consider their response. Although I think the reversal makes the changes less hard to swallow, I am still baffled by this as a pricing/plan strategy.

I use Bubble to build MVP’s for myself and others, once the startup is monetized I upgrade.

As a startup strategy you want to fill your funnel with customers who ultimately move down the funnel to become paying customers are retained and buy more of your services.

Nobody migrates their app to bubble and straight onto production (because you can’t) , everybody starts on a hobby or personal plan, builds the app then upgrades as required. So the top of their funnel is hobby/personal.

So you want to monetize as early as possible but reduce friction so users are retained and upgrade. So why would you penalise the top of your funnel, surely the result is you get less customer out the bottom and therefore you make less revenue. This appears to be a crazy, not thought through strategy. You want lots in the top of the funnel and want them to see value in upgrading to higher paid plans, you don’t want massive cliffs/gaps in pricing or features otherwise people just fall off and you loose user retention & revenue.

A strategy that allows you to upgrade features & performance between plans to the point it makes sense to move to the next plan up is a tried and tested startup methodology. Why try to re-invent the wheel with wild jumps in price & features? Has this worked anywhere ever? There is a reason why others don’t do this!

Suggestion:

Hobby - allow paid plugins & templates - It’s where the volume of users sit and test the product so make it useful for them so they see utility and upgrade. It’s also good for the Bubble eco-system for templates and plugin creators.

Personal - All features (including version control - crazy this is not here), performance, storage and collaborator upgrades

Make the pricing jumps smaller so by the time you have added some performance upgrades and a collaborator you may as well be on the next plan up.

Overall I think the Bubble team have done an amazing job and this is just a miss-step but the community had spoken and there looks to be a mismatch between the way many of the community are using bubble and the way Bubble team think its being used.

Here is hoping they listen again and change what plans have what features and smooth the pricing jumps out.

Simon

48

After a long reflection I am still of the view that Bubble really needs to consider offering a license in the AWS marketplace. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace in the long term.

I have deployed other products like this (such as WOWZA media server) and it delivers a degree of assurance and stability which is not currently offered. Pricing is fixed to server use and offers a degree of performance transparency not yet offered.

While it would not suit those starting out or even building the business in the long-term when revenue grows and investment becomes an imperative. After the recent decision I am not confident that Bubble offers professional business stability at this stage. The lack of transparency in hosting our IP and lack of control we all have over our apps and their hosting is, in my view, a big problem.

There is no point in comparing Bubble to Shopify or Webflow because it is not like those apps it is more in the class of Filmaker AND even hosted Microsoft products. This in itself is a testament to what the Bubble team have created but it also means they need to understand that the customers expect the same kind of delivery, responsibility and governance.

49

Pricing software is hard. Ideally, you can right-size your pricing to capture a meaningful percentage of the value received by each individual customer, but in practice that is difficult at any scale, especially so the more types of users and use cases you support. As a long-time product team leader, I can empathize with the Bubble team here.

Just reading all of the comments in the various forum threads this past week, it seems like the first wave of actions that Bubble took based on community feedback helped to ease a lot of people’s concerns, at least with respect to the gap between the Professional and Production plans, but it seems that there still exists a pretty significant gap in expectations/needs between the Hobby and Personal plans. Obviously the Bubble team will do as they wish, and I’m just another user like everyone else reading these threads, with no access to Bubble’s user/app/usage data, but Bubble’s desire for “pricing simplification” aside, I see an opportunity for another low-end plan that looks something like this:

bubble-pricing
bubble-pricing2879×1425 543 KB

Something that lets people build experimental apps that they can actually put out in the real world (custom domain, white labeling, SEO, data import (more important than export and possibly another dividing line between lowest paid plan and Hobby), ability to use plugins, and able to build proper API workflows) BUT not really having the tools that anyone managing an app with any real user base would need (multiple versions, data backup, logs, analytics, data storage, or direct-line support). Put another way, you can BUILD the theoretical app of your dreams, and pay a bit for the privilege of accessing the full power of the platform, but once real-world users start relying on it, you’ll very likely need to upgrade at least to the now-more-expensive Personal plan. And you can go back and forth between this would-be plan and the Personal plan as needed if you find yourself somewhere in between or have a temporary user acquisition push or whatever (which you cannot do between Hobby and Personal today).

This also supposes that Bubble does budge on the multiple versions feature and adds one version to the Personal plan as many have demanded. This would be yet another dividing line between the lowest paid plan and the Personal plan.

[My genuine apologies to everyone at Bubble for pretending I run your PM team; can’t help feeling like I want to sometimes.]

50

This is an excellent pricing table, As a no code starter, all will start & test with hobby and show their ideas to potential investors and will go for trial on a petite plan (or even the users will be less/internal webapp only for employees) and if more needed, let them upgrade.

This will be the best way to stick with bubble rather than being greedy on charging their users higher and higher without re-thinking. @josh & @emmanuel need to understand the genuine feelings of a no coder, where people trying to achieve their dreams with bubble and all of a sudden a heavy price is on their face. Its like you had taken all the pain to reach the doors of heaven and to open the door you have to give your head

51

The app we are building may help you with your pricing conundrum. Here is the idea.

You go to your customer base first for development money and you only go for development. Instead of rewarding funders with extra money or shares you reward your funders with Rewards in the form of discounts on invoices. You can afford to be generous with your Rewards because they a are limited and are only collected if people purchase from you. You only raise the amount you need and you only raise it when you need it.

Kevin Cox

52

I still think API workflows should be on every single plan. I mean, do you imagine a programming language that does not allow you to use the ‘loop’ statement unless you pay/subscribe/whatever?

To me, the Hobby plan (or the lowest plan, whatever name it is) is about learning the full potential on Bubble. You need to be able to use everything available but, since it’s just for learning purposes, I would not allow external users to view your website. It’s basically a ‘learn & develop’ plan.

This way you can spend as much time as you need to learn Bubble and build your app, without costing you money.

Then, when you are ready to take users on, you upgrade your plan which allows external users to view you app.

53

@josh and @emmanuel just to give my 2 cents - I do believe @edd’s table above is a better layout for pricing across the board.

I know with white labeling, SEO capabilities, and a custom domain for closer to $10-12/mo I can atleast continue to push smaller side project apps into the market to test as needed. I think the new pricing model would benefit from having one slightly lower tiered plan for those 3 items alone for single makers.

54

Josh, thanks for taking the time to communicate the thought process behind the recent price changes. I absolutely agree that bubble should make higher percentage on production apps that are eating a lot of resources. As a Maker in an early stage I have two small production app on bubble which was great, I got to validate my ideas at an affordable price. Now Its still viable for me to try out more apps in bubble but I’ll definitely reduce the amount of projects I make with bubble.

What scares me about is the price change is the drastic amount it went up by. 5%, 10%, 30% I would understand, but spiking up the price 100%+ without any communication was frightening to say the least. I want Bubble to do well and be sustainable in the long run and I don’t have that big of a problem with price increase but it hurts customer trust when the changes are not communicated properly or done in a drastic fashion. Anyway best of luck with and I will for rooting for bubble :slight_smile:

55

What did I miss here? Is there REALLY a plan that increased by 100%+? I don’t see that, if so. :man_shrugging:

56

Old pricing here : https://reviews.financesonline.com/p/bubble/

57

The price for the personal tier paying monthly went from $16/month to $29/month which is an 81.25% increase. It wasn’t a 100% increase but an awfully big one in my opinion.

58

I added this to another post, but for context, old and new pricing plans compared with % increases.

OLD vs NEW (August 2019)

Note: Comparing plans when paid on an annual basis only

Hobby = free vs free
Personal = $14 vs $25… 78% increase (extra $11 per month / $132 per year)
Professional = $62 vs $115… 85% increase (extra $53 per month / $636 per year)
Team = $165 vs discontinued?
Production = $445 vs $475… 6% increase (extra $30 per month / $360 per year)

Apologies in advance for any maths errors made.

59

When you see more and more bubblers joining competition’s forums you know that something has changed. Loss of trust is making people explore other options. And word of mouth is going to make things worse for Bubble.

Bubble went silent again while there are still so many concerns on top of the table.

This was an incredible lesson learnt here. I don’t know if Bubble team learnt it, but I have certainly.

60

I am possibly going to shoot myself in the foot and this is not intended to aggravate anyone but do we all just need to get over this. We can all look back historically at pricing and compare it to the new pricing but its just whining in my view.

You could counter all these arguments with the fact that the two founders have burned copious amounts of their own cash time and effort over the last three years building bubble to a point where there’s traction and they can then start to recoup. Yeah! When you look at percentage increases it seems excessive but Personal = $14 vs $25 in the Western world is still cheap as chips. I appreciate the third world countries our chums in Australia due to exchange rates find this onerous. But maybe the founders never intended this to be aimed at the addressable market the Third World.

Think we should try and be a little bit more considerate to the founders here… Like the majority of us im sure they just wantI make a good living and I think over the two years I’ve been on the forum they take an active interest at the coalface and seem a very passionate considerate pair… We should try and reciprocate in my view.

I think the fact that they’ve listened and reacted to this thread is testament to all of this… At the end of the day there are several tens of thousands of users of bubble… The small minority in comparison that are active on the forum and commenting here seems to be important to them.

All this talk of competitive platforms to Bubble Really! I don’t get it… I see others that are similar but nowhere close at the moment. If I was the founder (I’m not because I’m not clever, intelligent etc) I would make hay while the sun shines and siphon as much revenue as I possibly could for the value I deliver.

I still don’t believe the very large proportion of us would be unable to start to think about an MVP without bubble even at the fee’s.